Final Rating: 1/5
In The Woman, Sun-kyung (Han Hye-ji) meets with an internet stranger, Young-hwan (Kim Hee-sang), offering a free cordless vacuum cleaner. But her interactions with Young-hwan raise red flags immediately, mostly on account of both parties’ social awkwardness. Worried Young-hwan might hurt her, Sun-kyung is saved at the last minute by an old college friend, Ui-jin, who tells off Young-hwan before giving Sun-kyung his address in case of any more trouble. The next day, Sun-kyung is contacted by the police: Ui-jin is dead.
From director Hwang Wook, The Woman is a low-budget horror film that squanders a promising setup with incompetent technique and mediocre writing. What starts as a compelling mystery from the perspective of an unreliable narrator quickly becomes a flimsy screed about the dangers of social justice, with overly cartoonish villains and contrived interactions.
Hwang and co-writer Lim Dong-min attempt to fuse two styles of classic movie mysteries. The death of Ui-jin is treated as a straightforward murder mystery at first, but the framing leans more on the multiple-competing-narratives style of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon or Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster than a typical procedural.
“Part I: The Man” introduces the characters, and is told entirely from Sun-kyung’s point of view, but “Part II: The Woman” opens up the world, gesturing more towards Young-hwan’s perspective while revealing how those close to Sun-kyung view her. A group of detectives investigating the death of Ui-jin work quietly in the background. They cross paths with the deuteragonists occasionally but are largely finished with their case early into the first act.
The main effect of The Woman’s story structure is confusion. Sun-kyung and Young-hwan are opaque characters who are either good or bad depending on what the story needs at the time. The people close to them are either their friends, or aren’t, which feels as though it’s decided in the moment rather than rooted in the reality of the film. The policework, which ought to form the backbone of at least the central mystery, seems almost inconsequential by the end, in no small part because the central mystery is never solved.
More damningly, the competing-narratives structure is mostly used to smuggle in an anti-feminist message about the harm of false allegations. After the end of “Part I,” Sun-kyung is painted exclusively as a crazy person who destroys the lives of men she meets by accusing them of heinous crimes. A coworker of Young-hwan, at the same time, is revealed to maintain a list of people accused of crimes whose cases were dropped by the police, which he publishes on the internet to encourage vigilantes in the name of “social justice.”
Perhaps in the right hands, both characters could be interesting explorations of the ways that even miniscule amounts of power, left unchecked, can be used to ruin the lives of regular people. That’s certainly the argument Hwang and Lim appear to be making. The Woman however, simply presents this information, and expects the audience to be disgusted with the characters it paints as villains: the titular woman, and a self-described social justice warrior.
At a technical level, The Woman is simply not good. The film has horrendous sound mixing. Actors sound mushy and unclear while delivering dialogue, and some regularly blow out their microphones. Several scenes have constant background fuzz left in by accident or laziness. The score isn’t much better, sounding like bits of stock music cut abruptly and pieced together haphazardly. In a film that’s already frustrating to follow, it doesn’t help that it’s also frustrating to listen to.
Visually, the film fares better, but remains flawed. The Woman has a handful of interesting shot choices: an extended take of a vitamin drink, poured out, splitting into three separate streams; a cryptic shot of a small forest passageway later contrasted with a similar shot of a back alley. There are even more scenes that are just poorly executed, however. A few flashbacks apply an ugly green saturation filter; a get-together after Ui-jin’s funeral shows too many people in a tiny, nondescript room, making it especially difficult to keep track of who’s who.
The most disappointing thing about The Woman is the occasional hint that an interesting idea was at least conceived of but couldn’t be executed properly. Sun-kyung’s interactions with her college friends threaten to reveal interesting details about her worldview but only happen after her worldview is already revealed anyway. The film starts and ends on the same scene, clearly intending for it to hit differently after 100 minutes of added context, but the scene is an interview that’s not especially insightful at either position.
While the concept is flawed from the jump, it’s not uncommon for capable filmmaking to rescue problematic stories. Dragged Across Concrete and last year’s Strange Darling are great examples of films that have both received critical acclaim despite being the topic of intense debate over their perceived reactionary politics. The Woman has plenty of the latter but isn’t fated for the former.
The Woman was seen during the 2025 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to the festival for the screener.
