Unlocked, the review: a thriller on the shadows of technology on Netflix

The review of Unlocked, a Korean thriller where the protagonist ends up in the crosshairs of a serial killer after losing her smartphone.

The young Nami, employee in an office and waitress in her father’s bar, spends an evening with friends giving herself up to mad joy and on her way back falls asleep on the bus, ending up losing her smartphone. She only notices it the next morning and receives a call informing her that the phone has been taken to a repair shop.

Nami believes that the situation has been resolved for the best, but as we tell you in the review of Unlocked his is a misplaced thought. Unbeknownst to him, Jun-yeoung, the one who took care of the repair, installed one spyware and has cloned all his data to another device, thus coming into possession of all the necessary information on who will be his next victim. Because in fact Jun-yeoung is actually a serial killer that the police have been hunting for some time, starting with detective Ji-man who has a completely personal score to settle with him. Nami is now in grave danger and his life risks being ruined by the tantrums of a sadistic psychopath.

Madness take me away

South Korea can easily be considered as the modern homeland of the thriller, with dozens of productions that invade national cinemas every year, some becoming cult even abroad, others remaining confined exclusively to indigenous borders. Sure with the world of streaming everything is simpler and Unlocked can enjoy worldwide distribution thanks to Netflix, where it lands as an original production. We are faced with a pleasantly average title, which takes up a classic archetype often used in the new millennium such as that of cell phones, which contain the “life, death and miracles” of the owner and if lost can give rise to dangerous leaks of information, with the “private more private” at the mercy of psychopaths on duty.

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Memories unlocked

Of course, what we saw in the two hours of viewing creeps into those borderline cases out of the ordinary, mandatory to trigger gender dynamics, and the viewer must therefore deal with an obvious suspension of disbelief and fully accept the rules of the game. . Only in this way will he be able to better enjoy an experience dedicated to tensive entertainment that has no great ambitions whatsoever, other than to amuse the relative target with a discreet mix of suspense and introspective excavation of the main characters.
Unlocked is the remake of a Japanese film from a few years earlier, namely that Stolen Identity (2018) directed by Hideo Nakata’s dad The Ring / Ringu and in turn an adaptation of Akira Shiga’s novel. And he does it again leaving the guidelines more or less intact, transporting the action to Korean soil; at times, however, some details seem to be missing in the management of some key figures, whose background could have been exposed in a more cohesive way.

Matter of look

Where first-time director Kim Tae-joon manages to keep the audience’s attention steadily and in the intuitive directorial solutions, with the smartphone webcam to play a decisive role in the showdown between the potential victim and the murderer: the former is spied on by the latter through the cell phone camera, giving life to original situations. In Unlocked the protagonist finds herself a slave to her own addiction, an addiction which on the other hand partially reflects the use we all make of electronic devices: in her own way, therefore, she tries to send a message about the excessive use of social networks and technology, with the sharing of more or less sensitive data which can become a double-edged sword. Thus, the hunt for the serial killer also becomes a warning on the vices and virtues of this now hyper-connected world, where everything can be endangered with a simple click.