2017

   The year 2017 was a highly dramatic one for the film industry, and for Korea as a whole. Most notably, the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye led to her removal from office on March 10. Two months later, Moon Jae-in was elected the new President. Park had a notoriously turbulent relationship with the local film industry, compiling a secret blacklist of filmmakers and artists to be denied funding from the government, and directing an attack on the leadership of the Busan International Film Festival. The election of Moon, who enjoys a strong relationship with the film industry, signaled the start of a new era in which the government is expected to provide much more support to local filmmakers.

Many of the year's biggest hits also reflected this new mood. Following a winter in which massive street demonstrations led to the ushering in of a new political era, the summer release A Taxi Driver revisited the city of Gwangju in 1980, in which demonstrations of a similar size were brutally put down by military forces. Thanks in part to the great acting of Song Kang-ho, the film sold over 12 million tickets. Six months later, another film provided an in-depth look at late 20th-century political history. 1987: When the Day Comes covers the weeks leading up to massive demonstrations which forced the government's hand and led to the adoption of a new Constitution.

The biggest hit of all, however, was the first installment in what looks to be a new local franchise. Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds is based on a popular local webtoon, and depicts the various tests and trials that await humans when they reach the afterlife. Released at the end of the year, it would ultimately become the second-highest grossing Korean film of all time, despite less than stellar reviews.

Meanwhile on the festival circuit, it was Hong Sangsoo whose works received the most exposure. With no less than three new features, he saw On the Beach at Night Alone pick up a Best Actress award for Kim Min-hee at the Berlin International Film Festival, then just a few months later, both The Day After and Claire's Camera premiered in different sections at the Cannes Film Festival. Cannes also hosted the premiere of the Netflix-financed Okja by Bong Joon Ho, and two more genre films in the Midnight section: The Villainess starring Kim Ok-bin and The Merciless with Sul Kyung-gu and Im Si-wan. Among independent films, sophomore director Kim Dae-hwan's The First Lap, which was financed by the Jeonju International Film Festival, screened at the Locarno Film Festival and won a Best New Director award.  

     Reviewed below:     Fabricated City (Feb 9)  --  New Trial (Feb 15)  --  Bluebeard (Mar 1)  --  On the Beach at Night Alone (Mar 23)  --  The Prison (Mar 23)  --  The Villainess (Jun 8)  --  Okja (Jun 29)  --  The Battleship Island (Jul 26)  --  Midnight Runners (Aug 9)  --  The Mimic (Aug 17)  --  The Running Acress (Sep 14)  --  The Outlaws (Oct 3)  --  Heart Blackened (Nov 2)  --  Room No. 7 (Nov 15)  --  The Chase (Nov 29)  --  Forgotten (Nov 29)  --  The First Lap (Dec 7)  --  Steel Rain (Dec 14)  --  Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds (Dec 20)  --  1987: When the Day Comes (Dec 27).

    Fabricated City

There's a sense of mischief in the air from the very opening scenes of Park Kwang-hyun's Fabricated City. Despite its dark visual tone and the mood of foreboding that hangs over just about every scene, there's also a playfulness at work just below the surface. But you wouldn't necessarily pick that up just from reading the synopsis.

Our protagonist Kwon Yoo (TV star Ji Chang-wook, in his film debut) is a heroic online gamer, displaying resourcefulness, leadership abilities, and a willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of his fellow players. In real life, however, he is an unemployed loser who was kicked off of the national taekwondo team for fighting with a teammate. Living with his mother, his life seems to be going nowhere, until it unexpectedly gets much worse. After receiving a phone call and following through on what seems like an ordinary request, he suddenly finds himself accused of rape and murder, with forensic evidence that seems irrefutable. Kwon Yoo is baffled, both at how he ended up being framed this way, and why anyone would bother to target an ordinary guy like him.

His confusion will only grow deeper as he finds himself painted as a monster in the press, then swiftly sentenced and thrown in jail with a life sentence and no parole. But the plot of Fabricated City is only just getting warmed up. With each breathless escape, plot twist and betrayal more outlandish than the last, Kwon Yoo finds himself on an adventure far more dramatic than the games he loves to play.

It should probably be emphasized from the start that in order to enjoy Fabricated City, you have to watch it in the right frame of mind. (This film has a lot of haters.) Its hyper-kinetic energy and cyber-punk attitude are probably more naturally suited to the young, but most of all, it needs to be watched with an appreciation for the tongue-in-cheek rebelliousness that lies at its heart. Like many recent Korean films, it is a story about power and social injustice, but instead of the usual heavy, despairing tone and urgent moralizing we've come to expect, Fabricated City simply lifts a big middle finger to the 1%.

Director Park Kwang-hyun has been away a long time since releasing his hugely popular debut film Welcome to Dongmakgol, which was scripted by Jang Jin and which sold over 8 million tickets. Over the next decade Park's intended follow-up, the big-budget SF action project Kwon Bob, looked ready to enter production on several occasions before falling through each time for various reasons. Fabricated City is perhaps an unexpected comeback for the director, with a very different tone than we've seen in his previous work. It has its weaknesses, including an at-times imprecise control over the film's tone. But Park retains his gift for creating interesting and funny characters, such as the genius hacker Yeo-wool who has some unusual communication issues (played by Shim Eun-kyoung, who voiced the robot in Sori: Voice from the Heart) and the central villain played with knowing irony by Oh Jeong-se (How to Use Guys With Secret Tips). It's these sort of colorful and unpredictable characters that ultimately prove to be Fabricated City's biggest strength.      (Darcy Paquet)

    New Trial

In recent years there have been a number of successful Korean films based on real-life court cases, such as Chung Ji-young's Unbowed, in which a professor threatens violence against a judge he believes is biased; and FEFF Audience Award winner Silenced, about victims of sexual abuse at a school for the deaf. New Trial too is based on a real life court case that has received considerable attention in the Korean press, particularly after being highlighted in a popular investigative TV program. But what makes this a particularly unusual situation is that as the film was being developed, written and shot, the trial was still ongoing.

