Bleak Night: Capturing the uncomfortable musings
Bleak Night (2010) is about a father’s search for answers, uncovering the suicide of his son, Ki Tae (Lee Je Hoon), through the narratives spelled out by his son’s best friends: Becky (Park Jeong Min) and Dong Yoon (Seo Jun-young).
The interplay between silhouettes and shadows, and the low levels of light and saturation have been deliberately consistent in the film to cast the feelings of impending agony surrounding the relationships of the characters. Non-linear storytelling fits the evasiveness of answers that both the characters — Ki Tae’s best friends and father — and audiences have to uncover.
There are fewer dialogues at the beginning until the peak of the plotline, the story was primarily composed of gestures and the slightest vocal musters, enough to show the depth of the story. The decisive words and dialogues of the main characters remain confusingly uncomfortable, uttered in a whim.
The answers to Ki Tae’s father (Jo Sung-ha)’s questions, in pursuit of unraveling the mystery behind his son’s death, are not answerable by the uttered responses of Becky and Dong Yoon. However, we have seen how he gradually picked up the pieces throughout the subtle cues that the friends inevitably delivered in the story. It is also commendable how the casts were able to pull off these toned-down prompts.
A commendable annotation in the story’s phase, the only and first ecstatic and lively scoring can be traced in the 20th minute of the film, with the three friends bonding together and set up on a group date. There was no follow-up and everything set back to be gloomy musings, watching the mysteries unfurl.
Personally, I don’t have sympathy for bullies and I am wary of films that glamorize their character. Ki Tae always acted as if nothing happened after gradually breaking his relationship with his friends. However, as an observer of this film, I can say how it all started: the character’s trigger with his familial quandary.
His character is dynamic, changing over the course of the story, but this time, it’s downward tragic. He started as a loving and joyful friend which later on, will develop as a bully, breaking more cracks with his relationships. It fits the versatility of Je Hoon.
Overall, the film captures the disintegration and discontent in youth and friendship fractured by pride, onward fear, insecurity, and manipulation; all brought by the macho structure of their niche. The death only proves that these reasons have not completely torn the remaining links that they have with each other.
The film is bound to leave us in fragments as we saw how the turmoil transpires, leaving no words for the dead and the bereaved to offer.
