In the age of overwhelming technology, cell phones have become a tool so integrated into everybody’s lives that they seem necessary for many to perform their daily tasks. Instant communication, reading news, paying bills, and GPS are some of those tasks that have contributed to this dependence on devices. The film ‘Unlocked’ illustrates how dangerous it is to carry one’s entire life on one single (and easily misplaced) appliance. The film, which was released back in early 2023 on Netflix, adds itself to the fairly new and ever-growing horror subgenre, cyber-horror, which tells frightening narratives surrounded by new media technologies.
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Prolonging its status as a dominating force in cinema and horror, South Korea produces Unlocked, a cyber-horror film about a woman whose life takes a turn after a dangerous man gets ahold of her lost cell phone. Director Kim Tae-joon highlights the horror of modern technology dependency and the normalization of storing private information on easily lost devices. In Unlocked, Lee Na-Mi, the protagonist played by Chun Woo-Hee, loses her smartphone on the bus. After it is picked up by a stranger, she is contacted to retrieve her phone at a sketchy repair shop by Oh Jun-Yeong (played by Im Si-Wan), who uses an artificial voice app to disguise himself. During their meeting, Lee Na-Mi provides her phone information to Oh Jun-Yeong, believing it is necessary for repair, but unknowingly gives a serial killer the means to track her every post, search, and movement. The film’s style is ominous and mysterious, with a secondary plot focusing on a detective trying to find this anonymous cyber-serial killer. The direction makes the conflict believable, showing how such a scenario could happen to anyone with a cell phone. Combined with its tone and camerawork, the film maintains a tormenting energy that keeps viewers on edge, as the protagonist never feels completely safe or alone.
The Escalation to a Great Ending
The film isn’t necessarily a slow burn, but it does take its time getting to the plot’s boiling point. However, the torment that the villain imposes on Lee Na-Mi is a non-stop destruction of her life that is unfortunate but a must-watch. Once Oh Jun-Yeong gains access to Lee Na-Mi’s phone, he begins to turn her life upside-down and destroy everything important to her. With the gradual onset of chaos, the psychopathic motives of the antagonist are revealed to show his abilities of torturing his prey before his final intentions, which are hinted at from the B-story as detectives are searching for the suspect responsible for the death of seven victims.
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The escalation is great, not only for the plot but for the characters as well. In the escalating villainization of Oh Jun-Yeong and the escalation of Lee Na-Mi’s decaying sanity, the cast of ‘Unlocked’ all work fantastically to build the film’s tension exponentially. Im Si-Wan, who was most recently in ‘Summer Strike’ (a rom-com K-drama), performs his villain role with ease. Im Si-Wan was able to create an enticing but terrible narcissistic foe that made viewers want to keep watching to see if he would get everything that he deserves in the end. Despite Lee Na-Mi’s naivete, which normally repels viewers from liking a protagonist in a horror or thriller, Chun Woo-Hee’s performance was able to craft the character into someone worth rooting for despite her mistakes. The writing for these two characters is great and is a driving force in what makes the film one of the more notable thrillers in Netflix Korea’s catalog. The film has remnants of ‘Parasite’ through its clever yet sinister plot escalation and takes notes from ‘The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil’ in what makes a successful story about detectives, serial killers, and vengeance.
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What Separates ‘Unlocked’ from South Korea’s Many Other Cyber Horrors
In recent years, mostly on streaming services, the cyber-horror genre has been gaining lots of attention in Korean television and Cinema. From the disturbing and raunchy dating-app thriller ‘Somebody’ to the documentary ‘Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror’ which chronicles of the infamous Nth Room case revolving around the blackmail, deception, and coercion of young women to upload sexually explicit content online, ‘Unlocked’ still manages to create originality in itself to stand out in the expanding roster of films and series in the genre. Simply playing off the mistake of the protagonist, ‘Unlocked’ strays from the typical cyber-horror trope of deceptive online personalities and instead focuses on what could happen in a single instance of accidental irresponsibility. Instead of a cautionary tale about who to trust online, ‘Unlocked’ is a film that tells the severity of losing this device that stores all of people’s private information on. With how many phones are stored, a lost phone can be more severe for somebody than a lost wallet.
‘Unlocked’ touches on a new aspect of cyber-horror that has not been touched upon in recent K-dramas. Undetectable smartphone spyware is the major aspect used by the antagonist of the film. Showcasing the ease of installing the spyware and using it, Oh Jun-Yeong is able to access Lee Na-Mi’s cameras in real time and see every single activity on her device, from a Google search to checking her bank balance. What ‘Unlocked’ highlights versus other Korean cyber-horrors is the threat of a stranger knowledgeable of hacking and coding getting ahold of someone’s phone for just a couple of minutes. The threat in ‘Unlocked’ seems more likely to happen to any person as opposed to plots like ‘Somebody’, which creates its victims from online meetups. Where the usual dating app threat is avoided by the average person through many safe measures like FaceTime or avoidance, the threat of an unhinged psychopath getting ahold of someone’s misplaced cell phone can be out of anyone’s control and be a fatal mistake.
Director: Kim Tae-Joon
Writers: Kim Tae-Joon, Akira Shiga (novel)
Cast: Im Si-Wan, Chun Woo-Hee, Kim Ye-Won, Park Ho-San, Kim Hee-Won, Kim Joo-Ryoung
By Nino Vongphachanh
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