Movies
[Review] South Korean Thriller ‘Hide and Seek’ is Creeping on You
Contemporary Korean cinema is awash with slick, violent thrillers and the audiences over there keep eating them up. I don’t blame them either. Most of their genre films make “edgy” American thrillers appear tame in comparison. Even when plot logic is thrown to the wind, Korean thrillers are typically an entertaining joy to watch. Like this movie Hide and Seek, for example, which was one of their top grossers of 2013. It’s the debut film from Huh Jung and while it provides heaps of white-knuckle suspense, its story kinda collapses during the second half.
The film begins with a bracing prologue in which a young woman is stalked by the next-door neighbor in her apartment building. The neighbor wears all black and a full-face motorcycle helmet with the visor down. He’s either a huge Daft Punk fan or a fucking creep. He’s probably in your closet right now. This entire prologue is jarringly tense and utilizes precise camera work to heighten the uncomfortable atmosphere. That creep could be anywhere, but the camera only shows you so much. It’s top notch filmmaking and sets the mood for a relentless thriller.
Jump to Sung-soo, a successful café owner in Seoul. He has two bright kids, a supportive wife, and a luxurious apartment in a swank building. Those were all positive adjectives, so the guy must be doing something right, right? Look beneath the surface though and Sung-soo is harboring a bevy of past demons. It’s caused him to develop obsessive-compulsive disorder – he washes glasses and plates to the point of breaking them. Seriously, Huh Jung manages to draw suspenseful moments out of this guy washing fucking wine glasses. It’s ridiculous. I was cringing the whole time, thinking he was gonna break one and cut his hand to ribbons. Creating suspense out of the mundane? I love that shit.
Sung-soo learns that his estranged brother has gone missing. He checks out his bro’s last known address – the rundown tenement building from the prologue. The plot thickens when Sung-soo discovers tiny codes penciled around every apartment door. Then a neighbor invites him in to her apartment, only to flip out when she learns who his brother is.
From there the film throws in a lot of twists that don’t always work. All of it, however, is expertly crafted – particularly the chases and fist fights, which punch with kinetic energy. It’s not a Korean thriller without a good foot chase, and Hide and Seek has a couple of stellar ones. Huh Jung’s use of space in the tenement building is terrific, with loads of close combat sequences. Sing-soo isn’t Jason Bourne though, so the fights are really clumsy and awkward, which make them more believable.
Huh Jung pulls back from the action at times to explore the confines of consumerism and technology. With all the advances in security and surveillance, we’re still a high-strung and insecure race of wimps, is what I think the filmmaker is saying. Hide and Seek effectively exhibits that fine line between normality and violence, sometimes at the sake of the narrative. The twists start to take a toll on the gritty strength of the story. That’s fine for some films, y’know, the whole suspend disbelief thing. But Hide and Seek is initially presented as a contemplative film about grief and struggling through past horrors, so when it nearly goes off the rails, it moves away from that realistic plane in order to accommodate more genre thrills.
It’s certainly worth a watch though. Hide and Seek delivers more goods than the average American thriller, with style to spare. If Huh Jung had dug a little deeper into Sung-soo, brooded a little harder over his past demons, this bitch could’ve been a genre classic. Instead, it’s simply a tense thrill ride. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Hide and Seek is now available on various VOD platforms and will be released on DVD April 8 by RAM Releasing.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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