Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Abner Pastoll
Starring: Sarah Bolger, Sungsoo Yune, Ko Asung
Nervous boasts arguably the year's most arresting horror premise - what if a woman lost the ability to hear men's voices? It might be the first horror movie that causes its female audience to envy its protagonist, as what woman hasn't wished she could drown out the sound of a man at some point?
The film sees director Abner Pastoll (co-writing with Richard Hobley) reunite with his A Good Woman is Hard to Find star Sarah Bolger. That underseen Irish thriller breathed new life into the vigilante sub-genre, and Pastoll and Bolger's latest collaboration similarly adds a fresh perspective to the well-established horror trope of a woman failing to convince her husband that she isn't imagining the inexplicable phenomena afflicting her.
Bolger plays Sarah, an Irish woman who has given up a career as a London journalist to move to her Korean husband Sungsoo's (Sungsoo Yune) homeland. When we see the couple first they're driving on the roads outside Seoul, Sarah sporting a blindfold in the passenger seat. Sungsoo has a surprise in store for his wife - his aunt has gifted the couple a house in a small village outside the Korean capital. Sarah is understandably miffed that Sungsoo would make such a big decision without consulting her, but she seems too timid to really make her feelings known.
It soon becomes clear that this is a highly imbalanced marriage. Sungsoo likes to make decisions for his wife, he barely listens to her, and at a dinner party he infuriatingly answers questions directed at Sarah.
Things take a supernatural turn when Sungsoo discovers an old gramophone and a shellac record in the attic. When he plays the record for Sarah it appears to be blank, just a few faint crackles. But the record has an effect on Sarah. Over the following days she finds herself struggling to hear anything her husband says. She puts it down to a delayed case of "airplane ear" until she meets Eunbyeol (Ko Asung), the beautiful young woman who lives next door. Sarah can hear Eunbyeol clear as day, and on further investigation she realises that she can hear women perfectly fine, but anything that comes out of a man's mouth sounds as garbled as a grown-up in a Peanuts cartoon.
Sarah's initial reaction is one of horror, but with the calming support of Eunbyeol she not only accepts her condition, but grows content with it. It's often said that divorce is what happens when a couple run out of things to say to each other, and the absence of her husband's words makes Sarah realise that her marriage is built on the flimsiest of foundations. Unlike Sungsoo, Eunbyeol seems genuinely interested in Sarah as a person rather than an adornment, and the two begin a close friendship that seems like it might lead to something more intimate.
Nervous might be viewed as a story of late-blooming lesbianism, of a woman finally accepting her true desires. It certainly works as such, and Bolger and Asung have such tingling chemistry that we're positively excited at the prospect of them hooking up. But it's also very much a horror movie, and while Sarah's condition leads to a newfound liberation of sorts, it also brings forth grisly body-horror elements. Sarah starts to mysteriously bleed from her ears, despite doctors being unable to locate any physical injury. Nick Baldock's piercing sound design takes us inside Sarah's ear canals in a way that makes us sympathise with her actions when she follows the old maxim of "if your ear offends you, tear it off." The horror element is supplemented by a subplot involving the bodies of murdered men being discovered in the area corresponding with women disappearing. There is a nod to Don't Look Now and Audrey Rose in a yellow raincoat-clad woman who seems to pop up every time Sarah is feeling particularly angsty.
Bolger delivers a woman on the edge performance on a par with Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion and Susannah York in Images. She channels the frustration of every woman who feels seen but not heard, or heard but not listened to. As with her previous collaboration with Pastoll, Bolger takes an initially timid mouse on a journey to becoming a roaring lion, and every stop along the way is fascinating to watch (if A24 or Neon had picked up Nervous, Bolger would likely be in the awards conversation). When Sarah tells her husband that she needs him to tell her he believes her, even if he doesn't, Sungsoo's inability to fulfil her request is as disturbing a moment of horror as anything the genre has to offer, and the look on Bolger's face may haunt a few husbands in the audience. This is a devastating addition to the marriage-horror canon.
