High school can be very traumatic for boys. This is the case in every nation in the world, but maybe even more so in South Korea. Bleak Night by debuting Korean director Yoon Sung-hyun starts out as a classic whodunit. The saddened father of a boy whose death is shrouded in mystery goes looking for the deceased boy’s best friends searching for some answers. One of them had suddenly moved prior to the death and the other had not attended the funeral. Shady circumstances causing the father to suspect foul play.
The ingenious flashforward-structure used in the film confuses the audience. The film doesn’t start out with the death of Gi-Tae, a marvelous performance of Lee-Je-hoon, but we see him as the school bully whose only ambition in life is to terrorize his classmates and his best friends in particular. A classic interpretation of ‘we hurt the ones we love the most’. Especially kind-hearted Becky portrayed by Park Jeong-min-I is a favorite and easy prey for Gi-Tae.
The only one who has the guts to stand up to this near borderline case is the third member of the trio, Dong-yoon, played by Seo Joon-yeong. The three of them also have their good times. To illustrate their fragile friendship the director shows us beautiful dreamy shots of late afternoon sun filled baseball games on the railroad tracks alongside the grey suburbs of the big city. The unbearable lightness of being a teenager in suburbia is interrupted by sudden violence. Bleak Night deals with the world of boys only. Girls are just extras. In that regard there is even a hint of gay feelings in Gi-Tae’s persistence of harassing Becky. Every time he pleads for forgiveness like a lover does when he’s been unfaithful. The three actors are astonishingly realistic in their approach and are completely credible as a tight knitted tough emotional explosive group of friends. The many hand-held close-ups of the boys give a good impression of the internal conflicts tearing them apart. When I asked the talented young director during the Q&A how he achieved this interplay amongst inexperienced young actors (Park Jeong-min-I debuts as an actor), he answered that he gave them the difficult task of really listening to the other actor during dialogues instead of focusing, like young actors often do, on their own lines and to react instead of recite.
As the structure of the narrative gets closer and closer to the resolution of the question of who and how, the fabric of the film changes from a whodunit in to a social drama in which there are only victims and perpetrators. Everybody is innocent and everybody is guilty.
The emotional warfare in Bleak Night is, according Yoon Sung-hyun, a metaphor for the current state of South Korea, where people hurt each other because like Gi-Tae, they are weak on the inside. Weak, because people don’t live for themselves and are defined by their work. They suffer from peer pressure, just like everybody has experienced at one time or another at school.
The result is a complex, well-crafted, emotional gem of a film. It’s been only the third Tiger feature I’ve seen this year, but I already dare to state that Bleak Night, the winner of the Pusan New Current Award, is a serious contender for winning the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Rating: ***+
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