[HanCinema's Film Review] "Following"

With 1,237,103 admissions for its May 15th premiere, "Following" didn't provide much competition to "The Roundup: Punishment" in its fourth week of availability. Although to be fair, that's a pretty high standard for a mystery thriller. "Following" stars Byun Yo-han as Jeong-tae, a real estate agent who stalks people for fun. Give Byun Yo-han credit where its due- he makes Jeong-tae seem like a surprisingly sympathetic character given that he is, as the closing dialog reminds us, explicitly a creep and a criminal.

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Where the mystery comes in is that Jeong-tae starts stalking So-ra (played by Shin Hye-sun), and gets unexpected access to her home. One time Jeong-tae drops by unannounced though, and he comes across a most disturbing sight. The Korean title of the movie spoils what this sight is, and I'm a bit loathe to repeat that when the English title goes out of its way to avoid that questionable decision.

"Following" is actually a fairly clever title. It both literally refers to how Jeong-tae follows people around, and also how So-ra works as a social media influencer. Unfortunately, So-ra is an implausibly successful social media influencer, and the more "Following" gets into her backstory the sillier the whole plot becomes. Despite social media having no direct influence on anything that happens in the story, writer/director Kim Se-hwi frames social media as if it were the real villain.

As far as that actual story goes, "Following" suffers from the fact that the twist is fairly obvious. There's only really one plausible explanation for who could be sending Jeong-tae those red envelopes, as in, there's only one character who could possibly have access to the information contained in those red envelopes. While "Following" doesn't linger too long making the viewer wait for this plot twist, the subsequent explanations for how the evil plan was supposed to work weren't exactly convincing.

Yeong-hoo (played by Lee El) does manage to see through much of this by virtue of her being a fairly competent cop who's often stymied by internal police politics. In general Yeong-hoo is a much more compelling lead, to the point I wasn't really sure why the movie was from Jeong-tae's perspective at all. There are so few suspects for the central crime to begin with that the mystery would have worked a lot better if Jeong-tae was presented as the possible culprit.

In general most of the characters in "Following" suffer from competence issues. An almost hilarious corollary to the main plot twist is that the entire elaborate scheme is largely premised on a misunderstanding, the big conspiracy seeming less plausible than the telegraphed explanation mostly because so many things could, and in fact did, go wrong with the larger plan. "Following" isn't the most infuriatingly stupid mystery thriller I've ever watched, but that's more a statement on how many bad mystery thrillers I've watched over the years than it is any particularly endorsement of this film.

Written by William Schwartz