HIDDEN FACE – Review

The subtitled Korean export HIDDEN FACE is marketed as a suspense tale, but it’s a just-shy-of-soft-core drama about a romantic triangle that takes a few bizarre turns among a very attractive cast. Song Seung-heon plays the new conductor of a prestigious symphony orchestra, who landed his plum gig largely because he married the rich-bitch daughter (Cho Yeo-jeong) of a strutting soap opera star (Park Ji-young, looking alarmingly like Eddie Izzard in drag mode) who fancies herself the star of every scenario, on or off-camera… and convinces others to bend to her will. She provides the elegant apartment in which the newlyweds reside, as well as being the orchestra’s main benefactor. Mega-clout all around, wielded shamelessly by a mega-Karen.

The wife’s bestie and fellow cellist (Park Ji-hyun) have a chat in which the former pouts that she’s not getting enough attention from her stony-faced hubby and decides to disappear, leaving an unlikely suicide note behind. That opens up two spots for the bestie – a chair in the orchestra, and a horizontal one in the marital bed. With that almost Hitchcockian setup, we initially wonder how she vanished – is she dead, or just testing how much people will miss the preening Princess? Then the plot veers sharply into DePalma territory once we learn where she went and how she got there. The steamy bits come from several trysts with surprisingly generous displays of nudity for an East Asian production. Those scenes are beautifully staged and scored, both artistically and erotically.

The reveals are rather over-the-top, but the female performances and gorgeous sets are so compelling that one may not care about the logic or logistics of it all; or the fact that the male lead is a virtually blank slate, readily manipulated by the latest woman to pull his chain (or other appendage). The script is adapted from a 2011 Spanish film, THE HIDDEN FACE, which I haven’t seen. But some descriptions indicate it’s even more lurid. Time to start looking for that guilty pleasure, too.

Regular readers know how many Korean action flicks I’ve praised in the past few years. This tossed salad of psychological issues and titillation makes me think I should expand my genre repertoire.

HIDDEN FACE, in Korean with English subtitles, debuts on digital formats from Well Go USA as of Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025.

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars