The Hypnotized (aka Faceless Beauty) is a 2004 film from South Korea directed by Kim In-shik.
The story opens with Ji-soo (Kim Hye-soo—Hyena, Signal), a would-be writer who is mentally ill, afflicted with borderline personality disorder. A Bath Suicide attempt gets Ji-soo committed to a mental hospital. Her psychiatrist, Seok-won, himself has personal demons that lead to him quitting the hospital. Right before Seok-won leaves the hospital for private practice, Ji-soo checks herself out, against Seok-won's advice.
Cut forward a year, and Ji-soo really isn't very much better. Her mental state is not helped by the fact that her husband Min-seok is cheating on her. Ji-soo has a meltdown in a grocery store where Seok-won just happens to be shopping. He helps her calm down, and pretty soon, he is again treating her. While acting as her therapist, Seok-won becomes obsessed with her, and eventually starts taking sexual advantage of her while she is hypnotized.
Tropes:
- Bath Suicide: An unsuccessful one, although it seems to have been a near thing as the tub was full of blood when Min-seok found his wife.
- Call-Back: Early in the film Seok-won is shown with a phone that keeps getting calls from a man begging forgiveness and pleading for a meeting. It turns out the man calling is Seok-won's wife's lover, who doesn't know she died, and Seok-won is taking petty pleasure in not telling him. Eventually he does, giving the boyfriend the phone. Towards the end of the film this exact same sequence of events happens, except this time Min-seok is the one with the phone, and Seok-won is the one calling, because he doesn't know that Ji-soo has died.
- Car Cushion: How Seok-won meets his richly deserved end. He flees in terror from the ghost of Ji-soo and falls off his balcony, falling many stories before dying when he crashes into the roof of a car.
- Chekhov's Gun: Seok-won has a set of novelty stairs to his office, which play musical tones when someone steps on them. At the climax of the film, the steps sound their musical tones with no one on them, revealing that the ghost of Ji-soo appeared to drive Seok-won off the balcony to his death.
- Chekhov's Skill: In the early going, as Seok-won is quitting the hospital, his supervisor makes a comment about him giving hypnosis lessons to the staff. He later uses his hypnosis skills to have sex with Ji-soo while she is in a trance and imagining him to be her old boyfriend.
- Contrived Coincidence: Seoul, a giant metropolis, and Seok-won meets his old patient Ji-soo at random, at a grocery store, a year after she left his care.
- Downer Ending: Ji-soo dies when she has a car accident while driving to meet Seok-won, after he used his hypnotic trigger phrase to summon her. Seok-won at least gets his just deserts, falling off a balcony to his death, but Min-seok is left alone and broken-hearted.
- Flashback:
- A flashback sequence shows what happened with Seok-won and his wife. She was an anesthesiologist in the same hospital where he worked. She made some kind of error with the anesthesia and left the patient in an irreversible coma, which is why both she and Seok-won quit their jobs. Soon after she descended into drug addiction and died of overdose.
- Another flashback sequence shows Ji-soo's romance with the love of her life, Jang-seo. Scenes of passionate lovemaking and a scene of her cheering him on at a skiing event end with him leaving her, for no particular reason.
- Hallucinations: Ji-soo has them as a symptom of her schizophrenia. The opening scene has her trying to write a book, while the objects on her desk start floating up into mid-air. Then they all crash down, the glass shattering, and she hallucinates herself being covered in blood.
- Ji-soo also has multiple hallucinations of a woman who turns out to be Seok-won's late wife.
- Hypno Fool: A dark example. Ji-soo rejects Seok-won and in fact reconciles with her husband, but Seok-won has implanted a hypnotic command in her mind. Whenever he calls her at 8 pm and utters a specific trigger phrase, she goes into a trance, and comes by his office at 9 pm for sex. Once she does this when the call comes while she and her husband are out shopping, to his confusion, and another time this happens just as Ji-soo and Min-seok are at the airport about to leave on a vacation.
- Ms. Fanservice: Beautiful Ji-soo is shown naked quite a bit.
- No-Tell Motel: When Seok-won hopes to have sex with Ji-soo in a non-hypnotized state, he takes her to a motel that advertises "rooms by the hour."Ji-soo: Not very subtle!
- The One That Got Away: Ji-soo, stuck in a bad marriage, is haunted by memories of her old lover, Han Jang-seo. Jang-seo, a professional skier, had a passionate romance with Ji-soo, until he precipitously dumped her for no clear reason. She can't forget him, and it's during her hypnotic memory of having sex with Jang-seo that Seok-won rapes her.
- Protagonist Journey to Villain: Seok-won starts out as a decent, honorable man and respected psychiatrist, and something close to The Woobie as he is lonely and grieving after the death of his wife. But his obsession with and lust for the gorgeous Ji-soo eventually leads to him using his professional skills to engage in hypnotic mind control and rape.
- The Stinger: A somewhat random scene at the end of the credits shows Min-seok, his face full of grief after his wife's death, walking down a hallway.
- Time-Passes Montage: Seok-won's private practice is shown by a montage of various patients. One is a woman who hates "the whole human race," a man suffering severe memory issues, and a creepy young guy who took illicit photos of a girl he likes.
- Time Skip: One year goes by between the opening sequence, where Ji-soo is hospitalized and Seok-won meets her in the hospital, and when he sees her again in a grocery store. She isn't improved.
- Two-Person Pool Party: In a flashback Ji-soo and her old lover Jang-seo are shown having sex in a hot tub at a ski resort.
- The Unreveal: A subplot involves another patient at the mental hospital, a young woman named Su-yeon, who claims that her stepfather has been sexually abusing her—and that she likes it. Her parents when they are called in dismiss this, and also her "stepfather" says that he's her actual father. The truth is not revealed, but when he comes back to the hospital a year later Seok-won is disturbed to find Su-yeon still a patient there.
- Vengeful Ghost: The most likely interpretation of the ambiguous ending. Seok-won is in his office when, at the time usually appointed for their hypno-sex, the mangled corpse of Ji-soo (she was killed in a car accident) shows up. He flees in terror, and winds up falling off the balcony to his death. It seems as if it might be a hallucination—but then the musical chimes of the novelty staircase to Seok-won's office sound out, even though no one is there. Then Ji-soo, no longer mangled, gradually appears in the hallway before taking the elevator back down. The implication is that the ghost of Ji-soo showed up to cause the death of Seok-won, who not only raped her, but is himself responsible for her death (she was under his hypnotic spell when she was killed).
- Your Worst Memory: Seok-won actually tells Ji-soo while she's under hypnosis that she has to face her "saddest memory." She then remembers her old lover Jang-seo, who dumped her...and it's when she's in the throes of passion as she remembers their lovemaking that Seok-won rapes her.
