Suicide is a difficult topic to broach in any piece of art, despite being a tragedy that is sadly all but universal. The prevalence of this tragic blight is felt particularly keenly in South Korea, with suicide rates almost doubling in the last five years, and alarming levels across all age groups. It’s perhaps precisely because of this dark background, that Lim Jung-eun’s feature debut instead uses this as a springboard to peer sweetly into facets of love, connection and fears of failure and an uncertain future.

The film follows, Jihoon (Lee Seung-hun), a depressed out of work actor, whose successful newscaster girlfriend leaves him to marry another man. This spurs him to pick up a night-job, walking around an area of Seoul, looking for potentially suicidal people, and talking them down. He soon meets Eun-yeung (Park Seo-eun), a woman at the end of her tether after a failed relationship with a work colleague turned violent. Together, the pair begin meeting and strolling around the midnight city, talking about everything and anything, and letting the poison and the joy in their souls ebb out into the fresh air.

While on the face of it, the premise sounds rather like a homage to Richard Linklater‘s masterpiece Before Sunrise, but while there is clearly a nod here and there, there’s a lot more going on in Our Midnight. The resonant themes of failure, loneliness and the crushing despair of letting down not only yourself, but others around you, hovers in sight all round. For a film that ostensibly tracks the meeting of two minds and potentially two hearts, it’s also a staggering warning about the great yawning wells of sadness that bubble just below the surface of many people. It also never shies away from observing how few knocks it can take to drive people to desperation, and how often simple truths can spill out unintentionally. This is particularly clear with Jihoon, whose acting seems at times to simply be a defence against allowing the real him to show through.

The films is beautifully composed, in stark black and white imagery, with a square 4:3 ratio that tricks the reality of the film into a hazy old-movie style that only becomes explained later in the story. But it’s a film that will stay with you long after watching it, as even the ending hints at a deeper ambiguity as the final act, and several distinct visual and directorial choices, can be read in a variety of ways. It’s a brave effort to contend with vast, wide and difficult human topics which often have no answers. But as the film shows, sometimes asking the question itself can be enough.

Screening as part of Glasgow Film Festival 2021