[HanCinema's Film Review] "You Will Die In 6 Hours"

Jeong-yoon (played by Park Ju-hyun) is about to turn thirty, and is unremarkably depressed about the state of her life. She has three part time jobs that we know of with no apparent future prospects. What's worse, a chance encounter in the street with Joon-woo (played by Jaehyun) has the young man tell Jeong-yoon that she will die in six hours. Whether or not the prediction is real, Jeong-yoon is evidently in some sort of danger.

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Adapted from a Japanese mystery novel, "You Will Die In 6 Hours" renders itself needlessly boring by going out of its way to give the viewer too much information nullifying too many other possibilities. Scenes from Joon-woo's perspective, for example, make it clear that his visions are real, which makes it seem unlikely that he's the serial killer. Other scenes from the perspective of the police, incidentally, establish that there is most definitely a serial killer somewhere.

The problem with these narrative choices is that Jeong-yoon doesn't have access to any of this information, and to the main extent the drama is compelling at all, it's compelling because of her perspective. Jeong-yoon's reluctance to go to the police, for example, makes a lot more sense when we learn that she had previously reported a stalking incident to no avail. Whether the person Jeong-yoon thought was stalking her was actually stalking her is, well, more ambiguous than you'd think come to think of it.

And even the extant information Jeong-yoon doesn't have access to is a lot more unhelpful than you'd think. There's an entire corruption subplot going on at the police department which seems to explain the lack of progress with the serial killer investigation but I could never quite figure out what illegal things which police officers were even doing, let alone what the serial killings had to do with them. The twist as to who the serial killer is and why he was killing these young women is surprisingly unhelpful in this regard.

I'm not sure how much, if any of this, was in the novel, and "You Will Die In 6 Hours" is so short to begin with that I'm inclined to think this was new material since not enough happens in the original story to justify the feature length runtime. "You Will Die In 6 Hours" is only just barely ninety minutes long. I find this fact a bit remarkable, actually, because the movie feels much longer than that, particularly since even the epilogue scenes mange to slow to a crawl.

Conceptually "You Will Die In 6 Hours" is fairly flawed from the get-go, since despite his best efforts, Jaehyun looks and acts like the aloof lead of a romantic drama while working with a script that doesn't have any actual romance in it. The end result isn't really unwatchable or anything like that, there's just no obvious audience for this movie. Mystery fans and Jaehyun fans alike will probably just be confused and disappointed by the whole presentation.

Written by William Schwartz

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"You Will Die In 6 Hours" is directed by Lee Yun-seok, and features Park Ju-hyun, Jaehyun, Kwak Si-yang, Kim Min-sang, Lee Chul-woo, Lee Soo-jung-I. Release date in Korea: 2024/10/16.