The woman in the white car2022.
Directed by Christine Ko.
Starring Ryeowon Jung, Jung-eun Lee, and Jung-min Kim.
SYNOPSIS:
When a kindly small town policeman (Jung-eun Lee) is summoned by the local hospital to deal with Do-kyung (Ryeowon Jung), who has arrived with the limp body of his sister, who is believed to have been stabbed in a violent attack. For her controlling fiancé, she must navigate a web of lies and half-truths to get to the bottom of a mystery.
Do you remember how every episode of Scooby Doo it ended with one of the more confident members of the gang theorizing about who had committed the crime, before removing the mask from the janitor to do his mandatory job. “I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you annoying kids” monologue? Well, Christine Ko’s the woman in the white car it seems to be full of those kinds of revelations. It has more twists than a package of string cheese.
Sometimes you can get away with it, especially if you approach such serious matters as murder by fraud in a light-hearted way, at the knives outor play it for dark laughs, like the movie you The woman in the white car makes immediate comparisons with; Fargo. Unfortunately this doesn’t do it, he’s just content to be a disappointment who cares who did it.
Cross-referencing the Coen Brothers classic, you have a veteran local cop (played by Parasite‘s Jung-eun Lee) who is more interested in finishing her noodles than arriving at a crime scene somewhere in a snow-covered small town community. When she arrives at the hospital, she finds herself with the kind of crime that should turn into a decent follow-the-breadcrumbs prank, with one victim in a coma and the other suffering from memory loss.
What we get instead is a Rashomon assume events, but while Kurosawa’s classic presented four points of view, The woman in the white car it doesn’t allow the film to breathe a minute before hitting us with another one of the countless flashbacks that represent a character’s take on crime.
This wouldn’t be half as bad if the movie didn’t keep using the dodgy narrator. Almost all memories are immediately debunked, meaning that he has no idea what is going on and does not give validity to any of the perspectives he is shown. As a result, you quickly become uninterested in his-told-she-told shenanigans.
It’s good that the performances are good, with Jung-eun Lee and her rookie partner making a nice couple. The moments they share during the early stages of the investigation, particularly a good reference to Psychopathwhich the film has a similar-sounding score to, go a long way toward making you stick with things as the script ties itself into knots.
Not content to let the story unfold, director Christine Ko successfully employs some cinematic techniques to embellish the plot, such as changing aspect ratios every time we’re in a flashback or changing the color palette to suit the mood. . She also composes a series of shots that are reminiscent of some of the genre’s classics, especially Hitchcock, setting her apart as a feature director to watch for in the future.
The woman in the white car it is a tangled web indeed. An over-reliance on tropes and repetitive narrative devices dampens your interest long before the initially intriguing mystery is solved.
Flashing Myth Rating – Movie ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
matt rodgers- follow me on twitter