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One night, blind Soo-ah (Kim Ha-Neul) takes a cab ... and hears the
cabdriver run someone over. He claims it had been nothing but a dog, but
she knows otherwise. Ultimately, the cabbie throws her out of the car and
rushes off. She is sure it was a case of hit-and-run murder, so she
reports it to the police, but nobody is inclined to believe her, nobody
but detective Cho (Jo Hie-bong), a bit of a naive country bumpkin, but a
man with good instincts. He investigates, and since Soo-ah has once been a
police academy cadet, she decides to help him, also because she finally
feels needed rather than pitied once more. However, despite their best
efforts Cho and Soo-ah seem to be unable to find the cab ... and then
young Gi-sub (Yoo Seung-ho) shows up and identifies himself as a witness -
but insists the car Soo-ah was in was not a cab. At first neither
detective Cho nor Soo-ah believe him, simply because there is no reason to
why it wouldn't have been a cab ... but then they find more and more
evidence corroborating Gi-sub's claims, and not only that, they manage to
link the whole incident to a serialkiller's killing spree - but by that
time, the killer (Yang Yeong-jo) has already beaten Gi-sub half to death,
and when he's back to his health again, he doesn't want to have anything
to do with the cop and the blind girl anymore ... until he witnesses the
killer pursuing Soo-ah, and it's only thanks to this and to Soo-ah's video
phone that she escapes. Detective Cho soon finds a definite clue to the
killer, and from now on it's police work, which leaves Soo-ah and Gi-sub
pretty much at the sidelines, and they decide to hide away for a couple of
days, until the killer, a prominent gynocologist, is arrested, in Soo-ah's
old home an orphanage. But the killer is more ruthless than anyone has
thought, and he actually kills detective Cho in order to find out where
Soo-ah and Gi-sub are hiding out, and eventually, he breaks into the
orphanage to kill them - but Soo-ah is not a woman as incapable as she
might appear to be - and the first thing she does is to create a power
outage, as fighting in the dark turns the tide in her favour. But even
then, the killer is a mighty tough opponent ... but it all ends happily. In
parts, this it a pretty great serialkiller thriller, taking quite a few
cues from the gialli of old, in story as well as the look of isolated
scenes and choice of music. On top of that, it's creepy and/or exciting in
the appropriate moments. However, in all, Blind is a less than
perfect movie, basically because it tries too hard to give the story a ...
"heart" I suppose one would call it. Way too much time is spent
on Soo-ah's backstory and motivations to really give the thriller aspects
of the film room to properly develop, and what's worse, this backstory is
nothing but a cliché (she has lost her eyesight in an accident in which
she also lost her brother, and now considers Gi-sub hr brother
substitute), and because of that the film also ends on an unnecessarily
high note (well, at least she doesn't get her eyesight back). Now don't
get me wrong, Blind is still an ok thriller despite everything -
but cut by about half an hour, it could have been a much tighter and more
exciting and involving film!
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