Don't call Shin Min-a a rom-com queen

In "The Eyes," K-drama mainstay goes blind, and proves — yet again — there's far more to her than a lovable sweetheart

Shin Min-a (AM Entertainment)

There is hardly anything about "The Eyes," the upcoming Korean remake of Spain's 2011 chiller "Julia's Eyes," that will catch you off guard.

The twists can be seen from a mile off, while the last act serves up no shortage of histrionics and knock-down, drag-out brawls. There's so much you can see coming — which is ironic, given that this is a movie about a woman who cannot see much of anything.

What blindsides you is how much the lead, Shin Min-a, has to offer. Pulling double duty as twin sisters — Seo-jin, a photographer losing her sight to a hereditary disease, and Seo-in, the ceramicist sibling found dead in her basement studio — she comes close to keeping you on edge for all 105 minutes, more or less single-handedly.

And a lot of that comes down to the eyeballs.

Shin Min-a stars in "The Eyes" (By4m Studio)

Shin's most arresting work in "The Eyes" is quite literally all in the eyes.

As Seo-jin's eyesight fails, her pupils drift and twitch and refuse to settle, the two of them pointed spasmodically at slightly different corners of the room. More than just a caricature of blindness, that flicker is the whole film in a nutshell — unease you can't look away from.

"Both eyes moving on their own — that just takes practice," Shin says at a cafe in central Seoul on Tuesday. "The eye's a muscle like any other. You work it, it does what you want."

She started rehearsing the moment she got the script, she recalls, treating her own eyeballs like a gym routine. Friends who caught an early screening told her it was the scariest thing in the movie. Others refused to believe it was not CGI until she assured them it was real.

"Do it long enough and your eyes start to ache," she explained. "My head, too."

She laughs about it now, but the effort was real. That kind of grind has been the whole story with Shin, and that is worth keeping in mind for anyone who wrote her off as merely the gorgeous lead of breezy rom-coms.

Shin broke through as the spunky fox-spirit of "My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho" in 2010, and rode a string of charmers after that — from "Oh My Venus" to, most recently, "Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha." But run down the list and the rom-coms are fewer than you think; the heavier, riskier roles show up mainly on the big screen, from introspective indie "Gyeongju" to brooding mystery "Diva."

So it tracks that she sells this one. Acting in a tense thriller punishes the body in ways that may not show up on screen, and playing blind only raised the stakes — long stretches with her eyes bandaged, working without being able to see a thing. She spent so many scenes braced and rigid with fear that her neck seized up midshoot.

"There's a scene where I'm running, and afterward I couldn't even turn my head," she says. Going without her sight, she found, heightened everything else. "When you can't see, the fear is enormous — but your other senses get weirdly sharp. You start really listening, picking up on the air in the room."

Shin Min-a stars in "The Eyes" (By4m Studio)

Shin frames her character less as a woman simply fleeing in terror, though there's plenty of that, than as someone in the grip of something closer to obsession. "She's sure her sister was murdered, and the guilt drives her. She has to find who did it. That's the whole engine."

By her own read, the film is an allegory about obsession at its core — and Shin came at it with a streak that runs in her blood. With no small amusement, she admits to being "addicted" to hard work, or the kind who picks apart her own footage long after a shoot wraps.

"I obsess over the cuts, whether I could've squeezed a little more out of it," she says. "But they always tell me the first take was the best one."

Shin Min-a stars in "The Eyes" (By4m Studio)

You sense that streak is part of why the actor is still going strong, over two decades in. There's something to be said for someone who never quite lets herself off the hook: At 42, Shin has a Disney+ fantasy series, "The Remarried Empress," in postproduction, plus a romance she is currently shooting opposite Lee Jin-wook.

Plenty of roles have come and gone, and Shin is quick to say they all mean something to her — even the old rom-coms that still trail her name. The fear of being typecast doesn't bother her one bit, she says.

"So many people loved those parts, and they still remember me through them. I couldn't ask for more than that." She'd rather just keep trying things, chasing whatever feels new at the moment.

Then there's the one thing everyone in the room wanted to know. Her husband, fellow actor Kim Woo-bin — the two tied the knot in December after a decade together — turned up at a screening of the film. His verdict?

"He stayed for the whole thing and told me it was fun," Shin says, with a resigned smile. "That's going in the headlines, isn't it? That's the only thing you're going to wri…