Femme-centric Korean thriller 7 Days, not to be confused with the recent Mexican film of the same translation, presents an intriguing if slightly overlong mixture of the crime
and procedural genres, with a very personally motivated ticking-clock element
thrown in for good measure. While trading in a bit of grisly imagery, the film
for the most part eschews the gore of recent like-minded films about a killer’s
manipulations, and doesn’t embrace the supernatural elements of contemporary
Korean thrillers like Arang, Silk and
mayhem and panicked investigative maneuverings, bogging down a bit in the
second act before saving itself with a big, enormously satisfying hook in its
final reel.
hyper-charged design, slick commercial moves and end twist. Key to the
film’s much more modest chances overseas — either theatrically, with urban crime
pic fans who picked up on OldBoy’s
scent, or more likely on DVD, where Asian imports have carved out a nice niche
— will be its efforts to try to capitalize on the burgeoning recognizability of
front-and-center star Yunjin Kim (above), an integral cast member on ABC’s hit show Lost.
Single mother Jiyeon Lee (Kim) is a brilliant and successful
attorney who’s never lost a case. After her latest victory, her 8-year-old daughter
Eunyoung is kidnapped from a mother-child relay race at school. In lieu of
ransom, the kidnapper phones Jiyeon and instructs her that he wants her to legally
represent, and free from prison a drug peddler and habitual sexual offender, the accused in a heinous rape and murder case — a
trial coming up for capital punishment in less than a week.
to the police, Jiyeon throws herself into the case. For assistance she relies only
on old friend Sung-yeol Kim (Hee-soon Park), an independent-minded cop under internal
investigation for his own appetite for excesses, and even then doesn’t tell him
the entire truth. Jiyeon at first suspects a willfully botched
investigation or police cover-up, but then focuses in on a club-scene drug addict who seems to have suffered a psychotic split,
but nonetheless may have an important connection to the deceased. Meanwhile, Jiyeon sees her own despondency
paralleled by Sooki Han (Misook Kim), the mother of the victim, and works desperately
to please her daughter’s kidnapper and thus keep alive hope for her safe
return.
Ignoring the somewhat necessary absurdity of its
halfheartedly explained accelerated legal timeline — something the thriller Fracture, starring Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, also recently deployed — 7 Days packs a breathless amount of investigative findings and head
feints into its two-hour running time. There at first glance seem a few too
many red herrings and/or loose, extraneous threads — including a bitter
prosecutor aiming for professional payback against Jiyeon, a party promoter
involved in a car accident on the night of the murder, and the reemergence of a
gangster acquitted by Jiyeon — but 7 Days
eventually winds its way to a conclusion of some shared complicity, so the vast
sprawl of its story is somewhat mitigated.
The chief problem is that the movie’s meticulously chaotic shooting
and editing style works against this expansive tapestry for a decent portion of
its middle, with willful freneticism obscuring key narrative details. Director Won Shin-Yeon and cinematographer Young-Hwan Choi give 7 Days a very modern, shimmering,
kinetic feeling — albeit too frequently also a somewhat juvenile restless one. They
seemingly draw inspiration from both small screen American serials like CSI and Cold Case and the quick-cut, quasi-impressionistic style of director
Michael Bay
using crime scenes and car chases alike as an excuse to showcase flashes of the
same setting from all sorts of angles. These
modes of storytelling have the damning paradoxical effect of making 7 Days drag and seem longer, especially
in sequences with long dialogue exchanges. A more restrained focus on the
characters themselves would have increased the movie’s tension and intrigue.
For the slightly longer, original full review, from Screen International, click here.