Seo Yea-Ji Can’t Trust Memories Or Visions In Tense Thriller ‘Recalled’

Without memories it’s hard to know who to trust. Deciding which people to avoid is based at least partly on past experience. That’s why Soo Jin, played by Seo Yea-ji, is vulnerable when she wakes up in a hospital bed after an accident. Soo Jin, the protagonist in the tense psychological thriller Recalled, can’t remember anything due to a brain injury. As a result she can’t really trust anyone and soon discovers she might not be able to trust her own senses.  

After physically recovering from the accident, she is discharged from the hospital under the loving care of the devoted Ji-hoon, played compellingly by actor Kim Kang-woo. He does everything he can to help Soo Jin and helps jolt her memory by sharing facts about their past. However, there’s something suspicious about their relationship. He seems to be particular about what she should remember and what he would prefer she forgot. He also seems to be in a hurry for them to emigrate to Canada. 

Complicating her recovery and their plans to move are the visions Soo Jin starts to have shortly after she leaves the hospital. Her visions seem to involve strangers and she feels driven to intervene. Are these visions delusions or warnings of actual events? Are they a paranormal side effect of her brain injury or are they prompted by something that might be dangerous to remember? 

Not having memories might endanger Soo Jin, but it could be even more dangerous if she remembered what actually happened before her accident. Seo Yea-ji does a convincing job of portraying the fragile state of a woman unsure where to turn. The plot twists in Recalled are so well paced that viewers barely have a chance to accept Soo Jin’s evolving understanding of reality before she and the film’s viewers must once more reevaluate what’s real. Soo Jin’s shifts between memories and visions, dreams and nightmares leave her—and the audience—unsure as to what’s real and what’s not. She may need to know to survive.

Many of the film’s edge-of-the-seat action scenes take place on a construction site in a building that once promised to be a dream project but is now an empty shell, much like Soo Jin’s state of mind when the film starts.

Kim Kang-woo, who cleverly conveys his character’s emotional connection to Soo Jin without revealing their past, was last seen in the drama Woman of 9.9 Billion and the film New Year Blues. Seo Yea-ji starred in the successful drama It’s Okay To Be Not Okay and the film By Quantum Physics: A Nightlife Venture. 

Recalled was written and directed by Seo You-min, the screenwriter  responsible for the films April Snow in 2005 and Happiness in 2007. Recalled premiered in South Korea on April 21 and according to the Korean review aggregator Naver Movie database netted an approval rating of 9.27.