The "Yakchon Intersection murder case" took place in August 2000 in the southwestern city of Iksan. A 15-year-old high school student working as a delivery boy came across a taxi driver who had suffered repeated stab wounds. After testifying to the police, the boy was arrested as a suspect, and ultimately confessed to the crime. He then served 10 years in prison before being released in 2010. However the story did not end there, with the government demanding that the boy's family pay the equivalent of $90,000 in indemnities. Desperately poor, and outraged at the way he had been treated, the defendant then filed for a retrial, asserting that he was innocent and his original confession had been forcibly extracted by the police with threats and violence.

New Trial is not meant to be a documentary retelling of what actually happened. It's a character-based drama that alters some of the specifics, and sometimes tips over into melodrama, but stays true to the core issues of the case. The main character in the film is not the defendant - named Hyun-woo and played by the popular actor Kang Ha-neul (Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet) -- but the lawyer who represents him. As the film opens, Joon-young (film/TV star Jung Woo) has hit rock bottom, losing a major class-action lawsuit. With his family life in crisis and his public reputation shattered, he begs a friend to help him find work. But it's clear that Joon-young has an attitude problem. It's with great reluctance that he agrees to take on some pro bono work, through which he meets Hyun-woo's mother and begins to learn about their situation.

Actually this is not the first time that director Kim Tae-yun has adapted a controversial real-life case into a commercial film. Another Family (2013) is a thinly-veiled reference to a notorious Samsung Electronics semiconductor plant where workers contracted a wide range of life-threatening illnesses including leukemia. It is the story of the father of one of the victims, who in the course of working through his grief and demanding that the company accept responsibility, gradually transforms into an activist. It was a daring film to make, given Samsung's outsized influence in South Korean society, but he managed to strike an effective balance between social criticism and entertainment.

New Trial too is, at its heart, the story of one man's inner transformation. And as with his previous film, Kim tries to accomplish two things at once. He presents a dramatic story that pulls the viewer in and makes us care about the fate of its characters, but he also embeds the work with a streak of idealism (although it is not Ken Loach by any means). In the end, I felt that Another Family was a bit more successful in walking this tightrope.

Because this screenplay was written before the retrial even opened, New Trial lacks the sort of grand courtroom finale that many viewers might be expecting. To be honest, the ending feels abrupt and a bit unsatisfying, particularly for those who weren't familiar with this case before watching it. But Korean audiences didn't seem to mind, with decent word of mouth pushing New Trial proved to an unexpectedly strong 2.4 million admissions. In a weak winter season, it was a comparative standout.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Bluebeard

Seung-hoon (Jo Jin-woong, The Handmaiden) is a physician working in an up-and-coming clinic open in a newly developed Gyeonggi Province city. Quiet, bookish and somewhat neurotic, he turns out to be a recent divorcée, renting a small flat above the neighborhood butcher shop run by the openly creepy Sang-geun (Kim Dae-myung, Pandora). One day, Seung-hoon runs a colonoscopy operation by himself on the butcher shop's half-senile grandpa (Shin Goo, The Foul King), and overhears the latter unconsciously mumbling something about chopping up and discarding a human body. It then turns out that as the ice begins to melt around the Han River, a headless torso of a woman is found floating near the city. Seung-hoon becomes increasingly nervous, and begins to suspect that his erstwhile patient grandpa and Sang-geun may be a pair of Bluebeards who murdered their respective spouses and dispatched their bodies like racks of beef. He finally panics when he locates what he believes to be the severed head of the butcher's missing Filipino wife, first in the butcher shop and then in the refrigerator in his own flat (with no memory of how it got in there). The only person who seems to believe his cockamamie story is Jo Kyung-hwan (Song Young-chang, Veteran), a retired cop looking into a series of unsolved murder cases in the area.

Bluebeard, the Korean title of which is "Ice Melting," a more apt metaphor for the process by which the film's weird mystery is resolved, like a block of ice that slowly melts to reveal a fetid, forbidden substance encased within it, marks the return after 14 years of director Lee Soo-yeon, whose long-form debut The Uninvited (2003) is considered one of the creepiest Korean horror films of the new millennium. Lee's personal touches are easy to spot in Bluebeard: sharp observations-- through DP Uhm Hye-jeong's (one of the few female cinematographers in the South Korea movie scene) lens and LS Jeong Hae-ji's lighting-- of the clinically modern urban environment, punctuated by gruesome and surreal visions such as the blood-soaked abattoir, slimy close-ups of the innards of human body, and a headless torso twitching as fragments of ice dissolve around it. There is also a certain pathological quality to the main characters, who explode into violence at the moment of reckoning with their long-suppressed desire or guilt; jagged flashbacks and other editorial tricks that play with the viewer's perceptions of the diegetic reality; all ably supported by a subtle, minimalist music score (Jeong Yong-jin, Hong Sangsoo's favorite composer) and superbly wrangled performances by the main cast.

Happily, Lee has lost none of her thriller-maker's acumen: Bluebeard holds its interest as an intriguing mystery, even when we recognize that there are a few major potholes in the narrative path. For The Uninvited, she has squeezed out of Jun Ji-hyun (Gianna Jun) one of the latter's best performances, and does not disappoint with either Jo Jin-woong or Kim Dae-myung. Jo can play uproarious, high camp (A Hard Day) or timid and petty-bourgeois-endearing (Hwayi: A Monster Boy), but his Seung-hoon is a much more complex portrayal, low-key yet laced with the suppressed senses of equal parts remorse and hostility. The emotionally raw scenes of Seung-hoon and his divorced wife (Yoon Se-ah, Shadows in the Palace, also excellent) attempting a reconciliation is a case in point: one usually does not get to witness such powerful scenes of acting in a flashback sequence in a mystery thriller. Kim Dae-myung is also effectively subdued as the poker-faced butcher, never quite revealing the real thoughts going on behind his beady-sleepy eyes, all the while eloquently going through the motions of being a friendly landlord.

