Politically
connected J. Lloyd Haigh notoriously supplied rotten cables for the construction
of the Brooklyn Bridge, but its design was so sound, it held up nonetheless.
Unfortunately, that will not be the case for the shoddily constructed mountain
underpass Lee Jung-soo is driving through. He is about to become the focus of a
media feeding frenzy when his car in trapped beneath a cave-in. Current events
clearly inform Kim Seong-hun’s Tunnel (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Lee,
a rental-car wholesale dealer is headed home with his daughter’s birthday cake
when the unthinkable happens. This is not a matter of a few tiles falling from
the roof. It is a complete collapse. Of course, the authorities are caught
flat-footed, but at least Dae-kyung, the on-the-ground operations guy is a
strong improviser. He will do his best to rescue Lee, but he will have constant
distractions from the swarming press and preening politicians. Naturally, the
latter are all in for photo ops in the early days of the rescue (we hope), but
they bail when it turns into a protracted campaign. Unfortunately, that puts
Lee’s wife Se-hyun under tremendous pressure to give up on him.
Tunnel is not merely a claustrophobic
survival story in the mold of Rodrigo Cortes’ Buried or the mudslide movie Detour.
Kim opens the film up into a caustic indictment of the drive-by media and the negligent
political establishment (the echoes of the Sewol Ferry sinking are hard to
miss). Yet, it also happens to be a tightly executed ticking clock drama. We
are keenly aware of the passage of time and Lee’s dwindling supplies of food
and water, especially when he discovers Mi-na, a second survivor painfully
pinned behind the wheel of her car.
As
our lead, Ha Jung-woo is an effectively grounded, completely identifiable
everyman. Like always, Oh Dal-su inspires instant confidence as Dae-kyung, like
a Korean Tommy Lee Jones. Frankly, it is hard to say who is more emotionally affecting,
Bae Doo-na as the maligned and harassed Se-hyun or Nam Ji-hyun as the slowly
expiring Mi-na, but they both elevate Tunnel
far beyond workaday disaster movies.
