"Guilt is the memory that refuses to fall silent."
(Emil Cioran)
In the mountainous silence of Hongcheon, South Korea, a murder takes place—one that opens a rift not only in the linear course of justice but in the fragile equilibrium between memory and forgetting. A Girl with Closed Eyes, Chun Sun-young’s directorial debut, unfolds as an investigation that transcends the crime itself, delving instead into the very question of being: who are we when we are seen, and who remains when no one believes us?
At the center of this narrative labyrinth stands a young woman, caught in the suspended instant of guilt: a still-warm rifle in her hand, the bloodied body of a famous author at her feet, and a name—Min-ju—that is revealed to be a mask rather than an essence. The protagonist claims to be Lee In-seon, a girl who vanished years ago, now returned to reclaim a truth corrupted by time.
But in this film, truth is never what happens—it is what resists narration, what surfaces when memory breaks, falters, ruptures. In-seon insists on speaking only to Park Min-ju, a former classmate turned detective, herself a symbol of ethical conscience who has paid the price of institutional dissent. Their confrontation is not merely investigative, but ontological: two figures, separated by time and guilt, mirror and evade one another in an attempt to redefine the real.
The film moves through overt cinematic echoes and subterranean resonances: the trope of the urban detective clashing with provincial inertia evokes Memories of Murder, while the meditation on crime as a form of writing—and writing as a potentially criminal act—places it in proximity to the disturbing terrain of Misery. Yet here, each reference is not homage, but a fragment of a broader discourse on fiction's power to rewrite history and erase pain.
Among the literary traces the film scatters like clues in a puzzle, one stands out: The Secret Garden. On the surface, this reference evokes Frances Hodgson Burnett’s tale of renewal through nature and innocence. But beneath the narrative lies a more ambiguous, unsettling echo: Pamela Moore’s Chocolates for Breakfast. As in the young American author’s novel, here too there is a subtle tension between adolescence and disillusionment, friendship and manipulation, the apparent discovery of self and the risk of its dissolution. The "secret garden" in A Girl with Closed Eyes is not a place of healing, but an inner chamber of the unconscious where the seeds of trauma remain intact. It is a mental and emotional landscape in which female relationships become distorting mirrors—reflections of unspoken desires, ancient guilt, and alliances rooted in naïve intimacy. If Moore wrote of a generation torn between freedom and self-destruction, Chun’s film echoes the same note, but transposed into Korean tonalities, rendering existential unease as a score of silences, omissions, and exchanged glances.
The film’s first half is skillfully woven: claustrophobic interrogations, subtle tensions, and dreamlike or delirious scenarios create a field of force where every possibility seems at once plausible and impossible. But this very ambivalence, this dance between what might have been and what was, begins to unravel as the plot advances. The twists multiply, disorienting the trajectory and leading to a saturation of attention—a growing sense of logical disorientation.
When the film ought to clarify its thread, it instead bifurcates into a proliferation of digressions and symbols that, while internally consistent, obscure rather than reveal. The mystery, rather than dissolving, intensifies. And in this drift, something remains: a melancholy gaze, a meditation on the impossibility of definitively naming the guilty, and perhaps even the unconscious desire to remain trapped in guilt—as anthropological testimony.
The performances hold up the film like columns in a torn temple. Kim is magnetic in her oscillation between innocence and manipulation, embodying an unstable, slippery, fragmented identity. Choi Hee-seo, as the investigator, embodies the moral tension between duty and affection, between truth and justice. Their dynamic remains unresolved: an open wound, a sign of a past that refuses to pass.
A Girl with Closed Eyes is not a finished work—nor, perhaps, does it aspire to be. It is an imperfect meditation on identity as reiterated fiction, on the unbearable weight of memory, and on the impossibility of clearly distinguishing truth from plausibility. A film that demands not to be followed, but to be listened to—as one listens to a confession: with doubt, with suspicion. Once again, South Korean cinema interrogates the ambiguities of truth and the dialectic between justice and representation: an imperfect work, yet one that feels radically necessary.
Beneath the film’s emotional surface pulses the original wound of the family—not as a protective haven, but as a dysfunctional mechanism that generates fracture, silence, and erasure. Parents, whether absent or culpable, appear not as figures but as shadows—ghosts of a structure that failed its primary task: to safeguard. In this void, adolescence becomes a foundational event, a definitive rupture between what was once possible and what has been irrevocably lost. It is in this liminal zone between childhood and adulthood that the protagonists have suffered—and at times internalized—forms of invisible, systemic violence.
Yet within this landscape of disintegration, something endures: a fragile but tenacious core of female solidarity. Not a spontaneous alliance, but a laboriously negotiated complicity, expressed more through gesture than speech, more through gaze than declaration. It is a solidarity that exacts a cost: it is founded on sacrifice, on the assumption of the other’s pain as one’s own, on protection, on the acceptance of one's own partiality. But it is precisely through this radically ethical gesture that the film opens a breach—a still-formless dimension shaped by redemption and recognition. Not redemption as salvation, but as reciprocal recognition, as another possible horizon.
"Truth is a wild creature: it does not allow itself to be captured without wounding the one who seeks it."
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
22° Asian Film Festival
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