Project Silence 4K 2023

In a dense fog near the airport, a bunch of cars and their passengers get into a massive accident on a bridge: a politician with his daughter, a tired golfer with her fussy manager girlfriend, a pensioner with his wife in dementia, a tow truck driver and many more. The situation is complicated by the fact that killer dogs have escaped from a wrecked military truck, and a bridge is collapsing....

The fog is the perfect setting for a horror movie. Stephen King ('The Mist') and John Carpenter ('The Fog') will tell you that. It's so easy for monsters to hide in the fog. And also the fog is good at hiding the flaws in the picture - the audience's imagination will paint a better picture.

So the source material for the Korean zoohorror-catastrophe 'In the Fog' is the most fertile. I'll say right away that the main trump cards of the movie are played unevenly: scenes of a massive accident, collapsing bridge, explosions, the fall of the helicopter - filmed very cool, reminiscent of the catastrophe shots from 'Destination 5'. But everything about the killer dogs (which the bad military programmed to kill, and then lost control over them) - done on the computer is very clumsy. I've seen footage of it being filmed - men in green suits attacking passengers, and then the dogs were added on the computer instead. It's hilarious. Of course, I understand that it is impossible to torture and traumatize real dogs, but the same 'John Wick' perfectly combined scenes with live trained dogs and special effects. But with live dogs so much fiddling ...

It makes it hard to take what's happening on the screen seriously. Although the characters are interesting - Koreans are always at the top in this: in Hollywood there would be one cool hero who saved everyone. In South Korea, it's different. The politician (Lee Seong-kyung), of course, takes responsibility for others, but is unable to save everyone - even his daughter doesn't listen to him. The golfer is dashing with a club - an interesting superpower. A dog professor is trying to get to a laptop to reprogram his dogs. The pensioner seems to be the weakest character, but capable of heroism. But the most interesting character is the patched tow truck driver, whose character is revealed from a new side several times.

Life throws up plots that are more tragic than the movie ones. Actor Lee Sung-kyung, who plays the lead role in the movie and previously played one of the main roles in the Oscar-winning 'Parasites', did not live to see the premiere of 'In the Fog', committing suicide in December 2023. The occasion was the accusation of 'use of illegal substances'. Here's another difference from Hollywood - I can hardly imagine a star there committing suicide for such a reason. Yes, career 'cancelations' happen there nowadays, but for much more serious reasons. Korean society seems to be different. And the bitter irony is that a character who goes against the system due to his high moral and strong-willed qualities turns out to be more resilient than the actor playing him, whose career and life was swallowed up by a much more deadly fog....