Drown review – atmospheric Korean thriller doesn’t quite coalesce

Do-woo owns a run-down motel in a sleepy town. A meek, mild-mannered man without much of a social life, he seems resigned to his fate, cleaning rooms, fretting about leaks in the ceiling and looking after his mum, who suffers from dementia. But when she disappears without a trace, matters become more complex. The police begin searching, a mysterious stranger enters Do-woo’s life, and a local escort starts making more regular visits to the motel, simply to spend time there.

There are more pertinent details to Drown’s central mystery. The filmmakers let us in on the circumstances of his mother’s disappearance, but not the culprit. An early scene also makes clear that Do-woo’s motel is a regular suicide spot. Perhaps most crucially, the nearby lake – a tourist destination – is supposedly the mass grave of some 23,000 communists, killed during the Korean War. The presence of North Korea lurks keenly in Drown, a sense of constant underlying anxiety about the possibility – however unlikely – of sudden chaos courtesy of an unpredictable next door neighbour.

What starts as a mystery with a focus on the social – paying close attention to how fellow denizens of the town react to the disappearance, alongside the dilapidated environs – descends gradually into a focus on Do-woo's increasingly slippery mental state, with Drown flitting between psychotic visions of violence, blood and murder, and the genteel, yellowing state of the motel.

But director Lim Sang-su never quite finds a way for these strands to match – the ethereal Twin Peaks vibe doesn’t coalesce towards anything, and details such as the mass grave in the lake are only mentioned once and left to linger. Korean audiences might pick up on more – maybe there’s something here about the lingering guilt and repression of unanswered war crimes – but for this writer such hints felt too whispered to be heard.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though – most of these issues only really become apparent in the final act when the film attempts to shift past its steady pacing. For much of the first two thirds, this is strong stuff, using its location – both the motel and the village – to create a feeling of psycho-geographic detachment, a sense that nobody in this place actually belongs, the end result being that everybody is depressed, lethargic, and often angry. Do-woo’s often hapless, tired facial expressions betray a man who has spent his entire life stuck in second gear, unable to develop his own identity in the face of his environment.

Drown screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022. A UK release date is yet to be announced.