ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social, diegetic, stylistic, and cinematographic particularities of Cold Eyes in four parts. Starting with a historiography of surveillance films in South Korea. It analyses the socio-cultural contexts that propelled the film's popularity. The invisible visuality of surveillance operations is a power dynamic of knowledge, which acquires a heightened degree of manipulative force through the technologically augmented means of massive, undetectable, and pervasive deployment as attested to by recent state surveillance scandals around the globe. The chapter explores the film's narrative arc and character development to show how Cold Eyes contains the problematics of its topic and misdirects the spectators toward a false sense of disenchantment, subjecting them to perspectival implication not against, but by virtue of, conscious dissociation. It also explores the formal elements of the film, focusing on how the built-in gaze of the medium (the camera) enlists the viewers to practice surveillance, converting both the viewers and the medium into active agents.
