Korean Cinema: 버티고 (Vertigo) Review
Directed by Jeon Gye-soo, Vertigo explores Seo-young’s life in corporate Korea. It’s a dizzying world of uncertainty where simply being seen wearing a hearing aid could lose her a contract renewal. Seo-young’s secret affair with her handsome and popular boss is also another risk. Soon her life begins to spiral out of control when her inner ear problem causes her to start experiencing Vertigo in her high-rise office.
I watched this film as part of the London Korean Film Festival, which went digital this year as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a kind of stroke of luck for me as I have wanted to see Vertigo for quite a while, and I wouldn’t have been able to see it at its originally planned screening in London.
Narratively the central focus of the film is on Seo-young, but Vertigo also explores two men and their connection to her. Seo-young is very much in love with her boss Lee Jin-soo (Teo Yoo from the fantastic Russian film Leto!), which is displayed through her looking at him longingly while he religiously works and how she seeks physical contact with him.
His distance and unavailability are perhaps part of the draw, but it is clear she craves something more from the relationship. Kwon-Woo a window cleaner, is a point of fascination for Seo-young, he is literally and metaphorically on the outside looking in. He cleans windows suspended from a rope and can observe corporate meetings and lunchtime rituals, but he is also poor and of different social standing, and his interest in the melancholy Seo-young becomes a focal point in his life.
There is one moment where he writes Cheer Up on the windows in soap suds, which causes Seo-young to cry (and I must admit I did too!). However, one must also note that while Kwon-woo had the best of intentions his behaviour throughout the film was questionable and actually stalking.
Beautifully shot with a minimalistic colour palette Vertigo really stands out when audio and visuals vividly collide to bring Set-young’s vertigo to life. Visually we experience the disorientation, the panic and the off-kilter feeling through the use of a SnorriCam (essentially, the camera is mounted onto the actor, so it appears that they don’t move while everything around them does). The sound engineering in these moments mimics tinnitus with the high pitch ringing and the muffling of voices which I found to be really powerful, and as I have tinnitus myself rather realistic too.
While Vertigo starts off strong towards the end the film becomes rather over the top and a bit too melodramatic for my liking (though it does make for a spectacular cinematographic moment), but overall it was a beautiful film to watch and an interesting portrait of a woman on the brink. There were also some important moments throughout the film that highlighted social issues like sexual harassment and prejudices within the workplace.
