‘Dawning’: An Uneven Yet Mostly Effective Examination of Mental Health and Horror [Panic Fest 2022 Review]
Dawning wants to be this generation’s A Tale of Two Sisters. In some ways, director Young Min Kim’s debut feature is a laudable effort. At times, it channels Kim Jee-woon in how deftly it balances poignant trauma and bonafide, supernatural scares. Contemporary moviegoing has become considerably more trauma-informed. Of course, that isn’t to say it wasn’t before, especially in genre filmmaking. But modern fare is often viscerally explicit in how it tracks the score trauma takes on both the body and mind. This less nuanced approach, in no way singular to Kim, ultimately hurts Dawning more than it helps. In its more restrained moments, however, it’s a deeply affecting and often unnerving horror exercise.
Kim Ellis stars as Haejin Park, a trauma therapist living in a nondescript high-rise in New York City. Still reeling from the cold open wherein her father dies by suicide, the minutiae of her personal and professional life are capital T trauma. She searches the web for “antidepressants and hallucinations,” listens to audiobooks on—you guessed it—trauma, and seems isolated from the entire world around her. She is plagued by violent, terrifying nightmares. Despite them, she’s keen to fly to Los Angeles at the behest of her sister, Soojin (Veronica Kim) after she endures a particularly bad breakup.
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Par for the course with indie horror offerings, Dawning is a stripped-down affair. There are never more than three players on-screen at once. Most often it’s simply Haejin and Soonjin themselves, alone on a sprawling family farm. It opens with a curious title card. It simply reads, “Dedicated to the hurting,” and the longer Dawning goes on, the more sense it makes. Unlike parallel offerings, Dawning too often runs the risk of becoming a PSA more than a horror movie. The characters speak poetically about pain and trauma, the deep roots of their hurt, and the perennial disconnect from life. Yet it sounds less like organic dialogue and more like passages ripped from the audiobook Haejin was listening to at the beginning. It neuters the scares, with the implicit too often being rendered explicit through sloppy dialogue and arbitrary regressions into loud conflict.
The mix of both Korean and English nonetheless helps to differentiate itself from its supernatural rivals, even if the frequent nightmares and sudden jolts—effective as they are— feel culled from any number of other movies. Midway through, Dawning takes a big swing, and it’s a narrative rug pull audiences will either accept or reject. It marks a sudden shift in tone, and the horror elements all but dissipate entirely. In that sense, it feels like two distinct movies shoved together, with the more horrific early act looking more like a reel tethered to the latter half to assist in marketability and palatability.
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That latter half, despite losing the horror angle, is considerably darker. While its dour tone isn’t strictly speaking scary, it is effective. Most of the credit goes to both Kim Ellis and Veronica Kim and their heartbreaking respective performances. It is difficult material, however, with some of the most troubling beats of something like Hereditary stretched to an interminable length. It won’t work for everyone, either on account of the sudden subversion or the material itself. It’s a bold reversal, though. Dawning deserves considerable credit for trying something different, even if that same thing has been more deftly handled elsewhere.
Dawning is poised to be one of Panic Fest’s most polarizing offerings. Early beats harken back to its Korean horror roots, with long-haired specters and sudden jolts. Questions of trauma, depression, and memory remain at the forefront, however, and Dawning all but abandons its horror shadings for considerable reflection on mental health and recovery. That tonal balance is tricky to achieve, and Dawning isn’t entirely successful. Emblematic of horror’s curative role, however, Dawning might not be a genre inferno. But the embers burn brightly enough to warrant a watch.
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Dawning
Summary
Dawning is uneven trauma-informed horror, but the sheer depth of its commitment to doing something different helps its supernatural scares stand out.
