Watching Ko Jung-wook's whodunit The Culprit, it occurred to me: A movie can't be film noir if the actors are screaming all the time. Noir implies a sense of cool; it's an attitude as well as a genre. So having your two main actors constantly running their voices ragged as they feed each other's hysteria is going to disqualify you a thriller's highest label. Noisy noir simply isn't a thing. What's all the shouting about? Yeong-hoon (Song Sae-byeok) wants to find out who killed his wife! Jeong Da-yeon (Yoo Sun) wants to get her baby daddy (Oh Min-seok) out of jail. And Park Sang-Min (Jang Hyuk-jin) wants someone, anyone to remove the duct tape off his mouth and his wrists and his ankles in the recreated crime scene the widowed husband has made.
I'd say each has a perfectly legitimate reason to scream, especially the hostage, but these three probably could've discovered who the killer is with appropriate indoor voices. (Why none of the neighbors in this apartment building call the cops may be this movie's greatest mystery.) Now that I think about it, one of the few people who doesn't scream is the murder victim. A guilty conscience can really shut you up. But only if you're crime is adultery, not homocide. Cheating is so much worse than stabbing. Or so The Culprit implies.
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