Director Son Hyeon-woo aims for bold, pulpy suspense in the Korean thriller No Parking, but it seems the results fall somewhat short of expectations. Enjoyable to an extent, this new feature feels both derivative and under-developed.

Divorcee Yeon-hee (Ryu Hyun-kyung) has returned to South Korea after some years abroad. Challenged by her new job and suffering from a colleague’s sexual harassment, she faces an ongoing frustration when a neighbour’s car constantly blocks her parking space. When she challenges that neighbour’s husband, the brooding Ho-joon (Kim Roi-ha), it sparks off a growing nightmare of intimidation, stalking, and violence.

Violence against women dominates No Parking. It is not simply Ho-joon, who is presented from the outset as an unhinged and psychopathic murderer. Even within the comparative calm of Yeon-hee’s marketing workplace she is under constant and obvious sexual pressure from her oily manager – not to mention a male-dominated hierarchy that punishes her for his inappropriate behaviour. The situation may resonate with any viewers that have struggled with a patriarchal society, but it also feels aggressively tedious: there is no insight or depth here, and while it is a social issue worth addressing there are better and more involving methods than this.

It also suffers from issues with uneven tension. Within minutes of his arrival in the film Ho-Joon is revealed as an unrepentant multiple murderer. By setting expectations of his behaviour so extreme and so soon, the film is left with nowhere dramatically to go: we don’t see his stalking of Yeon-hee with growing concern, since we know precisely how far his behaviour will go from the outset. When the tension fails to rise as a result, No Parking turns out to be as much a passive waiting game as it is a suspense thriller.

Individual set pieces work better than the film as a whole, although nothing presented here feels particularly original or inventive. There is a touch of Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake here, a little of Unhinged (2020) there, along with an entire cottage industry of ‘woman in peril’ features: you can name further examples yourself, since there are honestly so many of them. No Parking seems content with copying other films rather than finding a fresh take of its own. There is little that even cements it as a particularly Korean work; not even high-density street parking issues feel that unique to the country.

Cha Sun-woo is appealing as Yeon-hee’s faintly ridiculous and goofy younger brother. Ryu Hyun-kyung does reasonably effective work as Yeon-hee herself, but this is not the kind of film that particularly rewards acting talent. Kim Roi-ha scowls and broods with the best of the big screen psychopaths, but it is all formula with no distinct edge afforded to his performance.

No Parking is a watchable diversion, but fails to find its own course or identity. Audiences have seen it all before – many, many times – and while yet another genre work of this kind doesn’t hurt anybody, it fails to sustain too much interest either.