A Thriller Down to the Final Moment
As part of the London Korean Film Festival, Recalled (Viki, Prime) is a 2021 mystery where, in the wake of an accident, the protagonist Soo-Jin believes she acquires clairvoyant powers. She awakens in the hospital with amnesia, but soon insists on checking out. Her solicitous husband, whom she doesn’t recall, takes her to a house she doesn’t remember. Rather than gradually recognising things, she begins to have visions. Some are about other residents in her apartment building whom she then tries to help. Her husband believes she’s hallucinating, heading back to the hospital only to be given a prescription. But the medication makes her trippy so she secretly ditches it. There continues a series of incidents that make reality vs precognition vs delusional vision undeterminable. After several calls to the police, a detective starts to believe that something isn’t quite right. But what’s really happening? Don’t you just love a movie where the end isn’t staring you in the face after the first 20 minutes? Among other classics like The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense, Recalled leads through twists and turns and you’ve no choice but to follow. Director Seo You-Min, known principally as a screenwriter, takes both director and writer credits for her first film. Previous scripts include movies The Last Princess (Prime) led by Son Ye-Jin of Crash Landing on You (Netflix) and You Call It Passion (Prime). Starring Seo Yea-Ji as Soo-Jin, you may recognise her as the lead next to Kim Soo Hyun in drama It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (Netflix) or the movie Quantum Physics (Viki) alongside Park Hae-Soo of Squid Game (Netflix). Kim Kang-Woo who plays husband Ji-Hoon recently led romantic comedy New Year Blues (Viki, Prime) and psychological thriller The Vanished (Viki, Prime) among other movies and dramas. There’s a different kind of love story tucked into this thriller. The kind you don’t really see in movies from the West but appear fairly frequently in East Asian content. While not the narrative’s main thrust, it drives the emotion underneath, making it more complex with a richer ending. The 2021 London Korean Film Festival runs from Nov 4-Dec 11. For information on more fantastic movies from South Korea, see the LKFF programme here.
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