In her debut feature, experimental film director Seayoon Jeong takes a deep dive into the mind of one woman suffering the debilitating effects of nyctophobia – fear of the dark. Deftly making creative use of animation and visual effects to enhance the fantastical and at times harrowing dreamscape of her central character’s mind, Jeong proves herself an original and innovative filmmaker adding an excitingly fresh perspective to the cinematic landscape.
Based loosely on her own experiences, Jeong adopts an experimental, non-linear framework in an attempt to communicate the irrational and illogical reality of being afflicted with these types of debilitating anxiety disorders. Opening with a series of unsettling animations, she immediately drops the viewer into the swirling vortex of fear and anxiety inside her protagonist’s mind. Deftly expressing the dichotomy between perception and fact fostered by irrational anxiety, she then abruptly cuts to the objectively peaceful reality of her actual surroundings.
Liz (Olivia Clari Nice) lies in a brightly lit bedroom, attempting to will herself to sleep. Clearly fearful of some unseen dark force, she talks herself down in a familiar ritual, coercing herself to sink into a tenuous unconsciousness. Meandering about the eerily desaturated dreamscape of her own mind, Liz encounters a number of unsettling images: bleeding flowers, abandoned carousels, labyrinthine hallways full of locked doors – the kinds of familiar yet illogical images that populate so many of our dreams, begging for deeper interpretation. She soon finds herself strolling along a beach peppered with bright blue sparkling gems. Modestly evoking the wild hallucinatory landscapes of films like The Fall, sequences such as these beg the viewer to wonder what a fertile mind like Jeong’s could achieve with even greater resources at her fingertips.
In much the same way as our own minds work, grasping subconsciously at the cultural touchstones ingrained in our individual experience, the film is rife with pointed cinematic references. From It to Wayne’s World to Sucker Punch, Jeong wears her influences on her sleeve. The first and most pervasive of these references is to Stephen King’s murderous clown Pennywise, with Liz stalked by not one, but several masked figures throughout her journey. At first subtle shadows lurking in the darkness, the threat they pose soon becomes more and more overt as they multiply, representations of the intensifying fears manifested from within herself.
The film kicks into high gear as Liz finds herself drawn further into the maze of a crumbling and labyrinthine industrial space. Considering her scant resources and experimental approach, Jeong is impressively targeted in her creative choices, making deft use of mannequins to up the creep factor, and utilizing a wall of analog television screens to great effect. Rather than simply relegate the device to the status of static set piece, she makes clever use of visual effects to coax the snow on the screens beyond their frames, infecting doorways, walls, and even – at times – Liz herself. The device is dynamic and evocative, indicative of Jeong’s confident grasp of the visual world at the centre of the film.
As she sinks deeper into her own subconscious, Liz takes on a series of alter egos: jazz singer, schoolgirl, disco diva, flashing in and out of self-awareness throughout. To be sure, Nice does some impressively heavy lifting here, effortlessly telegraphing her ever-changing internal states and convincingly delivering on a series of varied dance performances. Following along the natural ebbs and flows of peace and distress familiar to so many who suffer from debilitating anxiety, Jeong’s narrative (such as it is) eventually leads the viewer through her protagonist’s inevitably dramatic confrontation with the demons of her own making, seeing them vanquished just in time for her to drift off into a deep and relatively peaceful sleep.
Visualizing this moment as Liz sinking slowly into a vast sea, bathed in cool sunlight, the mood of the film slowly quiets along with her mind as she slips deeper into peaceful slumber. It is an arresting image (and the most beautiful moment contained in the film), but the tranquility it evokes is all too brief as morning soon arrives to rouse our heroine from her hard-earned idyll.
Nyctophobia premiered at the 2024 San Francisco Independent Film Festival.
© 2020-2025. UniversalCinema Mag.