Wide Awake. Out today. (********8/10)
“Now you listen to me. If you go anywhere near my wife, I will put you behind bars!”
“His liver is smashed like a dropped piece of tofu.”
Wide Awake is a South Korean thriller that, like so many other Asian thrillers, inspired an American thriller. At the beginning of the film, a little boy is having surgery. Really gross, graphic surgery. While he’s under, the anaesthetic does not take the way it should, and although he is immobilized he is conscious throughout the procedure. He feels everything, and he’s in intense pain. When the operation is over, his life is saved but something inside the boy has snapped. He loses his mind, and begins to do some really creepy things. There is a particularly freaky and creepy scene where he buys a giant box of baby chicks (who sells a bunch of baby chicks in a box, anyway?) and then kills them, one by one, by hurling them into a tree trunk. He soon moves on to human beings, killing a little girl when he is ten. Like a young Michael Myers.
The scene where he is having the surgery while conscious takes up about four minutes, at the very beginning of the film. And this is the part of the movie that an American director expanded into a full-length film, in the dreadful Hayden Christensen - Jessica Alba film Awake. Review right here:
I hate to associate the two movies, because Awake is dreadful and Wide Awake is very good. There are some genuinely startling moments, thanks to the able direction of Lee Gyu-man. Just a flower pot landing on a car windshield is as startling a moment as you would see in most horror films. The creepiness of the little kid is extremely effective, especially in a scene where he allows a bee to sting him so he can watch the bee die, and we see his face distorted crazily through the glass of the jar in which he keeps the dying bee.
Most of the action happens 25 years after this young boy was left awake during surgery. The story now revolves around a group of doctors at a hospital. A young doctor and his wife are being stalked by the husband of a woman who died on the operating table. This man is calling the doctor, threatening his wife, and following them around. Complicating things is a childhood friend of the doctor who shows up at their house unannounced, who may have an alterior motive to his visit.
There are some great scenes in the hospital, the best of which is one where a patient can’t be anaesthitized. He is put under using hypnosis, and the scene gets incredible tense as the operation proceeds. When a doctor knocks over a table of instruments, the loud crash threatens to snap the patient out of the hypnosis, in the middle of the operation. It’s a moment as tense as the ones in submarine movies where everyone is being deathly quiet as the torpedos are coming, and someone sneezes.
Eventually, the tension comes to a head as the young doctor’s wife takes ill suddenly, and is rushed to the hospital. The doctor is put in a position where he is the only one who can perform the operation. And the real identity of the would-be killer is unknown. The mystery in the movie is sharp, interesting and totally engaging. It gets explained as the film goes on, piece by piece, and has a very satsifying resolution. Where this movie started out looking like it would be a horror film, it ends up being more of a white-knuckle thriller as the doctors try to figure out who the killer is and where he is and how to stop him.
Now, the resolution does throw in a few too many red herrings, and it does involve a lot of unnecessary coincidences that complicate things a little. (For example, a scene in an abandoned warehouse where there is a showdown among three of the characters could have blown the story wide open early, had any one of the three guys payed a little bit of attention to what was going on, or asked even the smallest question, the movie would have ended half an hour earlier.) And there is a certain amount of cheesiness in the revelation of the killer that hearkens back to movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in it’s almost quaint notions of the power of certain types of medicine.
But all in all, Wide Awake is a crackling, intense, exciting medical thriller. Many Asian movies can be very confusing, partly because the names of all the characters are so similar, and through subtitles it’s easy to forget who’s who. But this one is really easy to follow in comparison. And it’s also really good. It comes out November 25th, today, from Alliance Films.