Blind is a South-Korean film directed by Ahn Sang-hoon in 2011.
The movie is about a young woman who lost her vision due to a violent car accident in which one of her brothers died. The story takes place 3 years later when an unknown psychically disturbed man starts kidnapping and killing young girls. The protagonist get involved in the police investigation as a witness because an unlucky coincidence that sees her accepting a ride from the killer during a rainy night.
Playing a blind character must be for sure a very complex task and in my opinion Kim Ha-neul (the protagonist) managed it very well, in fact she also won two awards for her positive performance in two different contests.
Nevertheless is possible to spot some behaviors that suggest us that the actress is not visual impared. For example something very hard to ignore are natural body reflexes. In some scenes is in fact evident that she react to a visual stimuli way before a blind person can do (In one scene the guide dog walks quickly to her and she is already perfectly positioned with her hands to “welcome” him).
Another aspect is how confident she is in running. Ok the situation is a bit extreme, probably if you are followed by a killer you don’t care much about safety, but at least placing your hands in front of you while running may be a good precaution to avoid smashing into things.
One last though is for the guide dog. It seems a bit dumb! Like at the beginning of the movie when she cross the street with the red light, and the dog is completely lost and confused as her.
Speaking about positive things that I personally learned watching that film are that blind people are comfortable with an iPhone. During the scene in which the protagonist is in the interviews room with the young boy, and he started blaming her for using a smartphone I was thinking the same. I wasn’t aware that an iPhone with Siri is better than many other specific product for visual impaired people.
Moreover I reflected a lot about how a blind person can understand what’s surrounding her/him. Maybe this aspect is a bit forced in the movie, I think that the description of the suspect by the protagonist is a bit too much detailed, but still is impressive how many information she was able to understand.
One last aspect that I would like to discuss is that at the very beginning of the movie, when she went to speak with the man at the police academy and he refused to admit her again. In my opinion he was right, she made a huge mistake that night 3 years before and she doesn’t seems to understand this fact. Even later, when she goes to the orphanage speaking with her “mother” both of them blamed the guy for being intolerant against impaired people. In my opinion he was just objective and correct.
To conclude this small reflection I can say that I enjoyed the movie. It also opened my mind about Korean movies! I never tried to approach the eastern movie culture.
Non-excluding Design 