Director Abner Pastoll and Ko Asung – star of Bong Joon Ho classics The Host and Snowpiercer – on the making of their fraught psychological thriller, which has its world premiere at FrightFest this week
The UK’s biggest genre film festival, FrightFest, returns to London this weekend for five days of thrillers, chillers and nail-biters. But whereas the past 26 editions have brought cult classics like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Gaspar Noé’s Climax and Zach Cregger’s Barbarian to the UK, this year’s edition opens with a more unusual multinational proposition.
Abner Pastoll’s Nervous arrives at FrightFest some seven years after the director’s acclaimed A Good Woman Is Hard to Find closed the festival in 2019. It’s a rare British-Korean horror production about a communication breakdown between partners – and features an iconic Bong Joon Ho muse among the cast. The film tells the story of a woman named Sarah (Sarah Bolger) who moves to the Korean countryside on the whim of her husband, Sungsoo (Sungsoo Yune). Arriving at her new home, she discovers a strange atmosphere and, most troublingly, an archaic gramophone that plays nothing but silence from an unmarked vinyl record. As signalled by the rotating overhead camerawork in the movie’s The Shining-like opening, the record seems to have a hypnotic, vortex-like pull to it. And after listening closely, Sarah finds herself increasingly drawn to her attractive but enigmatic new neighbour Eunbyeol (Ko Asung), while her ability to comprehend male voices begins to mysteriously deteriorate.
“I had read an article about a woman in China who basically woke up one day and couldn’t hear her boyfriend’s voice,” Pastoll tells me over video call ahead of the film’s premiere. “It turned out she’d developed some weird, rare condition where her brain had tuned out certain frequencies, making it difficult to understand men’s speech. I thought that in itself was an amazing concept for a genre film, or a horror film, because the very idea of not being able to hear the person that you love is in itself quite terrifying, and there are so many levels to explore in that.”
In Nervous, the literal breakdown of communication between Sarah and her partner, Sungsoo, directly mirrors the subtle fracturing of their romantic relationship. The theme is augmented further by Sarah’s limited comprehension of the Korean language that now surrounds her. This layer of cultural displacement stems directly from Pastoll’s experiences as an outsider, having been born in South Africa and raised in the UK, before settling in Korea after 20 years of back-and-forth between these countries. Korea’s significance to the story, though, emerged naturally through the film’s development, he says: “I was never looking at it from the outside and thinking about superimposing the country into the story.”
Instead, the project took shape after Pastoll was introduced to a key location by actor Sungsoo Yune. “His friends owned this house in Gwangju [in Korea] and there was nobody living there at the time,” says Pastoll. “I went to check it out and there was something so strange about it, because it’s neither a traditional Korean house nor a western-style house; it’s this thing of its own with a very odd energy.” With the Chinese newspaper story lodged somewhere in the back of his mind, he began to think about developing a movie to fit the location: “That’s when I really started to figure it all out.”
For Pastoll, mounting a production in and around Seoul was likely more straightforward than for most western filmmakers. Nervous’s executive producer, Kim Young-min, had been an unlikely investor on Pastoll’s France-set feature debut Road Games in 2015, while Jang Jun-young produced Pastoll’s two subsequent features after beginning her career on Bong Joon Ho’s breakout 2006 monster movie The Host. It was a key influence on Pastoll’s career, too.
“Growing up in London around the turn of the century, genre films from Korea – like Oldboy and Save the Green Planet! – were breaking out,” says the director. (The latter film, from 2003, was remade by Yorgos Lanthimos as Bugonia in 2025.) “Asian cinema was often this shocking experience, and people became almost addicted to finding the next big Asian film. Films like Attack the Gas Station were really interesting for me, and [got me] paying more attention to Korean cinema. That’s when I saw Memories of Murder, and I became a big fan of Bong Joon Ho.”
In 2006, Pastoll took a trip to the Cannes Film Festival to see Bong’s third feature, which was playing in the Directors’ Fortnight section. “Some time later, I met both Jun-young and Asung at the same festival – all because of The Host.”
Ko Asung doesn’t remember much of The Host’s premiere at Cannes. “I was 12 years old at the time,” she tells AnOther. “But I remember seeing the poster with my face on it. It was my first movie ever; it felt so unreal. I was like, ‘What’s going to happen to me now?’”
The actress, who played the rebellious teenager captured by The Host’s amphibious monster, would embark on a colourful acting career thereafter – leading Duet, an indie film about an aspiring Korean singer on a tour of England, in 2012, and reuniting with Bong Joon Ho and her The Host co-star Song Kang-ho for the sci-fi blockbuster Snowpiercer in 2013. She returned to Cannes in 2015 – with the psychological thriller Office – where a dinner with Pastoll, who had just finished Road Games, planted the seed for a horror collaboration that would bloom a decade later.
“I was interested in how Nervous follows the traditions of the horror genre, but has Korean features, and a kind of Korean supernatural aspect to it,” she says, describing the draw of Pastoll’s film. Moreover, the inherently Korean concept of han, she explains – a blend of grief, resentment and a sense of injustice tied to the country’s troubled history – makes the country a natural backdrop for horror storytelling.
In any case, Nervous seems like a fitting opener for FrightFest, which gave the UK premiere to one of Korea’s most influential horror films of all time, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan, in 2016. And just as Dublin-born lead Sarah Bolger proved quick to acclimatise to the kimchi jigae and samgye-tang dinners in Korea during Nervous’s production (“She was eating kimchi and rice for lunch every day by the end of it,” recalls Pastoll), perhaps a new filmmaking relationship between the UK and Korea can be fostered in the wake of this new horror project. “I’m now looking forward to making another film here,” says Pastoll. “I already have plans to do so.”
Nervous has its world premiere at FrightFest in London on 27 August.