Director: Jay Song
Writer: Kim Hae-gon
Stars: Oh Dal-su, Jang Young-nam, Kim Hong-pa
Synopsis: A suspense thriller depicting a peaceful couple’s daily life slowly turning into a nightmare due to a neighbor who visits every day at 4pm.
Premiering at the Fantasia International Film Festival as part of its main Cheval Noir competition, Jay Song’s 4PM starts out incredibly strong. Based on Amélie Nothomb’s The Stranger Next Door, the film’s conceit is laid out in its first act, where professor Jung-in (Oh Dal-su) takes a sabbatical from work and moves to the countryside with his wife, Hyun-sook (Jang Young-nam). The house and its setting seem peaceful enough, until they get a knock at the door at precisely 4pm by their neighbor, Doctor Park Yook-nam (Kim Hong-pa), who sits in the living room, without saying much, and leaves at exactly 6pm.
Of course, the couple wanted to pay a visit to their neighbor, and him showing up unannounced on the first day in which they settled into their new home seemed like the perfect opportunity for them to get to know each other. However, the doctor isn’t too open-minded and instead comes back every day at 4pm to sit, drink some tea, and leave at 6pm. This begins to interfere with the lives of the couple, who attempt to, at first, get rid of him. Nothing works, and the movie then takes a sharp turn, both aesthetically and thematically.
At first, it’s engrossing. The movie, which starts with simple, yet refined photography to represent the idyll of the couple’s lives, becomes far more erratic as their lives get disturbed daily at 4pm. The camera begins to shake (with Song going so far as to use a GoPro when the professor runs chaotically towards the doctor) and distort (fisheye is notably used in one key moment), with Steve M. Choe’s editing growing more precise and exacting. The match cuts are sharp and effective, with a strong montage representing exactly how much the doctor’s unexplained visits take a toll on the married couple. In that regard, Song terrifically pulls us in for a good forty or so minutes until a Parasite-like reveal begins to change the rather simple story 4PM initially sets up.
And that’s where the movie begins to lose itself, because it becomes immediately clear that Song is going virtually nowhere with neither his story nor the character work he strongly laid out before changing the scene. It will be difficult to give anything away, and since the film isn’t out in the public eye, there will be no spoilers here. However, one should know that a story like this should be keen on slowly revealing its details as the film progresses, which Song doesn’t do. Of course, there’s much subversion going down here, but it needs to be executed, from a storytelling and thematic perspective, in a smart and cogent way.
However, Song seems to forget all about his characters in the film’s second half, and instead takes far too many drastic turns with them that undermine how they were established in the beginning. The professor is far too unrecognizable at the end from the calm demeanor he usually conveys for most of the runtime and resorts to methods that feel improbable, even if the annoyance of the doctor grows as he never takes no for an answer. Perhaps Song wants to make a character study on how humans, even the most stable, can resort to violence or extreme acts if their sanity feels threatened. Unfortunately, I never registered with the protagonist as he makes decisions that make no shred of sense, even during its tense, but underwhelmingly surreal climax.
As a result, 4PM can never exceed the wild expectations it sets for itself in its first half. While I appreciate a movie that dazzles visually and experiments with all types of cameras (and camera angles) to exacerbate its sense of tension, alongside some pretty solid performances from its cast, there’s very little to hold onto as the movie reaches its finish line. I will say that the final shot will stick with me long after I’m done watching it, but at what cost?