Nonetheless, Bluebeard is marred by its needlessly meandering narrative-- the movie could have been trimmed of about 25 minutes, especially in the second half-- and the extended coda, probably meant to comment on the ubiquity of surveillance tools in a modern society, but which in the end feels like a concession to one of the conventions of the genre. One cannot blame Lee for not playing fair with the mystery fans among her viewers, except that those familiar with early '00s horror films might find her ultimate key to the puzzle something of a disappointing retread (not of her own film, to be sure), if not a total wash. One of the reasons that we feel a measure of disappointment at the later half is that Jo and director Lee have sculpted Seung-hoon's character into an intriguingly ambivalent figure, putting him on a skillful balancing act between the viewer's sympathy and disgust. Regardless of whatever fate he "deserved" morally, the film really should have ended at the point where his story was finished. On the other hand, Lee handles the tangential social issues such as prejudice against non-Korean ethnicities as well as the emotional toll a divorce takes on children with admirable degrees of sensitivity and equanimity. Despite surprisingly gruesome visuals (in a particularly bloody fantasy sequence, Seung-hoon witnesses Sang-geun and his father exsanguinating a headless corpse of a middle-aged woman hanging from a meat hook) the movie never really ends up feeling exploitative or sleazy.

Bluebeard is a welcome return to form from a New Korean Cinema director thought for many years as one of those unfortunate "Forced to Become One Hit Wonder" figures. Thankfully, while the film was not a big hit, it managed to recoup its production budget with more than 1.2 million tickets sold in the winter season of 2016-17. Here's hoping that director Lee Soo-yeon comes back with another intriguing thriller or fantasy (hopefully the long-gestating "mermaid monster" project that she has been trying to mount for years) sooner rather than later.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    On the Beach at Night Alone

"It was my first kiss with a woman!"

- Young-hee (Kim Min-hee, The Actresses, Helpless)

Uhm, you know we've all seen The Handmaiden, right?

But of course Hong Sangsoo and Kim know we've seen Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden where Kim kisses, (and then some), a woman. That is partially the point. By bringing in the extra-diegetic realities of Kim's celebrity status and the 'scandals' of that status into On the Beach at Night Alone, including those involving Hong and Kim themselves, for Young-hee is involved with a married man, the already simmering gossip is de-stabilized by alluding to it with dialogue. This diegetic becoming extra-diegetic and back again about Hong and Kim is even paralleled stylistically with the score of On the Beach at Night Alone. There are two moments where a song is played in a scene and then we are taken far from the original scene to hear the song still playing. (I'm pretty sure the same song is played both times but played differently. My late father was a music theory professor. I wish I could ask him if this is what is called 'variations on a theme'.) In the first instance we see Kim's character playing the song that bleeds into the next scene. What was aurally inside the frame continues playing outside the frame. It is a simple use of a score but it is used in clever ways that add layers of complexity. It is the score as underscore.

Yet regardless of the extra-diegetic to be found in the two women kissing, unlike Park's film, Hong keeps a respectful distance, occluding the audience's view of the kiss with the other woman's hair, providing further support for an aspect of Hong's work that I discussed in a paper I delivered for a panel on the work of Hong Sangsoo at the 2014 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, Washington, USA. In my paper, I discussed how some of Hong's most striking depictions of the male gaze are free of complicity in the male gaze. (An interesting side note that applies here, which I didn't mention in my paper, is that Hong stopped including female nudity in his films after his sixth film Tale of Cinema.) The best example of this complicity-free male gaze is the Chinese restaurant scene in Woman Is the Future of Man where we watch the men stare out the window at the woman who had left the restaurant as they entered. They disturbingly, creepily, stare at her for quite some time, but we the audience cannot see her because her distance through the window makes her image blurry to us. As a result, we can't stare along with them like we stared at Lady Hideko and Sook-hee's carnal coupling on full display in The Handmaiden. In this way, Hong does not make his audience complicit, allowing these moments to be critiques of the male gaze. The fact that Hong's purposely disruptive, abrupt zoom is a signature of his work, to not deploy that tactic when Young-hee is kissing at the table is significant. By not zooming in on the two women kissing in On The Beach At Night Alone but putting them in the back of the image with a woman's locks blocking the actual kiss, Hong's allusion to Kim's extra-diegetic star status is not salacious or intrusive but ironically deflective by being so blatant.

Those of you who have read Kyung Hyun Kim's important book Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era (Duke University Press, 2011) may be confused about what I wrote above. Kim states on page 140 of that book that the woman outside the window of the restaurant in Woman Is the Future of Man is the same woman as the Chinese Korean waitress serving the two main male characters. But if you go back and watch the point when the two men enter the restaurant, you will see a woman leave who is wearing the exact same outfit as the woman they stare at out the window. They are not harassing the same woman but two different women to demonstrate further how horrible these two men can be. I point this out in case folks are confused about what I said above. But I also point this out because confusion about what really happened in a Hong film is always part of the pleasure of watching a Hong film. The similarities of plots, characters, and actors from film to film are an occupational hazard for critics and scholars of Hong's oeuvre. 'Did Jung Yu-mi's character recite that line in Like You Know It All, Oki's Movie, In Another Country, Our Sunhi or was it the short Lost In The Mountains or List?' 'Did that scene happen in Night and Day or was it The Day He Arrives or The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well or The Day After?' It's striking to me that my difficulties with recall this time around are even found in the English title. I am constantly having to remind myself not to type Woman On the Beach Alone at Night. Just like 'mistakes' in language can help you better understand a language, I feel my own mistakes can ironically tell me a great deal about Hong's films. In this case, I add a 'Woman' because of memory triggers from Hong's previous film title Woman on the Beach. And the 'Alone' at the end of the title acts as a lovely elliptical reminder for me about the core state of Young-hee and why her protestations about love provide powerful, awkward punctuations within this film.

