A woman experiences paranoia, loss and bodily danger after a serial killer hacks her phone.
In the sleepy cyberthriller “Unlocked,” Na-mi (Chun Woo-hee) forgets her phone on the bus after a night of revelry. It’s discovered by Jun-yeong (Yim Si-wan), who returns it to her — and who turns out to be a methodical serial killer. He’s bent on using the personal device to isolate Na-mi: first by kidnapping her doting father, then by destroying her promising marketing job, and finally by breaking the bond she shares with her best friend.
It’s not a particularly difficult task: He runs a phone repair shop, where he has hacked the device to observe texts and notifications, overhear calls and even access the camera. When Na-mi uses the phone’s selfie mode, it acts, in a sense, as a point-of-view shot. The director Kim Tae-joon and the cinematographer Yong-seong Kim smartly subvert the empathy such a composition provokes by leaning into the dread of unknowingly being watched.
The film, unfortunately, struggles to build on that aesthetic choice. Na-mi’s sole personality trait is her tendency to trust too much — a characterization that could work for a short-lived victim but that evaporates in a protagonist. Jun-yeong’s father (Kim Hee-won), a detective ridden with guilt over his seven-year estrangement from his son, is weakly drawn, too. The detective desperately wants to catch Jun-yeong before he kills again, but a last-second twist undermines the arc’s pathos.
“Unlocked” moves at a glacial pace. Jun-yeong is too apathetic, too quiet to keep a viewer enthralled for the entire film. In a cinematic landscape where the anxiety of surveillance has been sufficiently explored — with movies like “The Conversation,” “Enemy of the State” and “Kimi” — this simplistically dreary offering doesn’t crack a new code.
Unlocked
Not rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
