Door Lock is a 2018 South Korean thriller about a woman who suspects that someone is trying to break into her apartment and struggles to figure out who it is
From Fantasia Festival 2019: Door Lock is the South Korean remake of the 2011 Spanish film Sleep Tight except taking it from the other perspective. If you haven’t seen Sleep Tight, you’ll probably want to get to it after this one, mostly because while the thrills of figuring out who is the bad guy are gone it still has some suspense. If you have seen it, then this one might just be a fun exercise in watching the story from a different angle set in a different city. If you’re safely in first camp, never having seen the original, Door Lock is a solid mystery thriller with a good twist on the home invasion genre.
Briefly showing a woman going home to her apartment and then suddenly attacked, the story quickly shifts to another woman (Hyo-Jin Kong), whom we discover after waking up, lives in a daily routine of almost compulsive obsession. She’s so precise, even the smallest change anywhere automatically spark her attention. Despite her safety precautions of moving to a big building with better security and installing an electronic door lock, she still feels unsafe. One night, she is woken by the sound of someone (Seong-oh Kim) frantically trying to break into her apartment. Calling for help, her suspicions aren’t enough to keep the police around to investigate further so she naturally, she decides to take matters into her own hands.
Door Lock isn’t exactly a new idea in the thriller department, all one needed to do being to take notice of that one clue and that one bit of dialogue to gather suspicions about the invader. However, it’s done very well. Right from the beginning, there is a powerful sense of being followed as our point of view moves and motion tracked through surveillance cameras and overhead shots. It’s quite creative and adds to the unsettling feeling of being observed. The sounds are atmospheric and subtle, rising as moments intensify but also taking care to focus on the smaller things such as ticking clock, adding punch to the isolation. This is done especially well as the story follows the progress of two different characters at the same time.
Many South Korean films are criticized for their length, often running well over two hours, though it’s quite the opposite with Door Lock. Its shorter run time actually hurts, never letting us get really close to the people inside, especially the woman (who remains nameless throughout), she clearly someone with a lot to get invested in but lacking any real chance to do so. More so, the obvious misdirections to suspect other characters are fairly easy to see, though the larger issue in the concept of safety in the society and the false pretense of whether it’s the people around our everyday lives or the fancy gadgets we buy to give us a sense of security, none really played out with all that much significance.
Still, Door Lock is plenty good, especially I suspect if never having seen the original, which I confess I haven’t. Despite a few flaws, the tension is palpable and the cinematography and sound design raise the bar. Even if the characters are fairly shallow, the message is on point and worth exploring.