In fact, it's another book by Kyung Hyun Kim, this time co-edited with Youngmin Choe, that helped me get a different handle on the flowery claims of true love that Hong's characters often espouse while drunk and sober. This wonderful book, The Korean Popular Culture Reader (Duke University Press, 2014), which also includes a chapter by our man Kyu Hyun Kim, includes a fascinating translated chapter by Associate Professor of Korean Language and Literature at Korea University Boduerue Kwan entitled "The World in a Love Letter". (Shout out to Youngju Ryu of the University of Michigan for translating the article.) In this chapter, Kwon discuses literary critic Kim Ki-jin's argument that the Korean word for romance, yonae, was "a twentieth century invention" (p 19). The protagonists at the origin of Korean literature in the 1920s were very much motivated by yonae. "It was by leaning on the concept of romantic love that Korean literature tutored itself in the art of writing, nurtured the awakening of individual consciousness, and sharpened the powers of social critique" (p 21).

But it wasn't simply yonae that inspired Korean literature. A new medium for professing that romantic love also played a part - the letter. Early twentieth century Korea was a place where the sexes were still segregated. The emergence of a letter allowed an intimacy previously unimagined prior to marriage. An accepted belief during this time was that "... the letter represented the most intimate and truthful form of communication" (p 23). And not just the words, but the physical manifestation of the letter itself bridged the physical chasm that still could only be crossed in marriage. The emotions of yonae were felt internally, but also physically, through the touch of the letter, the visuals of the script and the stationary, even the smell of those letters doused with perfume. Letters were literally and figuratively intense.

Kwon's chapter helps me add a new lens to Hong's work. Moments such as Young-hee's drunken declarations about love are modern day letters wafting with "the very structure of feeling" (p 21). Letters were technology that afford concepts of romantic love. They were perfumed poems. They were awkward because they were private thoughts erupting in public moments. And what is every Hong film but private feelings divulged in public in messy ways such as the dinner where the women kiss in On the Beach at Night Alone. Hong's films are drunken revelries of romantic love.

Yet this romantic intensity was tempered even in the 1920s by awareness that the letter was "still a mediated communication" (p 22). Kwon qualifies that "At one end of the literary spectrum, there was already a clear sense of skepticism toward both the gesture of confession contained in a letter and its ornate rhetoric" (p 23). Hong has said that his use of the awkward zoom is one of his many efforts to remind his audience that they are watching a movie, that what you see isn't real. (His dream sequences that refuse the typical demarcation are another example of this tactical reminder.) These abrupt philosophical declarations of love are equally awkward. Hong is underscoring how his films are mediated moments about which we must be skeptical. That doesn't mean there isn't a broader truth in them. But just as much as we shouldn't leave with the lessen that we should all get drunk to reveal our 'true' selves, we should consider the pragmatics of these mediated moments.

In many ways, Hong's recent dialogues about romantic love are cinematic social media. His characters are performing an identity through romantic love just like identities are performed on Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media. As Inkoo Kang points out in her piece at Slate.com, "Why Everyone Is Tweeting About How The Year's Best Movies Made Them Cry", "There's a performative sensitivity to some of these social missives, ..." Just as telling someone I cried while watching the scene in Kawase Naomi's An where real-life disabled bodies are finally allowed on screen tells you something about where my political sympathies lie, Young-hee's pronouncements about love are as much a declaration of how she wants to be seen by others and how Hong wants his characters to be seen. Yet it's the constant return of skepticism in Hong's films through his visual tactics and how his films encourage viewers not to trust their claims or memories that allows me to receive these proclamations with a tempered, and ironically, sober reception and reflection.      (Adam Hartzell)

    Prison

The runaway box office success of A Violent Prosecutor in early 2016 spoke to the popular appeal of prison movies. One year later, The Prison took another crack at the genre, and once again it seems to have paid off. Long time screenwriter Na Hyun's directorial debut is darker and more claustrophobic than many of its predecessors, and the methodical way in which it reveals the power structures within a notorious high-security prison make for engaging (though in no way groundbreaking) viewing. The general public responded fairly well to the film, turning it into a mid-sized hit.

A brief prologue depicts the carrying out of an unusual crime. The CFO of a large conglomerate is in a hotel room, on the day before he is to be summoned by prosecutors in a tax evasion case. Just then a group of men walk into his room, subdue him, and inject a lethal dose of drugs into his blood. Careful not to leave any fingerprints or other traces of their presence, they make it look like he overdosed by accident. It's what happens next that is unexpected: the men return to their vehicle, make their getaway, and then drive through the gates of a prison. Inside, they change back into their prison uniforms and go back into their cells. It's a perfect crime, virtually untraceable. Who would think to suspect a criminal who is already in jail?

Such an operation cannot be planned by just anyone, and sure enough, within the prison there is a man whose power and connections are extraordinary. Jung Ik-ho (Han Suk-kyu, Tell Me Something) is a long-term prisoner who not only exerts absolute control over his jail, but through a combination of bribes and intimidation maintains a vast network in the outside world. With the warden in his pocket, he is able to do pretty much whatever he wants, and in some ways being in jail is an advantage to him.

Into this cruel environment arrives Yu-gon (Kim Rae-won, Gangnam Blues), a former police lieutenant who at one time was famous for his stubborn pursuit of criminals at all costs. After a hit and run accident, which he then tried to cover up with bribes and destruction of evidence, Yu-gon finds himself on the other end of the criminal justice system. His arrival at the prison is greeted with glee by some of the inmates who ended up there because of him. But Yu-gon is no dupe, and their plans to exact revenge are not so easily realized. When it becomes clear that there is a new, unusually ruthless fighter in the prison, Ik-ho takes notice.

