Anytime a movie is released that toes the “paranoid thriller” line, it’s a guarantee that a non-zero number of movie critics will, like a slice of lemmings, line up together and one after the other describe the film as “Hitchcockian.” This happens to Park Chan-wook all the time, and I would frankly contest that most of his work is actually all that related to the work of Alfred Hitchcock at all; it also happened more recently to Manuela Martelli and her wonderful new movie Chile ’76, a Pinochet-era-set thriller that owes infinitely more to Alan J. Pakula than to Hitchcock.
This is a great movie – chilling, unnerving, choked by an atmosphere where you can hardly feel your own dread because it gets stuck in your throat like so much phlegm. You can read my full review over at Paste Magazine.
A Constant Visual Feast 