Nervous (Frightfest 2026)

One of the opening‑night main‑screen titles, Nervous set the tone for the sheer number of Korean projects at this year’s FrightFest. It’s the latest from Abner Pastoll, director of A Good Woman Is Hard to Find, and reunites him with Sarah Bolger. Here, Sarah (Sarah Bolger) and Sungsoo (Sungsoo Yune) relocate to a house in the Korean countryside just outside Seoul — a genuinely gorgeous area, peaceful and remote enough to feel like a fresh start without being too far from the city. Inside, however, they find a mysterious yellow‑coated woman lingering, and a huge gothic record player in the attic with a record, that seemingly plays silence, that changes the fate of this transcontinental couple.

Before the record player enters the story, Nervous adopts an oddly pitched tone, painting the house as an ominous space and leaning heavily on atmospheric red herrings. The unexplained woman upstairs is one such device — implied to matter, but never concretely addressed. It is initially suggested to be an atmospheric horror, but Nervous isn’t that kind of film. Rather, it’s a psychological piece, and once the record player appears, the film’s real intentions become clear, including the background thread of murdered husbands and missing women. The plot is deliberately vague. Nothing is fully answered; everything is suggested. What we do know is simple: the unmarked vinyl record is the cause of Sarah’s predicament. After listening to it, she begins losing the ability to hear her husband’s voice, and with that loss comes a fracture in her grip on reality. On that note, the sound design is genuinely excellent — the woozy, broken auditory experience that overtakes her is some of the best sound work I’ve heard in years, disorienting and crucial to the film’s psychological effect.

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Eunbyeol (Ko Asung) sits at the centre of the film’s ambiguities. She is both real and heavily implied to be imagined – an instigator who doesn’t really instigate. Her provocations come from genuine friendship and flirtation rather than pushing Sarah toward danger, and while Sarah’s mental health deteriorates, nothing beyond her hearing loss drives her there. Well, not entirely: Eunbyeol is supportive, while Sarah’s husband gaslights her for becoming “obsessed” again. That word is loaded. Sarah was an investigative journalist who relocated wholesale, giving up her career to move across the world for the man she loves. His frustration is tied to an extramarital history, but their dynamic speaks volumes about gender roles within the Korean family space. The film never hammers this point, but it’s present as one of the core building blocks.

Sarah’s dreams are home to the film’s most graphic moments. Doctors insist nothing is physically wrong and suggest her condition is purely psychosomatic, yet the damage persists. In her dreams, she violently attempts to clear her hearing through increasingly bloody acts of self‑mutilation – including ripping her ear clean off. These scenes are brutal, but they fit the film’s psychological logic: pain as clarity, violence as the sole means of control.

Moment‑to‑moment storytelling is strong, but the overarching structure doesn’t fully cohere. The film never explains who the woman in the house was or what her significance might be. These dangling ideas make Nervous more of an interesting experience than a fully realised thriller, but that’s common in psychological horror, a genre that rarely has an obligation to make perfect sense. The hinted‑at ideas make it feel less like a conventional thriller and more like a sound‑design showcase wrapped around an “Irish fish in Korean water” drama. Sarah’s alienation (cultural, emotional, auditory) is the film’s real core.

Nervous will frustrate viewers who want every idea to connect, but its psychological focus, excellent sound design and exploration of isolation give it a distinct identity. That identity is sharpened by the cultural mismatches of being a Korean‑speaking Irish woman in a place where locals both fawn over her (as “looking like a doll”) and Other her. It’s not an atmospheric horror, despite its opening misdirect, it’s a story about perception breaking down, hearing becoming unreliable, and about a woman losing her sense of reality in a place she barely understands. And on that level, it functions solidly within the canon of Pastoll, who – after A Good Woman Is Hard to Find – is revealing and fine tunning the core narrative concerns he’s carrying from one film to the next.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – NERVOUS