The Prison is mostly solid and unremarkable, but it does have its strengths, including its acting. Han Suk-kyu has a long career stretching back to the 1990s, when he was arguably the most popular actor working in the industry. His experience is highlighted in a role like this, where he projects a menacing power even in the scenes where he chooses not to use it. Kim Rae-won too is convincing as someone whose obsessive drive carries him far beyond what you would expect him to do.

Whether The Prison is memorable is another question. I have a feeling that in five years I'll be struggling to distinguish the plot of this film from other prison dramas. (I suppose that's true of most of the films Korea is putting out these days) But if nothing else, I'm sure I'll remember the image of Han Suk-kyu, because he took a familiar character type and gave it an unusual energy.      (Darcy Paquet)

    The Villainess

The film barely opens before an unseen assailant spectacularly shoots, stabs, slices, smacks and strangles to death more than two dozen hoodlums in a back-alley of Seoul, showering the screen with geysers of blood. To the viewer's astonishment, the assailant turns out to be a pretty young woman, Suk-hee (Kim Ok-vin, Thirst): exhausted and seemingly having lost the will to live, she surrenders to the police. However, instead of being tried as a murderer, the Yanbian native finds herself forcibly "recruited" as a member of an elite female assassin team working for the South Korean government. After plastic surgery and vocal training, Suk-hee starts a new life as a stage actress with her toddler daughter, under the tight surveillance of her supervisor Kwon Sook (Kim Seo-hyung, Forbidden Floor) and "caretaker" Hyun-soo (Seong Joon, excellent in the indie film Pluto), now married to her after approaching her disguised as a friendly neighbor. Of course, the government reserves the right to task her with a wet-girl job anytime they want. She dutifully performs these assassinations, but one day she recognizes one of the assigned targets. It turns out to be her former husband, Lee Joong-sang (Shin Ha-kyun, Room No. 7), the gangster who had trained her to be a human lethal weapon in China, and whose supposed death she was meaning to avenge in the opening sequence.

The Villainess, co-written and directed by Jung Byung-gil, who debuted with the well-received documentary Action Boys (2008) but received mixed notices for the second feature Confession of Murder (2012), garnered spotlights when it was invited to Midnight Screening section of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, in addition to being a rare Korean actioner toplining an actress, in this case the svelte and foxy Kim Ok-vin. The movie belongs to one of the currently fashionable sub-genres in the R-rated "action and adventure" category that relentlessly focuses on the mind-blowingly intricate architecture of hand-to-hand combats and the creative ways to inflict bodily damages. Typically in these films the viewers are bludgeoned with progressively impossible action set-pieces, such as a one-take shot of two actors falling through three stories to a parked van below-- which must believably crunch on the impact, ouch!-- all the while frantically slashing at each other with sharp knives and, of course, drenched in tropical downpour. This bare-knuckles aesthetic has become a notable component of "Extreme Asian Cinema"-- Iko Uwais and Gareth Huw Evans's The Raid films (2011 and 2014) are premier examples--, as well as of Hollywood, resulting in relatively high-profile projects such as John Wick (2014) and its sequel (2017) with Keanu Reeves as well as Atomic Blonde (2017) starring Charlize Theron (There is also an intriguingly self-reflexive, self-consciously "laid-back" variant of this sub-genre, such as Steve Soderbergh's Haywire [2011], but let's not get carried away).

Depending on where you are coming from, The Villainess is just what the acupuncturist ordered to cure your cinematic doldrums, or a vicious waste of celluloid wallowing in pointless gore and heedless violence. Not that The Villainess actually looks ugly. Given its medium-high budget (around at 4:5 million dollars, still dirt-cheap compared to a regular Hollywood fare), the motion picture is all surface slickness, with primary-colored, cartoon-like set pieces held together with a needlessly complex flashback structure. DP Park Jung-hoon who, perhaps surprisingly, cut his teeth in quiet indie dramas such as Snow Paths [2015], nonetheless does a man's job, managing to sheathe the quieter scenes in gorgeous hues of gold and deep blue, while trying his best to capture delicate gleams in the eyes of Suk-hee and other characters in extreme close-up.

The overlong plot is a mess, a whirring-blender cocktail of Korean and Hollywood action film clichés (Can we please ban the "who can put together a dismantled gun first" test from a Korean thriller forever? Kim Ji-woon having had a good laugh at that irritating cliché in A Bittersweet Life was enough already), elements obviously culled from other movies (most notably Kill Bill and Le Femme Nikita) and character dynamics reminiscent of '60s Japanese boy's manga (or even more artless contemporary Japanese examples like Kitamura Ryuhei's Azumi [2003]), but that's hardly a surprise. On the other hand, the action scenes are indeed impressive, including the opening massive physical assault that for the most part assumes Suk-hee's first-person POV and the three-way motorbike fight-chase following her first mission. It is also true, nonetheless, that, by the climax, tiresome video-game-like shaking and rolling of cameras as well as excessive gore threaten to diminish the impact of these actions.

As far as I am concerned, whenever Kim Ok-vin and Shin Ha-kyun (this is their third pairing following Thirst and The Front Line) are on screen, they seem to be essaying characters far more complex and interesting than their video-game-avatar-like ones in the rest of the film. Kim goes through some effective makeup transformations, first presented as a rounder-faced country girl prior to plastic surgery, yet conveys well the despair and hesitation of a woman deceived and exploited throughout her life. It is too bad that Suk-hee is far from a well-written character, especially compared to the genuine femme fatale Kim played in Park Chan-wook's Thirst. It is particularly disappointing when the lady assassin goes literally insane faced with the ultimate betrayal, rather than displaying cold resilience of a survivor. Shin Ha-kyun has played villains before (most notably in a bizarre SF movie The Game [2008]) but here he is clearly letting Kim be the prima donna in the original sense of the term, teasing the viewers with deceptively gentle smiles but revealing a frightening void behind his twinkling eyes. As he did with a similarly overwritten scene in Room No. 7, Shin gives a real heft to what could have been a set of cringe-inducing, pseudo-profound dialogue that spells E.V.I. L. in broad brushstrokes. He doesn't quite make it work, but he at least confers it some level of dignity: without his contribution, I might have burst out laughing at the film's predictably nihilistic, "did we just watch a slasher horror film?" denouement.

Again, like many Korean thrillers of the last half-decade, The Villainess has more than a few virtues, the least of which are its technical ingenuity and performative gumption, if not originality. For me, though, it ultimately proved disappointing. Do not misunderstand me, I am not expecting an art-house film with Oscar-caliber performances: my criticism is that the film undermines its own affective power by refusing to shake off the hyper-masculine clichés. Suk-hee never grows into a truly strong protagonist, capable of taking charge of her own life course. To be honest, I think the movie would have been a whole lot more cathartic if she went off and killed all "good" government agents, including her insufferable supervisor (It is no fault of Kim Seo-hyung that Kwon comes off so blithely hypocritical. And what are those male surveillance agents who act like a bunch of horn-dog schoolboys, snickering and hooting at Suk-hee's bedroom footage?), in addition to, or even rather than, the Korean-Chinese gangsters, who are apparently such a threat to national security that the secret agents have to be mobilized to illegally kill them (this agency must be run by the ROK equivalent of Joe Arpaio).

I had little expectation that The Villainess would turn out to be an overtly feminist vehicle, but at least I had high hopes for it being a step in the right direction in presenting a genuinely powerful female lead. As I reiterate, the beautiful and charismatic Kim Ok-vin has zero trouble cutting such a figure, but Suk-hee is again one of those "sad" female heroines without true subjectivity, stuck with sob-sob father issues, overseen by a kindly male protector (who of course is too incompetent to actually make her life easy), burdened with a child that needs to be protected at all cost, and antagonized or impeded by other female characters who should have been her allies and supports. This is all rather retrograde not to mention predictable, the fact accentuated by the film's loud, aggressive stylistics.

Since director Jung Byung-gil has proven his genre-cinema skills with The Villainess beyond any investor's doubt, my hope is that for his next project he should start with a more thoughtful and character-oriented screenplay, preferably not written by himself.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Okja

It is an alternative earth, year 2007. The platinum-blonde CEO of the global conglomerate Mirando Corporation, Lucy (Tilda Swinton), unveils her ambitious plan to introduce to the worldwide consumers the next generation of genetically engineered super-pigs. The most adorable yet meaty piglets picked out of the first litter have been distributed among twenty-six farms throughout the world, from whom one will eventually be selected as the winner during a massive publicity event to be held in New York City. Flash forward to 2017, deep in the mountains of the Gangwon Province, Korea: the super-piglet has grown into an enormous, SUV-sized sow with floppy dog ears and hippo-like maw, affectionately named Ok-ja by her caretakers, twelve-year-old Mi-ja (Ahn Seo-hyun, Monster) and her grandfather Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong, The Host). Mi-ja's life with the grandfather and Ok-ja is rough but idyllic. Unfortunately, the Mirando Corporation intrudes into their lives, led by their PR front-man Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal), a former nature-documentary program host now gone to seeds, quickly declaring Ok-ja the winner of the contest and shipping her to New York. Aghast at her grandfather's betrayal, Mi-ja bravely follows Ok-ja's trail to Seoul, but is intercepted by a group of hooded young men and women claiming to be members of the Animal Liberation Front. The latter's leader, Jay (Paul Dano), attempts to convince her that Ok-ja should be enlisted in exposing Mirando's hideous animal rights abuse records. Meanwhile, Lucy's ruthless twin sister Nancy (Swinton again) working with a suave corporate shark Dawson (Giancarlo Esposito) plans to chuck the former's "sentimental" publicity stunt and send Mi-ja's animal friend to the industrial abattoir as soon as she could. Will our intrepid pre-teen heroine be able to save Ok-ja from becoming packets of processed pork, caught as she is between Mirando and the ALF, neither of which may have the best intentions for the lovely super-pig at their hearts?

Bong Joon Ho's (Snowpiercer) sixth feature film courted much controversy since its inception in 2015 when Brad Pitt's Plan B Production and the video rental/streaming giant Netflix came on board as its production company and worldwide distributor, respectively. The production budget estimated at approximately 50 million dollars, Okja is not a blockbuster production by the U.S. standard, but Netflix's decision to simultaneously release it online and in select theaters in South Korea has rubbed the theater-chain giant CGV wrong way, who, along with CJ, Lotte, Megabox and other domestic distributors resolved to boycott the film. Consequently, despite the explosive anticipation regarding the film as well as Bong's proven track records as one of Korea's biggest hit-makers, Okja was shown at only 111 screens as opposed to 1,000 and upward number of screens usually reserved for such a highly anticipated production (for a comparison, The Transformers: The Last Knight opened in 1,739 screens in its opening week). The good news is that, for a week of its initial run in the theaters, Okja scored very impressive 42 to 56 per-cent attendance rates (again, for a comparison, The Tranformers in its second week is scoring approximately 24 per-cent), boosted by excellent words of mouth. We can tentatively conclude that Okja's availability through a VOD streaming service has done little to dampen the enthusiasm among South Korean movie fans to catch Bong's latest projected on the big screen.

The movie itself certainly does not disappoint the director's domestic and foreign fan base. It draws upon some familiar themes and motifs found in his previous works (the audacious mingling of a gargantuan CGI beast and live actors as in The Host; a young girl fighting to protect animals from heartless human predators/abusers as in Barking Dogs Never Bite; and so on), and non-coyly attributes homages to the sources as diverse (and wacky) as My Neighbor Totoro, Chaplin's Modern Times, George Franju's Le Sang de bête and the long-running Korean TV series Animal Farm. Like Bong's other films, Okja maintains a remarkably steady tone throughout its running time, never quite deciding to become an out-and-out dark satire, nor a para-Disney fable for contemporary adults, nor a Dark Knight-like urban action film with jaw-droppingly creative stunts, while incorporating into itself elements of all of these. As was the case with Snowpiercer, some viewers might feel nicked by Bong's refusal to smooth out sharp edges of his film in the manner of Hollywood blockbuster productions: he pulls no punches, for instance, from displaying the nightmarish vista of Mirando's meat processing plant. Others might take issue with the film's ambivalent message, as it were, as the Animal Liberation Front, led by the serenely self-absorbed Paul Dano, are not exactly portrayed as good guys. There is a giddy but disturbing undercurrent of obsessive zeal in their behaviors that serves as a counterpoint to the frazzled paranoia of the Mirando executives (One of the film's most intriguing sidebar plots involves serious consequences of the linguistic miscommunication between Mi-ja and her so-called allies, based on the Korean-American member K's [The Walking Dead's Steven Yeun] deliberate misinterpretation of a key dialogue from Korean to English).

The technical aspects are top-notch, as one would expect from a Bong Joon Ho film. Darius Khondji's (The Immigrant, Amour) cinematography is pure magic, contrasting misty yet intimate splendor of the Gangwon Province mountain-scape to the aggressive golds and blues of the concrete- and steel-bound NYC. In other departments, South Korean and U.S. talents collaborate seamlessly to weave together the flamboyant tapestry of clashing cultures-- Kevin Thompson (Birdman) and Lee Ha-jun's (The Thieves) production design stuffs the viewer's field of vision with glittering and gluttonous details, while Choi Se-yeon (Coinlocker Girl) and Catherine George (Jane Got a Gun) run with the visions of Swinton swathed in a cream-colored hanbok dress and Dano in a natty bell-boy uniform. The CGI effects employed to render Okja realistically "alive," supervised by Eric De Boer (Life of Pi) and other artists, are superior by leaps and bounds to those used to portray the amphibian beastie in The Host; I almost felt that Bong was using the early portions of his motion picture as a demo reel for the technical prowess of his effects crew.

The performances are equally intriguing but perhaps more likely to split the viewer opinions, especially among the American constituency. Ron Johnson's English dialogues (Having worked on, along with Mr. Editor, translation of the original Korean-language screenplay of Snowpiercer, I would love to find out how the English and Korean language division of labor was determined for Okja: one thing I can be sure is that no detail, however small, would have escaped Bong's eyes or ears) are a tad overtly satirical, and I wish Gyllenhaal's animal-show host had been more fully developed as a character (By the way, I do not find Gyllenhaal's alleged "overacting" a serious problem; his performance-- like Swinton's-- is fascinating in the sense that its pitch is held at the level that would be considered "normal" for a Korean actor, say, Hwang Jung-min or Yu Hae-jin, in a genre film of this type). On the other hand, Ahn Seo-hyun is perfect, an action-figure kokeshi doll with huge, soulful eyes, who nonetheless works beautifully together with a CGI creature and stands her ground against the teeth-baring Swinton in her scariest black-witch mode.

Okja is nothing if not adventurous; it has its shares of grotesqueries and black humor threatening to veer off into bad taste, along with the scenes of lyrical, heart-stopping beauty and thought-provoking poignancy. The film also refuses to pander to either the superficial breast-beating of American political satires or the self-importantly loud barking of the South Korean leftist social criticism directed at "neoliberal capitalism" but has little real bite in terms of actually challenging the complacency of the (Korean) hands that feed them. During the startling climactic confrontation between Mi-ja and Nancy Mirando, the Korean girl speaks a sentence of English dialogue that not only satisfactorily resolves the Gordian knot of the film's plot, but also cuts to the very core of the workings of the global capitalist system, exposing to us its monstrous, circular logic that feeds on itself like an Ouroboros worm. Heady stuff, this is; it is not something you will ever get to see in a Marvel superhero franchise film. In the end, Okja is truly a parable for our times. As I'm a Cyborg But That's OK was supposedly for Park Chan-wook, it might have been intended as a "breather" for Bong after making such "serious" works as Mother and Snowpiercer, but it will be your loss if you are fooled by its fairy-tale imprimatur and miss such an intelligent yet powerful critique of the crazy "real" world we live in.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Battleship Island

1945, several months before Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers: in Gyeongseong (Seoul), a jazz band, led by a womanizing cad Gang-ok (Hwang Jung-min, The Wailing), and featuring tap-dancing and singing routines by his pre-teen daughter So-hee (Kim Soo-an, Train to Busan), narrowly escapes being busted by the police, sicced on them by an irate, cuckolded Jungchuwon (Privy Council) member. They are mistakenly shipped off to a coal mine in an island called Hashima, otherwise known as Gunkanjima (Battleship Island) due to its unusual shape as well as its harsh natural environment, almost entirely deprived of vegetation. Put to hard labor in the mine are impoverished Koreans from various backgrounds, including Chil-seong (So Ji-seop, A Company Man), a Seoul gangster, Mal-nyeon (Lee Jung-hyun, Juvenile Offender), a former "comfort woman" relocated from China, and Yoon Hak-cheol, a political activist now serving as an unofficial representative of Korean miners (Lee Kyeong-yeong, who appears in thirteen Korean movies released or to be released in 2017 and whose tiresome typecasting in these films serves as a total spoiler for Yoon's character arc).

The conditions in the mine are terrible, with Gang-ok having to deal with not only the brutality of the psychopathic Japanese supervisor Yamada (Kim Joong-hee) but also entirely unwelcome lechery of the mining company president Shimazaki (Kim In-woo) directed toward So-hee, but when the real prospect of losing the Pacific War looms above, things turn even direr. Adding further wrinkles to the plot is a Korean independence movement agent Moo-yeong (Song Joong-gi, A Werewolf Boy), who, working with the OSS operatives from the U.S., had infiltrated the island in order to rescue Yoon. His arrival, and his reluctant team-up with Gang-ok, however, uncovers some dastardly secrets about the betrayal of Korean miners and Shimazaki and Yamada's secret plot to eliminate the "evidence of war crime" in the island. Could the hundreds of Korean miners and working women overcome their mutual distrust and escape the island together?

