Director Sun-young Chun’s feature debut, A Girl with Closed Eyes, begins with a deceptively simple setup: a woman named In-seon (Minha Kim) shoots and kills a famous writer, Jeong Sang-woo (Lee Ki-woo), in his remote home. Police arrive at the scene and find her still holding the murder weapon. She freely confesses to the crime, and the cops write it off as “a Misery scenario,” labeling In-Seon a deranged stalker who murdered the object of her literary obsession. In-Seon alleges that Jeong Sang-Woo based his bestselling novel, A Girl with Closed Eyes, on her own childhood kidnapping and abuse. Initially, police dismiss her claim. As the investigation moves ahead, In-seon refuses to cooperate with anyone but Detective Min-ju (Moon Choi), a lone woman in an overwhelmingly male police force, with whom In-seon allegedly shares a complicated past. The case soon reveals itself to be much less simple than initial appearances suggest, involving a range of shadowy suspects and untold histories.
A Girl with Closed Eyes serves as an exercise in content-through-form: it’s an excessively twist-filled narrative about the complexity of narratives. It’s filled with written and oral accounts — police interviews, text messages, novels, legal contracts, and YouTuber theories; a vortex of opaque intentions, hidden identities, stories-within-stories, conflicting testimonies, and clashing cultural and individual perspectives. A phrase is inscribed into the handle of the gun that took Jeong’s life — the truth will set you free — signaling the film’s primary moral focus. The question of fiction versus reality hovers over everything. Girl’s mazelike plot concludes with unmistakable condemnations of victim-blaming, misogyny, and abuses of power both individual and systemic. Mysteries cloud the question of who fired the gun, but there’s no mistaking its symbolic targets.
A Girl with Closed Eyes ultimately falters in narrative terms, but it’s not without merits. Director Chun Sun-young demonstrates an aptitude for staging, especially during sequences set at Jeong’s modernist home — expansive frames capture the space’s steely elegance, concrete walls surrounding floor-to-ceiling window views of a snowy landscape. Early interrogation scenes between Min-ju and In-Seon crackle with spoken and unspoken drama, and Moon Choi is a strong lead, deftly managing her character’s evolution from staid resolve to emotional revelation. The film also maintains tension through much of its dialogue-heavy proceedings. But The Girl with Closed Eyes eventually loses momentum by the end of its second act, and at 106 minutes it feels dauntingly overlong. By the time the third act arrives and cedes ineffectively to overwrought melodrama and tidy resolution, viewers are left to contend with the lingering impression that Sun-young’s film has somewhat undersold the impact of its weighty themes.
Published as part of NYAFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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