In online distribution, you can come across the South Korean thriller 'Stolen Identity'. About why this film came out just in time – in our review.

At the center of the plot of the film 'Stolen Identity' is Na-mi (Chun Woo-hee) – a young, happy girl living in a big metropolis. Like most of her peers, she leads an active life – works a lot at a large company, helps her father in the family cafe in the evenings, has fun with friends, likes photos on social networks, orders food, carries on correspondence, constantly takes pictures and checks the battery charge of her smartphone, which she never parts with for a minute.

One day, after a wild party, she accidentally loses her gadget on a bus, in which, to her misfortune, a stalker-maniac (Im Si-wan from) was riding. He finds the phone and begins to stalk Na-mi, gradually learning everything about her: what she eats, what she drinks, where she works and where she goes in the evenings. At the same time, several bodies of brutally murdered girls are found outside the city, and the police begin searching for the killer.

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'Stolen Identity' – the debut work of Korean director Kim Tae-joon – hits the nerve of today's digital reality. Well, who hasn't broken into a sweat at the thought that a phone, which contains a whole piece of life, along with passwords from banking apps and various messengers, might suddenly get lost? And even worse, if the gadget is secretly hacked by some hacker who will spy on you through the camera, or write some nasty thing to a loved one on your behalf (at the very least).

It is precisely in this situation that the main character of the film 'Stolen Identity' will find herself, who had never before thought that the created digital double in the phone could one day forever ruin its owner's life, or even physically destroy it.

The director lays this idea already in the first act, which, it must be said, turned out to be the best in the film. Following all the rules of a screen-life thriller, 'Stolen Identity', from the very first minutes, when the alarm goes off on the smartphone, immerses the viewer in the very center of the events of Na-mi's ordinary day. Routine things here are the main characters and are presented in a machine-gun montage through the smartphone screen, sometimes frame-by-frame copying (not caricatured) the technique of the famous Briton Edgar Wright and his 'Cornetto' trilogy.

The fragility of private life, the indifference of those around, just like Na-mi, who don't look around, buried in smartphone screens, the formula of loneliness alone with one's copy in the phone and the digital footprint on the Net, as a metaphor for the breadcrumbs from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, along which a mysterious and terrible stranger begins his pursuit. Side themes are also nearby: loneliness in a big city, dependence on technology, general paranoia, and frightening stalking.

All this Kim Tae-joon manages to pack into the first twenty minutes of the film, frankly delighting with his light touch, attention to detail, and immersion in the genre, where the antagonist so cleverly obtains Na-mi's phone password that it simply takes your breath away.

But, already by the second and, especially, the third act, the director's excitement evaporates somewhere, and the genre of the film flows into melodrama, and so bluntly that it seems as if the director changed halfway through the film. It becomes frankly boring, and the denouement is guessed already fifteen minutes before the final credits. But on the former enthusiasm and fervor, the film can be watched to the end, almost without being distracted from the screen. In a good way, everything that happens could have been compactly placed in one episode, and the main message, due to its poster-like nature, would not have been lost anywhere

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Nevertheless, 'Stolen Identity' is a lively, audience-friendly, and, perhaps, sincere film, for which Kim Tae-joon can only be praised. He does not engage in moralizing, but firmly warns: the dominance of AI is undeniable, and it is better not to entrust your digital double with all your innermost secrets, and sometimes you need to leave it in another room.