Out of Screamfest, Abner Pastoll’s Nervous uses sound with great, harrowing results. Modern offerings such as Smile, Masking Threshold, and Undertone remind us that sound remains the foundation of any good horror film. Whether that’s built into the score (e.g., stingers signaling a nightmare moment to the audience) or used within a given scene, sound almost always does the heavy lifting. And that’s not a bad thing. John Carpenter originally pitched Halloween without a score, and a studio executive told him it wasn’t scary. But when he came back with that chilling, iconic music, everything changed. Audiences ate it up. Nervous carries the essence of Halloween, in that sound becomes integral to the film’s effectiveness.
Sarah (Sarah Bolger) and her husband Sungsoo (Sungsoo Yune) move to the Korean countryside. After the death of a relative, Sungsoo inherited the home, a little worse for wear. Sarah displays a clear distaste for the cracked paint, dreary color scheme, and tattered flooring. But she’s willing to give it a chance. A fresh start is exactly what they both needed. Perhaps, they can get their relationship back on track. Their new neighbor Eunbyeol (Ko Asung) likes to dance at midnight, the glow of a roaring fire silhouetting her movements like a puppet on a stage. There’s far more than meets the eye when it comes to Eunbyeol, and Sarah and Sungsoo are about to get a rude awakening that might drive them both crazy.
While going through boxes, Sarah discovers an old record player and a vinyl record. They play the record, but all they can hear is the scratchy static of the record’s grooves. Nothing else. What they come to realize, though, is that the record contained a hypnotic, coded message, and it only affected Sarah. The evil takes root insidiously enough; she begins having slight trouble hearing Sungsoo, but she believes it to be just a case of airplane ear. But when the problem not only persists but gets much worse, Sarah becomes increasingly obsessed with finding out the truth. Turns out, men have been silenced in her eardrums—particularly timely when men do a whole lot of talking without actually saying anything.
Pastoll co-wrote the script with Richard Hobley, and together, the creative duo explore ideas of male dominance in relationships (e.g., Sungsoo speaking for Sarah in conversations), a woman breaking those shackles, and the tipping point of sanity. Bolger gives a grounded, emotionally wrought performance that carries the film and sends the story spiraling out of control. She plays against Yune’s more purposefully detached turn as the disinterested husband. Nervous not only works as an allegory for the modern woman, but it’s also brimming with full on terror to get the blood pumping.
The tragedy holding Nervous from being truly a marvel, however, is its recycling beats and a sluggish middle. Bolger walks through the same emotional scale, becoming one note for a sizable chunk of the runtime. When it rebounds, it really rebounds, but it requires immense convincing for the audience to pay attention again. It’s an otherwise creepy, Twilight Zone-esque episode of the twisted and the macabre that would work decently as a double feature with Undertone. At the end of the day, horror watchers just want to be scared to death, and this might do it.
