“None of this would have happened if you didn’t follow me,” the hero of Following (그녀가 죽었다, Geunyeoga jug-eossda) is told by his opposite number though he himself doesn’t see anything untoward about his voyeuristic hobby and justifies his habit of “peeping” into the lives of others on the grounds that it does no harm. Of course, he’s not very well placed to make that decision and too narcissistic to consider that while he watches someone may be watching him.
In any case, what Jung-tae (Byun Yo-han) claims to want to see is “the real you” rather than the persona created for public consumption which is why he’s drawn to duplicitous influencer Sora (Shin Hye-sun) whom he spots simultaneously munching on a sausage and posting about eating a vegan salad. Of course, as an influencer “followers” are what most she most craves though not of the kind Jung-tae becomes nor does she want this particular kind of attention not least because it threatens the facade she’s created for herself as a “good person” posting about her altruistic deeds such as rescuing dogs and cats for which her followers send her monetary gifts and donations for various funds and charities.
As for himself, Jung-tae thinks he remains a fairly anonymous person. As an estate agent, he projects an image of himself as being kind and trustworthy, while he runs a popular online blog under a pseudonym. He gives little of himself away and later acknowledges that part of the thrill of his voyeurism is a sense of superiority, that he is privy to privileged information about strangers that others do not have. Misusing his position, he sneaks into people’s houses and takes something insignificant as a trophy while also performing small household tasks in recompense. Perhaps it should have seemed like a red flag to him that Sora suddenly wanted to sell her apartment (on her landlord’s behalf), let alone that she didn’t make any attempt to tidy up before giving him a key, but he is so assured of himself that the possibility he has been discovered doesn’t really occur to him until he sneaks into Sora’s place and finds her dead, covered in blood on her living room sofa. Predictably, he does not call the police because he’d have to admit he let himself into her apartment when he shouldn’t have.
Receiving a threatening letter, Jung-tae then becomes a classic wrong man in the firing line for Sora’s murder and in his mind unfairly persecuted for his “harmless” hobby. The irony is that the person who’s targeting him is doing so because they had something they did not wish others to see and fear Jung-tae may have done so which would give him power over them, while what Jung-tae wants to keep hidden is his own voyeurism. “It’s all about reputation,” he explains and his would be ruined if his clients knew he’d been misusing the keys they entrusted to him for professional purposes let alone the embarrassment of being exposed as a peeping tom even if in this case his peeping isn’t sexual but intimate on another level.
The power dynamics between the seer and the seen are always shifting, not least because Jung-tae believed himself invisible and in fact continues to think that he is the victim as does the person targeting him. He later comes to realise that what he did was wrong and that he invaded these people’s privacy, but continues to centre himself and despite the glasses he now wears at the film’s conclusion he may not see anything any more clearly than before. What unites him with his own stalker is a sense of frustrated loneliness and longing for connection if also a kind of acceptance even if mediated through a “fake” persona to paper over the cracks in their identity. Yet ironically, even the killer’s words that none of this would have happened if he hadn’t been following them further bolsters his narcissistic sense of importance as much as it reflects the words of an abuser deflecting responsibility for their own actions. Jung-tae has met his mirror image and may not like what he sees (or perhaps does not see at all) while they equally struggle to understand why others cannot see that they are the victim. Told with a touch of humour and a degree of B-movie silliness, Kim Se-hwi’s taut psychological thriller nevertheless suggests that even as we obsess over the image we project to others and that they project to us, we remain largely blind to ourselves and all too keen to justify our actions to maintain a carefully constructed self-hood that is otherwise unlikely to stand up to scrutiny.
Following screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 