The Woman in the White Car, 2022.
Directed by Christine Ko.
Starring Ryeowon Jung, Jung-eun Lee, and Jung-min Kim.
SYNOPSIS:
When a kind-hearted smalltown cop (Jung-eun Lee) is summoned by the local hospital to deal with Do-kyung (Ryeowon Jung), who has arrived carrying the limp body of her sister, believed to have been stabbed in a violent attack by her controlling fiancé, she must navigate a web of lies and half-truths in order to get to the bottom of a mystery.
You remember how every episode of Scooby-Doo ended with the one of the more self-confident members of the gang theorising about who’d committed the crime, before whipping off the mask of the janitor for him to perform his obligatory “I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you pesky kids” monologue? Well, Christine Ko’s The Woman in the White Car seems like it’s chock-full of those kind of reveals. It has more twists than a packet of cheese strings.
Sometimes you can get away with that, especially if you approach such serious matters as duplicitous murder in a light-hearted fashion, a la Knives Out, or play it for dark laughs, like the film with which The Woman in the White Car draws immediate comparisons with; Fargo. Unfortunately this does neither, simply content to be a disappointing who-cares whodunnit.
Cross-referencing the Coen Brothers classic, you have a long-in-the-tooth local cop (played by Parasite‘s Jung-eun Lee) who’s more interested in finishing her noodles than getting to a crime scene somewhere in the snow-covered small-town community. When she does arrive at the hospital she finds the kind of crime that should make for a decent follow-the-breadcrumbs caper, with one victim in a coma, and the other suffering from memory loss.
What we get instead is a Rashomon take on events, but whereas the Kurosawa classic presented four viewpoints, The Woman in the White Car doesn’t allow the film a minute to breathe before hitting us with yet another of the countless flashbacks depicting a character’s take on the crime.
This wouldn’t be half as bad if the movie didn’t keep using the unreliable narrator device. Almost every single recollection is debunked immediately, meaning that you have no idea what’s going on and place no validity in any of the perspectives you’re being shown. As a result you quickly become disinterested in the he-said, she-said shenanigans.
It’s a good thing then the performances are good, with Jung-eun Lee and her rookie partner forming a likeable pairing. The moments they share during the early stages of the investigation, particularly a nice reference to Psycho, with which the film has a similar sounding score, go a long way towards making you stick with things as the script ties itself in knots.
Not content with simply letting the story play out, director Christine Ko successfully employs some filmmaking techniques to embellish the plot, such as the switching of aspect ratios whenever we’re in a flashback, or changing the colour palette to suit the mood. She also composes a number of shots in a way that recalls some of the genre classics, especially Hitchcock, which singles her out as a feature debut director to look out for in the future.
The Woman in the White Car is a tangled web indeed. An over-reliance on tropes and repetitious narrative devices dulls your interest long before the initially intriguing mystery has been solved.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
