“The Witness” Korean Theatrical Poster
Director: Jo Kyu-Jang
Cast: Lee Sung-Min, Kim Sang-Ho, Jin Kyung, Kwak Si-Yang, Park Bom, Kim Sung-Kyun, Bae Jung-Hwa, Shin Seung-Hwan, Jung Yoo-Min, Yeon Je-Wook
Running Time: 111 min.
By Paul Bramhall
It’s fair to say that violence is as an integral a part of Korean cinema as kimchi is to its cuisine. Sure, you don’t need it with every dish, but when it’s there, it makes for a distinctly Korean experience. I mention this, because the opening of The Witness feels like a textbook template of exactly what audiences have come to expect from a Korean thriller. A car is driving through isolated countryside roads at night, the purpose of the driver’s trip clearly to murder the bound female he has tied up in the trunk. However, after digging a shallow grave, it gives his victim just enough time to break free of her constraints and escape into the forest, before stumbling across civilisation in the form of a new residential village, comprising of blocks of identical apartment buildings. However the killer isn’t far behind, hammer in hand (OldBoy has a lot to answer for), and he’s soon thrusting it into her skull in plain view of the presumably sleeping residents.
Of course, as the title suggests, it turns out that not every resident was asleep. Lee Sung-min plays a salaryman who’s just got back from a night of drinking, to celebrate becoming a home owner of one such apartment, however his early hours of the morning drowsiness is disturbed by a scream coming from outside. Quickly sobering up, he arrives at the window just in time to see the killer delivering the blood splattered blows of death, and while he also gets a good look at the killers face, it also means the killer gets a good look at him.
So the crux is set, and it’s a good one. Who is the killer? Who was his victim? Where The Witness differentiates itself from other similar thrillers though, is the fact that it doesn’t turn its focus to any of these questions. Such a decision frequently allows The Witness to soar as much as it does nosedive, depending on how far along in the narrative you are. Our main character is Sung-min, and proceedings are at their most interesting when watching the social pressure he encounters to not inform the police of what he saw. Understandably, soon the residential village is swarming with detectives, led by the permanently frazzled Kim Sang-ho (Fabricated City). However with a residents association keen to not get involved in anything that would make the prices of their properties drop, Sung-min finds himself torn between doing the right thing, and not putting his wife and child in danger.
It’s a darkly cynical premise, but one that works. As the victim wasn’t a resident of the village, almost everyone living there is willing to plead ignorance to if they did or didn’t see what happened, and soon the detectives are at a dead end. Sung-min doesn’t tell anyone that he saw the murder, including his wife, and is soon having residents association petitions thrust in front of him to sign that he won’t talk to the police, and finds himself increasingly conflicted on what to do. Sung-min delivers a convincing performance, and his lead role here is well deserved after his recent turn opposite Hwang Jung-min in The Spy Gone North, also from 2018. He’s long been a solid supporting actor, but hopefully roles like this one will mean we see a lot more of him headlining.
The handling of the killer doesn’t work so well. Played by Kwak Si-yang (who notably acted alongside Sung-min in 2016’s Familyhood), his killer is the typical genre stereotype – think Ha Jung-woo in The Chaser, or Jung Kyung-ho in Running Turtle, and you get the idea. Black jacket, black cap, lurking in the shadows etc. The issue is that Si-yang doesn’t do much else other than that. His presence feels more like a plot device than an actual character, and it’s a caricatured one at that. Appearing in shots to elicit fear and glimpsed as a sign of danger, we know what it means when he’s around, but we don’t know anything about him. In fairness, the ending confirms that this was the intention, however that doesn’t necessarily mean it works.
Si-yang also seems to come with what sometimes border on supernatural powers. For such a high security complex, he has no trouble coming in and out of it as he pleases, and is even able to steal Sung-min’s family dog. Or is he? Director Jo Kyoo-jang struggles with portraying the more ambiguous themes of The Witness, which often leave the audience to second guess how much they should read into a certain scene. It could well be read that Sung-min is being paranoid about how far Si-yang is willing to go to make sure he doesn’t talk, with scenes of the dog’s disappearance, prank phone calls, and mysterious motorcyclists all leaving room for interpretation. Such scenes are never really given a satisfactory conclusion, as it either means Si-yang is some kind of murdering super villain, or the detectives are absolutely useless.
The everyday reality of Sung-min’s predicament, played alongside Si-yang’s Michael Myers style stalking, result in a somewhat awkward experience with The Witness. It almost feels like a mix of Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser meets Huh Jung’s Hide and Seek, with the threat of a hammer wielding psychopath lurking around a new apartment complex. While there are scenes which differentiate Kyoo-jang’s latest from both, there are also an equal number that feel derivative from these other genre staples. It’s these scenes which hold The Witness back from being one of the great Korean thrillers, as there was just one time too many when I said to myself “This was done much better in (insert another Korean movie title here)”.
With that being said, when The Witness has its focus on the inner-workings of the apartment complex eco-system, and the distinct lack of humanity that comes with it, it’s genuinely engaging. The closing shot, which has Sung-min stood alone surrounded by the various apartment buildings, feels like a legitimate punch to the gut in how it reflects just how hopeless society can sometimes be. The effective quietness of the closing moments play out in stark contrast to the brash finale that precedes it. The Witness gives Kyoo-jang his largest budget to work with to date, after previously helming the drama A Camel Doesn’t Leave Desert and the romantic comedy Mood of the Day, and he obviously wanted to see things out with a bang.
After racing to get back to the apartment knowing that Si-yang is targeting his family, Sung-min decides that enough is enough, and it’s time to put an end to his murdering ways. What follows is a pursuit up the nearby forested mountainside, a brutal throw down incorporating local Korean fauna as weaponry, and a landslide that appears to have taken its inspiration from the 2011 Umyeon Mountain incident. It’s a rather gratuitous, if not entirely unexpected, conclusion, and one which does its best to reconcile Sung-min’s conflicted salaryman with Si-yang’s super villain. The use of the landslide scenes result in some of the most striking imagery in The Witness, with Sung-min rising up from it in a way that wouldn’t be out of place in a Lucio Fulci zombie movie. Like I mentioned, it’s kind of gratuitous.
With a strong supporting cast featuring the likes of Jin Kyung (Master) as Sung-min’s wife, Bae Jung-hwa (Gifted) as another resident that witnessed the murder, and Kim Sung-kyun (Golden Slumber) as one of the victims husbands, it’s difficult to fault their performances, even when the script sometimes defies logic. Indeed if anything the script deserves credit for the fact that, unless you’re paying really close attention, some of the more glaring issues (if Si-yang is such an effective killer, why couldn’t he tie his initial victim’s hands together properly?) only become apparent once you’ve given it some thought afterwards.
All in all The Witness is a movie that has as many strengths as it does flaws, and when the end credits rolled I walked away feeling that it had been an enjoyable 110 minutes. If there’s anything to be learnt from these movies, it’s that if you’re a Korean resident and currently renting your property, then the best thing you can do is continue. Buying your own place in Korea seems to be an open invitation to witness a murder, attract stalkers, vengeance seeking ghosts, and all kinds of trouble. In this case, if we’d been given as well rounded a villain as we do a main character, The Witness could have been another bona fide classic in Korea’s well regarded cannon of gritty thrillers. As it is, for his third feature director Jo Kyoo-jang serves up an enjoyable slice of murder and paranoia. If anyone will still be talking about it 10 years from now the same way they talk about one of its most obvious influences, The Chaser, is another question.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 6/10
