Much like two recent films by major Japanese horror auteurs — Takashi Shimizu’s Sana (2023) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime (2024) — South Korean filmmaker Kim Soo-jin’s feature debut, Noise (2024), explores aural menace. Noise also speaks to a long-lasting tradition of tenement-set horror cinema, which has achieved varying levels of commercial and artistic success — from Polanski’s classic triptych of Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976), to John Carpenter’s expertly crafted TV movie, Someone’s Watching Me (1978), to the ‘80s sequels Demons 2 (1986) and Poltergeist III (1988), to Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem (2012), Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise (2023), and beyond. Noise provides a conceptually intriguing but ultimately middling new variation on this theme.
The film opens with a distressed woman, Joo-hee, frantically soundproofing her apartment unit against grating noises from an unknown source. She documents her experience on a video camera and an audio recording app, desperate to prove the existence of her tormentor. When Joo-hee suddenly goes missing, her deaf sister Joo-young requests time off from her factory job to investigate. Joo-young soon finds herself contending with potentially supernatural forces, while also grappling with a spiteful building chairwoman and a menacing downstairs neighbor who believes Joo-young is responsible for all the noise.
In conceptual terms, Noise thinks intelligently about its apartment building’s omnidirectional potential for danger. The eerie noises tormenting the characters deceptively seem to emanate from units above, while below, tenants have turned the building’s basement into a site for unauthorized garbage disposal. Years of refuse have become unmanageable, and the basement’s stinking mountain of trash is now locked away like a dirty Gothic secret. Noise sets one of its most effective sequences in this basement, a search for clues that becomes a deadly chase. Another chilling scene sees Joo-Young trapped between a spectral figure on her back balcony and a deranged neighbor tapping his knife against her front door. Noise finds ripe potential for mystery in its tenement setting, too: high renter turnover means a greater concentration of unknowns, traumas, and ghosts.
However, Noise crucially lacks a sense of accumulating tension. Its first act effectively establishes a sense of unknowable dread, but the film quickly becomes repetitive, and then eventually stagnant. It’s consistently too timid with its horror, opting for quick relief and cutaways, unwilling to linger in its darkness long enough to create genuine discomfort. It majorly missteps by undermining several frightening scenes as mere nightmares. Kim Soo-jin is an intuitive director who demonstrates a good sense of visual and audial space, and Lee Sun-bin is a solid lead actor, but on the whole, Noise fails to substantively transcend its narrative shortcomings.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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