In ‘4PM’, It’s Best Not to Answer the Door [Fantasia 2024 Review]

Jay Song’s (The Nightmare) 4PM, which has its North American premiere at this year’s 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, is an anxiety attack wrapped in rural Korean flair. Writer Kim Hye Gon adapts Amélie Nothomb’s novel The Stranger Next Door, the first of the seminal writer’s works translated into English, with contemporary verve. While the setting has changed, the underpinnings of human behavior have not. As Jung-in (Oh Dal-soo, Oldboy) remarks at the start, we never really know ourselves.

Interrogations of human behavior thrust 4PM forward similar to the 2022 Sundance breakout Speak No Evil (soon to be remade). Where the latter bludgeoned its audience with the extreme ends of politeness theory, Song’s approach is more subtle and internalized. Jung-in, recently on sabbatical, buys a new countryside house with his wife, Hyun-sook (Jang Young-nam, Project Wolf Hunting). On their first day, they leave a note at their neighbor’s house, mindful of how simply walking over and introducing themselves might not only be disruptive, but rude.

Their neighbor, a doctor named Yook-nam (Kim Hong-pa), arrives the next day. Yook-nam is odd. He’s terse, reticent to share anything about himself, and oblivious to social cues. From four until six, he remains seated in their living room. Well enough. But the following day, Yook-nam is back. Ad infinitum, a perennial presence in their living room, at the same time, for the same length of time.

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4PM is a nightmare of hospitality. Song regularly culls dramatic absurdity and suffocating tension from the mere tick of a clock. Jung-in and Hyun-sook slowly unravel, manufacturing excuses and outs, desperate to avoid their quotidian visitor. Jung-in’s monologue contextualizes most of Yook-nam’s visits. He privately grapples with his image as a nice, understanding guy while publicly undermining his own domestic tranquility, often making excuses for Yook-nam’s behavior, even as his wife grows more vocal that his presence is certifiably unwelcome.

An early evening Hour of the Wolf, 4PM is hypnotic, alluring, and regularly quite funny. In league with a contemporary genre-bending tradition of Korean social thrillers (see: Parasite, Decision to Leave), 4PM embellishes its communicative pulse with elements of horror. Yook-nam is an unwanted presence, a home invader, and he doesn’t seem to want to leave.

Grounded social commentary is eschewed in the final act, a more literal yet simultaneously metaphorical explosion of the burgeoning resentment. Not all of it works. As the clock ticks louder, 4PM’s quieter, more effective moments are diluted. Strong performances, commanding camerawork (at one point, the camera tilts and shifts like the hands of a clock), and a disquieting sense of unease aid in thoughtful terror. Who are we really? Whose perspectives do we value more? Is it better to honor ourselves and our desires, or maintain a public image liable to collapse at any moment? 4PM will have you questioning the absurdity of it all in the moments your heart isn’t racing.

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