Door Lock — An Adaptation that Centers on Women
Several years ago, when I didn’t know any better, one of my proposals to a friend was that instead of braving Manila traffic, that it would be better to walk home if the distance was not insurmountable. Her reply made me re-assess my worldview: “It’s easy for you to suggest walking, since you’re a guy. Women have different safety concerns to consider.”
The opening scene of Door Lock, a thriller by director Lee Kwon, is reminiscent of that conversation: A young woman commutes home, wary of her surroundings. When she starts walking down the street of her apartment, she turns to look at the guy approaching her and is relieved when he walks past her. When she arrives at her apartment unit, she swipes a key to her electronic door lock. The lights in her room don’t work and she uses her phone as a light source to check for intruders. She’s relieved when she finds no one lurking in the closet, but this is the moment when she’s attacked.
If Door Lock is scary, it’s because the concerns are all-too real and it revels in the plausibility and mundaneness of its horror. It’s a contrast to Sleep Tight, a film directed by Jaume Balagueró in 2011 that serves as the source material for this movie. Sleep Tight is a story about a man who obsessively torments one of the tenants in his building, while Door Lock is how Cho Kyung-min (played by actress Gong Hyo-jin), a temp who’s constantly gaslighted and taken advantage of, survives.
What unites both films is a scene at the beginning: both a man and a woman are sleeping on the same bed, side by side. The man wakes up, gathers their belongings, and leaves the apartment. It then slowly unfolds that the woman is not aware that she is living with someone else. In the case of Door Lock, Kyung-min has, in fact, been drugged the night before, causing her to be in a daze every morning. Her predator uses her bathroom and eats breakfast on her dining table, but cleans up after himself so that there’s no trace of his existence. But Kyung-min subconsciously knows something is wrong and is plagued with doubts. For example, the cover to her electronic door lock, which requires a passcode, is open when she leaves her apartment.
One of the memorable moments in the film is late at night, Kyung-min finds someone attempting to enter her apartment. The stranger enters the wrong passcode multiple times and eventually leaves, leaving a cigarette butt at her doorstep. Should Kyung-min feel safe that her door lock was working? The only emotion that lingers, however, is fear, and it does not help that the police downplay her worries when they arrive the next day.
And that is what’s terrifying about the narrative in Door Lock. The story begins in the middle of Kyung-min’s abuse. We never get to see what life before the harassment began. The only pathos we have is that she will hopefully survive this trial, identify the perpetrator, and hopefully elude him.
It’s a completely different take from Sleep Tight despite their similarities. In Sleep Tight, we know who the predator is. It is their point of view that we follow. With Door Lock, the predator’s identity is constantly hidden. Kyung-min starts to doubt every man she encounters. It does not help matters that at her day job, one of her customers is a persistent stalker who lives near her home.
Kwon makes the viewer experience these anxieties, these fears while Hyo-jin gives us a convincing performance. But the re-framing of the story is important, and transforms the source material into an entirely different beast.
