Kicking off this year’s FrightFest in London for its 26th year was Abner Pastoll’s Nervous that takes a unique look at the voicelessness many women feel in relationships, as well as the wider world. However, its unique premise and dazzling sound design couldn’t prevent the opening film from falling on deaf ears.
Nervous follows Sarah (Sarah Bolger) who moves from the city to the Korean countryside with her partner Sungsoo (Sungsoo Yune) in a bid to save their relationship following his infidelity. They are immediately greeted by a strange old woman lurking in the home, whom they usher out of the property. Shortly after, the find an unmarked vinyl record that seems to play nothing but silence, with a strange note than Sungsoo refuses to translate. After listening to it, Sarah slowly begins to lose the ability to hear mean’s voices and no one around her seems to listen to her concerns, apart from her new neighbour Eunbyeol (Ko Asung).
Nervous twists and turns at the drop of a hat and can be interpreted in several ways, be that as an analogy for how woman are often ignored by society, how the patriarchy aims to silence women and ignore their issues, or how the medical system trivialises female health issues, to name but a few. Nervous is a film that does not spoon-feed the audience details, leaving you to your own devices to figure out what it means. Unfortunately, rather than feeling like a film that thrusts you into its universe and forces you to accept its rules, too many plot threads and underbaked characterisations mean the overall effect feels like an unfinished film with an abundance of ideas left jostling for prominence.
The iconography of the pitch black record player and the sinisterly simple record are incredibly effective, but Nervous never seems to settle on what sort of film it wants to be. Its psychological thriller elements never feel as gripping as they could be, while its emotional subplot concerning Sarah’s paranoia and how she has lost herself in her relationship never tugs at the heartstrings as effectively as it could. Where it utilises eerie, simplistic scares that could have been effortlessly brilliant, they’re not, drowned out by the jumbled narrative.
Bolger does a fantastic job of bringing Sarah to life, portraying her vulnerability and intense self-consciousness are starkly juxtaposed to her investigative nature and need for answers. Her duality as a person is one of the only things in the film that feels fully realised, and Bolger’s performance as a woman desperately trying to maintain her sanity in the face of an impossibly frustrating situation – both in her relationship and her new medical quandary – is gripping from start to finish.
Nervous has a fascinating central concept that centres around the simple yet effective and off-putting silent record, yet it undoes its hard work with baffling narrative choices that halt the carefully crafted tension of the first act. The sound design and cinematography are startlingly impressive and help to immerse the viewer in Sarah’s nightmarish situation, yet too many plot threads that meander into nothing leave the film feeling closer to am ear-splitting cacophony than a sweet symphony.
Nervous had its world premiere at FrightFest 2026 on Thursday, August 27.
