Wide Awake (AKA: Return) (DVD) (Taiwan Version) DVD Region 3

The film begins in 1982, with a ten year old boy wheeled into the operating room of a busy hospital for a shockingly graphic and deeply unsettling round of open heart surgery. The boy is put under the cut open, his ribs sawn open, his heart exposed, exposed veins cauterized shut. But though the child appears to all in the room to be unconscious he is actually fully aware - the anesthetic preventing him from moving a muscle or making a sound and yet his mind still fully conscious, his nerves still feeding every excruciating pain impulse into his brain. He hears it all, he feels it all, and the experience leaves him deeply scarred. Yes, like recent Hollywood effort Awake, Return is built on the deeply unsettling concept of anesthesia awareness - an actual phenomenon in which a small percentage of people remain fully aware and conscious when under the influence of anesthesia.

We move ahead twenty five years and are introduced to the film's core group of characters. There is Doctor Ryu, the successful surgeon plagued by recurring nightmares about shooting himself. There is Lee Myeong-seok, the vengeful husband of a woman who died under Ryu's knife. There is Ryu's scarred and gone to seed childhood friend Gang Uk-hwan, returned to Seoul unannounced after a lengthy period away. And there is hospital psychologist Oh Chi-hun. As the drama between these characters plays out, director Lee intercuts a series of flashbacks playing out the life of the young boy from the opening sequence. Suffering post traumatic stress disorder from his surgical nightmare, the child becomes an unhinged killer, a young girl becoming his first victim before he is put away into a mental institution for years of treatment. Lee lets us know that the boy is now out and supposedly cured but, in actuality, he is now preying upon everyone remotely connected to his childhood ordeal, killing everyone in a quest for revenge. Clearly the child has adopted a new identity and become one of our four lead characters - the question is which?

Director Lee is blessed here with not one but two very clever foundation stones to build a tight thriller upon. First there is the concept of anesthesia awareness itself, a concept immediately horrifying to anyone who has ever been under the knife themselves or who even knows someone who has. The idea that you could remain aware of what is being done to you during surgery is truly shocking. Second there is his clever idea to play killer-in-the-midst with the audience. We know everything there is to know about the killer, we know he is one of four men, what we don't know is which it is. It's a smart concept that easily and neatly adds a claustrophobic edge to the proceedings.

Beyond the core concepts, the film's great strength is Lee's technical skill. The man shoots astounding film and when he opts to make his audience squirm with a bit of blood he does so with the best of them. He's got an excellent sense of rhythm and pacing and certainly knows how to edit for maximum effect. Unfortunately he's also saddled with a fairly bland leading man and lacks the mastery of character that he clearly has with his camera. Whether it be that the writing's not quite there or that he simply hasn't yet learned to draw the best out of his actors, Lee's characters tend to play a little bit flat, never quite engaging the audience fully enough for the scenario to play with full impact. The end result is a film that shows buckets of promise, that teases with what it could be, but never quite gets there.

The new Korean DVD is typically strong. The English subtitles are clear and clean, the transfer very crisp and anamorphic. As is the standard for Korean releases the second disc of bonus features contains Korean language options only.

by Todd Brown - Twitchfilm.net