South Korea’s housing crisis sets the stage for a contemporary haunting in director Kim Soo-jin’s debut feature, Noise, inducing anxious frights with the cacophony of sound from ghosts and crowded apartment complexes alike. It’s the sound design that takes center stage, creating a uniquely aural nightmare for tenants of a particularly noisy building. That fresh angle, along with Lee Je-hui’s genre-bending script, injects enough unpredictability and well-crafted scares to nearly distract from the increasingly overstuffed plot.
Noise‘s cold open signals a very different type of ghost story ahead as it follows Ju-hee (Han Soo-a), a young woman driven to the brink of madness by sound emanating from neighboring apartments. Her frantic scramble to dampen the noise that only she can seemingly hear gets abruptly interrupted by an eerie threat, one that leads to her disappearance, which takes place in broad daylight. The woman’s hearing-impaired sister, Ju-young (Lee Sun-bin), who’d been away at a job-assigned dormitory, returns to find her missing sister.
The longer she stays in the apartment, though, the more hostile things become.
Kim Soo-jin creates no shortage of effective scares and tense moments through nerve-shredding sound design. Like her sister before her, Ju-young finds her sanity tested by increasingly alarming encounters with both the paranormal and unhinged neighbors, with sound playing a prominent role in eroding her mental well-being. The emphasis on sound over visual scares prevents the familiar haunted abode formula from feeling stale, and the inclusion of volatile neighbors injects more than a few intense standoffs that throw the formula off-kilter. Noise frequently slips back and forth between supernatural horror movie and apartment thriller with ease, and Kim Soo-jin demonstrates a confident touch when it comes to the horror mechanics.
As straightforward as the escalating scares can be, Noise overstuffs its brisk-moving runtime with a lot of plotting and big ideas that convolute what works. Prickly apartment association president hostilities, Ju-young’s hearing complications, ghostly inhabitants, the maddening nature of disruptive neighbors in close housing quarters, tragic pasts, and more get packed into the 95-minute runtime, centered around Ju-young’s investigation into her sister’s disappearance. Supporting characters, like Ju-hee’s boyfriend, come and go as needed until Noise comes off the rails fully for an extended climax that brings the horror, but struggles to provide satisfying answers. It’s also here where Kim Soo-jin struggles to mesh the horror and thriller elements, further muddying the ill-defined rules behind this building’s pesky paranormal problem.
Ju-young’s family history and bond with missing sister Ju-hee provide affecting motivation and rooting interest, with Lee Sun-bin as a formidable lead, but that complicated backstory doesn’t fully pay off and detracts from the core concept. Noise is at its strongest when it’s plunging Ju-young and the audience into a nightmarish soundscape caused by a busy building filled with personalities, alive and dead. The way a nonstop barrage of ear-piercing or eerie noise can drive you to madness makes for a novel approach to well-trodden territory.
Noise loses focus and doesn’t forge new ground, but it sets itself apart with its smart approach to utilizing one of horror’s most vital tools: sound.
Noise made its North American premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info TBD.
