Review: Suddenly in the Dark (1981)
Ko Youngnam's Suddenly in the Dark is one of many entries in the horror genre of woman-descends-into-madness, but it's accomplished in a compelling manner unlike most of what I've seen before. As a story of a woman driven to extremes by paranoia about her husband’s infidelity, the tension is built by way of stylized cinematography, editing, and set design to create a setting that reads as both normal and otherworldly.
By normal, I mean it's a family of three with a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and their young daughter in a beautiful home. What's otherworldly is that this home's giant rooms are packed to the gills with eclectic decor from its chiffon-curtained doorways, bright red living room carpeting, and menagerie of taxidermy animals—which may just have been staples of the '70s, and seem surreal to a millennial in the year 2022. Anyway, it's the age-old tale of a wife, Seonhee (Kim Youngae), over the age of 30 living in a world where, to men, there's no difference between a 28 and 60-year-old woman. Her husband (Yoon Ilbong) takes long work trips to the countryside to study butterflies, and all is well until he brings home a 19-year-old orphan girl named Miok (Lee Kiseon) to work as their live-in maid.
Seonhee is initially thrilled as she's been struggling to find a maid, and she welcomes Miok—who carries with her only a wooden doll—into their home with a warm bath and clothes from her own closet. Things seem okay only briefly—besides that Seonhee was having weird visions of that doll before Miok even arrived. From here it's a slow burn as Seonhee's paranoia builds with these visions persisting and kaleidoscopic nightmares of her husband sneaking into Miok's room. She talks herself out of it time and time again, surely she’s just overreacting. But her suspicions grow as Miok begins making near-fatal house cleaning mistakes, and her paranoia expands into suspicion that Miok may actually be trying to kill her.
Seonhee’s concerns are waved off by her oblivious and patronizing husband, who's witnessed nothing of the sort. But, to him, Seonhee just suddenly seems to be falling into hysterics, and he tells her time and time again that she’s acting crazy, it’s all in her head. Aiding in this classic display of passive gaslighting is the setting, whose vibrant colors are much brighter than I'd expect in any horror movie, and its bright cleanliness creates an unsettling air of something being not quite right.
The wooden doll was a gift to Miok from her shaman mother before her death, and Seonhee begins to suspect more and more that it’s possessed by an evil spirit—and that Miok is possessed by the doll. As Seonhee’s reality slips through her fingers, her husband insists she needs psychiatric help, which eventually puts her into a corner where she can see only one solution (you can probably guess what it is). It all comes to a head in a wild finale sequence where Seonhee faces off alone in the night with the spirit she fears; and while this story is simple enough by description, it's the storytelling that keeps it interesting.
Through use of practical film techniques to create surreal, hallucinatory views, it's increasingly unclear if what's happening is Seonhee's imagination or not. Regardless, the one thing we can tell for certain is that Seonhee's biggest fear is quite real: she's being alienated from those closest to her. Suddenly in the Dark is erotic and certainly harrowing, though decidedly inexplicit, and it’s also the only psychological horror movie I've seen that I'd consider to be almost comforting given its appearance. Seonhee floats through softly lit scenes with feathered, fluffy hair and elegant outfits of long skirts and blouses, and she fits seamlessly into the setting of clashing colors. Now a cult classic recognized for its innovative filmmaking, Suddenly in the Dark is a beautiful hallmark of styles unique to its time; which, ironically, circles back around to become a timeless aesthetic.
Edited by Kelly Sipko