Fantastic Fest 2011

Min Soo-ah is a police woman in training the night she rousts her younger brother from an underground dance club. Trying to keep him from running back inside, she handcuff s him to the inside of the car; a gesture designed to keep him out of trouble. On the way home, the siblings are in a terrible car accident. Min Soo-ah loses her sight and her brother, trapped in the car, is killed. One year later, Min Soo-ah is coping with the loss of her brother as well as her visual faculties. Meanwhile, several young girls begin disappearing from her neighborhood. One rainy night, a chance encounter with a stranger sets her unwittingly in the path of a killer.

Director Ahn Sang-hoon, best known for the 2006 horror film ARANG, creates a thriller wherein the suspense grows organically from the deeply humanistic, character-driven story and a sincere connection made between the audience and Min Soo-ah, played with wit and sweet vulnerability by Ha-Neul Kim. The games the sinister killer plays with Min Soo-ah draw favorable comparisons to 1967’s WAIT UNTIL DARK starring Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin.

Unlike the heroine of WAIT UNTIL DARK, however, Min Soo-ah carries a more modern psyche. Recessed are the frailty and vulnerability of Hepburn, replaced with a confi dence and poise under pressure more akin to the modern woman. What worked in WAIT UNTIL DARK, however, continues to deliver in BLIND: flat-out edge of your seat suspense. Much of the tension in BLIND is crafted in the classic Alfred Hitchcock style, in that the audience is often privy to more information than the hero or heroine on screen. Min Soo-ah can’t see the killer moving through the room, but we can. Hitchcock often described this as the essence of suspense; his theory continues to work beautifully in BLIND. (Brian Salisbury)