The Soundtrack of Terror
As its title suggests, Noise aims to anchor its horror dynamics around sound: not only are noises at the heart of the story from an intradiegetic perspective, but the sound design is also meticulously crafted to petrify the audience in a way that’s more gripping than a blunt piano crash that drops when a jumpscare erupts.
When it comes to sound effects that embody the supernatural and raise the hairs on the back of your neck, you encounter the classic creaks of joints, moans that seem to blend human screams with feedback (in a similar fashion to what Ring’s characters hear on the phone when Sadako speaks through the receiver), the mysterious thuds on walls from someone who isn’t really there… Nothing truly new under the sun, but Noise makes the effort to use these devices as real levers of its scare sequences and as genuine narrative elements rather than merely decorating the background, and it pays off.
Moreover, the interplay between what the protagonist (who is hard of hearing) perceives and what the viewer hears (subjected to the heroine’s disability and to her willingness or not to wear her hearing aid) is deftly handled and helps the audience project themselves into the story in a more physical way than usual. The director seeks, moreover, playful yet terrifying ways to make image and sound dialogue, and to convey the limits imposed on Joo-yeong by her deafness.
This is notably the case in sequences where she opens a voice recognition app on her phone to translate into written form sounds that do not belong to the living world or that she cannot hear without her aid. The idea is as playful as it is effective and, in fact, deserves to be used far more widely.
The Horror Is in Full Swing (A Bit Too Much)
But that’s the entire problem with Noise, which piles up clever ideas, yet lets them gnaw at each other and ultimately yields only a little in return (to avoid spoilers for this discussion, jump to the next section). The film’s first half stacks concepts that could individually fuel a top-notch horror movie without needing to pile on more.
The neighbor driven mad and violent by noises that don’t exist, the basement where ten years’ worth of trash has piled up without the owners caring to keep the building livable for its tenants, the haunting phenomenon that seeps from one apartment to contaminate all the units below it while sparing the rest of the building, the sonic nuisance that is in fact the echo of a murdered woman’s call for help, spurned by a hatred of noise…
Excellent ideas that could feed as many horror-film scenarios as there are rooms in a building, and some sequences manage to muster a nice scare with very little. Unfortunately, unable to commit to a single path among the many it tries to walk at once, Noise gets tangled in what it’s trying to say.
A Lot of Noise for Nothing
Is it the fault of having three screenwriters (including the director) on the project? In any case, the stakes, the characters, and the plot twists end up mixing, choking one another, and scattering, leaving the viewer completely adrift in the film’s second half, which suddenly feels very long, whereas the first half was particularly rich and brisk.
The ending, very muddled in its message, follows a (long, very long) resolution during which it’s hard to recall who is who, who wants whom, and who is really alive or not. The simple and fair reason? The film fails to distill elements and central intrigues within this moodboard-like, structureless framework.
The frustration is all the greater because Noise had every chance to please: the originality of its horror dynamics, the potential of its setting, the credibility of its cast, its underlying social commentary, its ideas of staging, and, once again, the underutilized force of its brilliant concepts. Genre fans will likely be willing to overlook the film’s flaws to savor the few genuine frights it offers. For everyone else, however, watching it is likely to be a slog.
