Door Lock (2018)

Original title: 도어락

Kyeong-min (Gong Hyo-jin), working the white collar version of a menial job as a bank clerk, has rather as sad existence. She seems beaten down by all the small and large indignities of being among the working poor and being a woman, with little of a life outside of a job she clearly doesn’t enjoy. As far as we’ll ever learn, her much more assertive colleague Hyo-joo (Kim Ye-won) is her only friend. And a rather good one at that, as the course of the movie will show. These days, Kyeong-min is feeling even worse than usual. Each morning, she wakes up with a headache, and a dizzy feeling that won’t go away until her working day has progressed quite a bit. Something about her home isn’t quite right either. The electronic door lock to her apartment is acting up, objects sometimes seem to be not quite where she thinks she left them - small things that will eventually add up to a rather nasty bigger picture.

We the audience do at this point know a little more about Kyeong-min’s situation already. Some male creep has somehow acquired the code to her door lock, hiding under her bed when she comes home, drugging her, putting her to bed and jumping in, naked, beside her after a good long shower, in a crazy way pretending she is his girlfriend.

Kyeong-min doesn’t quite realize all of this, but a lot of those small, wrong, details do add up to the idea that someone is stalking her – someone who somehow has access to her place. The police, sadly not surprisingly, aren’t initially much help to her (and will for a time later become another group of shitty men who make trouble for her), but as lacking in confidence as Kyeong-min is, she – with the help of Hyoo-joo – starts to investigate for herself what’s actually going on when push comes to shove. Things will get much worse before there’s any hope for them to get better, however.

Nominally a South Korean remake of Jaume Balagueró’s Sleep Tight, Lee Kwon’s film is really a completely different film only sharing the very basics of some of its set-up and the job of the villain of the piece. Its structure is completely different, shifting the audience’s viewpoint character from the stalker and serial killer to his newest victim, and then using this shift to turn a tale where we watch a creepy man being very creepy indeed into a thriller about a woman finding a degree of independence fighting for her life not just against a creepy man but all the other shitty men populating her world.

Obviously, the film fits rather nicely into the ideological zeitgeist in the times of #metoo, but there’s nothing cynical about Kwon’s film. Rather, it genuinely sets out to create empathy for Kyeong-min and her travails, as well as perhaps a broader understanding of where they come from using a the thriller format with its need for heightened emotion. It’s not a propaganda style affair (which always does tend to smell of ideology more than actual human insight), but one where a basic plot, a director’s (and co-writer with Park Jeong-hee) world view and a genre structure come together to organically say something about the state of the world, making an audience understand injustice and indignity by showing it how these things feel, but also demonstrating practically how they can shape people – for better or worse. In this way, the killer’s not really the thematic point of the film but rather a symptom of the whole situation its heroine is in.

Because all of this happens so organically, Door Lock does also have the opportunity to be a rather fantastic example of the thriller form, Lee using pretty much every trick in the genre book to ratchet up the tension, and to dramatically escalate our heroine’s situation whenever she seems to find a degree of security. There are a handful of true showstopper sequences, with Kyeong-min’s and Hyo-joo’s discovery of the killer’s lair as well as the finale in an empty hotel out in the country being particular highlights among many. Obviously, you can take the usual high standards of acting and general filmmaking in South Korean cinema as a given here, too.


All of this adds up to one of my favourite thrillers of the last decade, and a great example of how to fuse a social and political message with very exciting genre business.