Bleak Night

It had already been tackled in Korean Cinema: the suppressed aggression and explosive relations among older pupils in the often strict and repressive school system. But the murky complexities of power, pecking order, friendship, loyalty and physical fury have seldom been examined as closely as in Bleak Night, the feature debut by Yoon Sung-Hyun.
His film starts as a whodunit. A schoolchild at a boys’ school, Ki-Tae, has died. The father, who realises all too well how absent he was in bringing up his son, wonders what happened. He has conversations with Ki-Tae’s friends, but they do not seem eager to say very much. The fragile Hee-June, who to avoid conflict has gone to another school, advises him to look for Dong-Yoon, who has known Ki-Tae from childhood. But Dong-Yoon has disappeared without trace. The film slowly reveals how the friendship broke down – and how mutual relationships were not as expected.
Bleak Night, with several of the most talented young Korean film actors playing the lead, is Yoon’s final exam film from the Korean Film Academy, KAFA. Yet in everything it’s a mature film, gripping and impressively told, with complete concentration on his subject: the microcosm of schoolchildren in which adults are suspiciously absent.

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