Kim Soo-Jin’s inventive, Deaf-centric horror debut mines plenty of screams from silence
After Ju-Hee (Han Soo-A) mysteriously vanishes from her high-rise apartment, her estranged Deaf sister, Ju-Young (Lee Sun-Bin), moves in to investigate. She soon uncovers what one resident calls “a spider web of grudges”: bitter rivalries and unexplained deaths linked to the building’s poor soundproofing against interfloor noise. Using her hearing aids and other assistive devices, Ju-Young begins to pick up the same eerie evidence that Ju-Hee had desperately tried to document — phantom voices, faint echoes, and relentless banging from all directions. With the help of Ju-Hee’s boyfriend Ki-Hoon (Kim Min-Seok), can Ju-Young uncover the truth behind the complex’s aural paranoia and find her sister before she too loses her grip on reality?
Like many Korean horror films before it, Kim Soo-Jin’s debut Noise ambitiously blends genres, using a traditional mystery as a framework for a variety of popcorn scares. At times, it evokes supernatural horror in the vein of Apt, Phone, and other Ahn Byeong-Ki staples, before shifting into paranoid stalker thriller, gritty crime drama, and other pulpy modes. While its elements may feel familiar to seasoned Asian horror audiences, Kim’s thrilling and sensitive portrayal of Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing experiences, along with his adept and patient delivery of blockbuster chills, make Noise a standout debut.
What gives Noise such a sound foundation is how Kim forefronts Ju-Young’s experiences as a Deaf/HOH woman, which provides an emotional anchor and sensorial framework for the film’s plentiful frights. Like Kwon Oh-Seung’s similar thriller, Midnight, there’s a heightened emphasis on sound design. However, where Midnight immediately leans into cat-and-mouse thrills using its character’s Deafness as an innovative and reliable conceit, director Kim patiently immerses audiences in Ju-Young’s daily reality before Noise’s genre elements make themselves heard. Aside from brief yet impactful sequences involving Korean Sign Language, Noise demonstrates a keen awareness of Ju-Young’s accessibility tools, from Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids to speech-to-text technology, which provide Kim with opportunities to creatively weave in expository elements. In one particularly memorable scene, Ju-Young listens to a voicemail recorded on the hearing aids Ju-Hee once gifted her; the flashback unfolds as a seamless conversation between the sisters across past and present, and essential items in those flashbacks manifest in Ju-Young’s present as visual illustrations of her deductive process. Even before Noise changes pitch into a full-out horror film, Kim ensures Ju-Young’s Deafness remains central to the story outside of providing new opportunities for thrills.
That said, the scares that do rely on Ju-Young’s Deafness aren’t limited to her experience alone: with Ju-Young as our focal point, Kim experiments with silence in ways that force his audience to rely on their other senses as much as her. Stripped of sonic clue-ins, audiences become even more focused on Jun Hong-kyu’s eerie cinematography, which features some creepy Hereditary-esque hidden visuals as Noise’s mystery deepens. There’s also some wickedly inventive scares involving Ju-Young’s technology–in the complete absence of sound, the auto-notification of detected speech-to-text becomes a wholly terrifying signifier of something lurking outside our realm of experience, as does Ju-Young’s realization that the sounds she’s picking up on her hearing aids aren’t actually occurring in the world around her. These moments shine in a film steeped in unnerving sound design, where whispers, scratches, and bangs haunt the edges of the frame, steeping us in the characters’ paranoia.
It’s a blessing that these elements are as strong as they are, as they significantly elevate Noise from the film’s hodgepodge of other Korean genre elements that run the gamut from the campy to the contrived. Noise isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel when it comes to a seemingly cursed central mystery–and it’s a plot that becomes increasingly unwieldy as director Kim weaves in everything including conspiratorial HOA politics, neck-twitchy possessions, and backstories that (you guessed it) mash together the traumatic and the melodramatic.
Yet Kim keeps it all feeling fresh, or at least engaging, thanks to his sharp focus on Ju-Young’s Deafness and the riveting tension he and lead actress Lee Sun-Bin bring to those sequences. Kim knows exactly when to dive back into a sequence that’s both sensorially striking and viscerally terrifying, using a familiar narrative framework as a gateway to inventive, memorable scares that highlight his emerging talent as a horror filmmaker. Noise may borrow the notes of Korean horror past, but Kim Soo-Jin orchestrates them into something deeply unsettling, formally inventive, and well worth listening to.
Noise had its North American premiere at the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival. It is currently seeking international distribution.