Ryoo Seung-wan's follow-up project to Veteran (2015), currently third most successful Korean film of all time with 13.4 million tickets sold, had probably been the most hotly anticipated motion picture of 2017. Press releases about the 2.2 billion won production (more than two and a half times bigger than his previous film) generated a huge viewer interest in its meticulous recreation of the island setting as well as casting of youth-market and TV stars such as Song and So, along with reliable acting powerhouses such as Hwang and Lee. Unfortunately, the film, upon its release in July 26, became mired in a series of controversies. First of all, the financier and distributor CJ Entertainment chose to release it in whopping 2,027 screens across the nation, out of 2,575 screens nationally available. This was excessive even by the standard of usual screen monopoly by big companies: something like two thirds of all available movie theaters were showing a single motion picture. Coming at the heels of CGV, CJ, Lotte and other big distributors/theater chains banding together to blackball Okja, this gluttonous act of monopoly naturally sparked much dismay and criticism. And then the internet wags began to attack the movie itself for being "pro-Japanese" and "distorting" the "reality" of the forced labor suffered by Koreans during the last phase of the Pacific War. Most web "attacks" of this type I have personally encountered have been intellectually lazy or viciously stupid, but again, the CJ Entertainment bears at least some responsibility for this brouhaha: their marketing campaign, including a trailer patched together from the most sensationalistic, anti-Japanese images and shots in the feature, failed to accurately convey the movie's wildly swinging tone from realistic wretchedness to generic war-action-spy movie thrills to literally apocalyptic devastation.

Despite all these controversies The Battleship Island has many virtues. I would defend it against the claim that Ryoo Seung-wan, a talented maverick conversant with both the obscure and neglected tradition of Korean genre cinema and the genealogy of the sub-Hollywood and non-elitist Euro-American exploitation films, sold his souls to the devils with this outing. In fact, Ryoo's personal style-- aggressively genre-bound, even archly conventional, dialogues and sequences nonetheless punctuated by surprisingly ironic, creative directorial touches-- comes through more or less intact. The technical accomplishments are nothing to sneeze at, either. The Hashima coal mine set is indeed impressive, Lee Hoo-gyung (The Wailing)'s production design highlighting the intensified misery of the confined space overrun by black soot, grey concrete and excrement-colored mud. DP Lee Mo-gae (Asura: The City of Madness), working with Lighting Supervisor Lee Seong-hwan (The Tiger), swathe the nighttime island set in pitch-black darkness and poisonously gorgeous amber flames. The first two thirds of the film feature more than a few set pieces that showcase Ryoo's action-meister skills, if not conceptual originality: for instance, a bathtub fight between Chil-seong and a Korean Kapo foreman, while clearly inspired by a similar bout in Eastern Promises (2007), is one of the best scenes of its kind in recent memory.

Some characters surprisingly transcend their archetypal origins to declare themselves to the viewers. Hwang Jung-min's band leader is neither somberly idealistic nor entirely amoral: he is quite unlike the righteous-macho cop in Veteran, and in fact much closer to the survival-minded protagonists of Ryoo's earlier films such as Die Bad and Crying Fist. He has a terrific chemistry with the young Kim Soo-an, practically a leading lady of this opus, who sings, dances, cartwheels, and grabs the viewer's attention with equal measures of pretty sincerity and frightened desperation. Like Dakota Fanning in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, So-hee as played by Soo-an appears horrendously vulnerable and at the same time strikingly aware of the hypocrisies of the world she inhabits: her moments of tearful "acting" to save her and her father's skin from the Japanese authorities are some of the most effective scenes in the movie. Likewise, Lee Jung-Hyun, whose Mal-nyeon initially appears as if inserted into the movie for the single purpose of condemning Japanese males as sexual predators, turns out to be anything but such a cipher, as her emotional denunciation of the Korean pimps displays (No doubt for the hate-Japan crowd this sequence is one of their evidences that Ryoo has turned "pro-Japanese").

The film, however, is seriously problematic in other ways ensuring that its best intentions are bound to be misunderstood and come out offensive for both nationalistic Koreans and liberal Japanese. Let me try to explain the reasons, as much as the space allows. To begin with, it seems that Ryoo did not understand that making a 70's Hollywood style prison-escape action film with the subject as sensitive as the forced Korean labor in wartime Japan was a highly risky prospect. The problem here is not, as many viewers argued, his allegedly inadequate understanding of colonial-period Korean history. I do not think Lee June-ick (Dongju, Anarchist from Colony) or Choi Dong-Hoon (whose Assassination is praised to the hilt by some professional Korean historians as "historically accurate," despite the flagrantly fictional and melodramatic plot devices it employs) is particularly better than him in this regard. I believe him when Ryoo says he put as many efforts as humanly possible to realistically capture the living and working conditions of Hashima. I also appreciate Ryoo's effort to address the Korean complicity to Japanese exploitation of the under-privileged members of their own ethnic group, although there is little subtlety in the way he does it. Truth be told, The Battleship Island dutifully rolls out hideously stereotypical and prejudiced portrayals of Japanese characters-- and those include portrayals of villains, I am not arguing bad guys should not be depicted as bad, for God's sake--, but this is what almost all recent colonial-period pieces do, and hardly a major concern among Korean internet "critics" swarming over these movies like Tse Tse flies over a dying cow. Even though the Japanese laborers greatly outnumbered Koreans in the real-life Hashima mine, the former come across in the film as innately racist, skulking around in literally torch-carrying mobs looking to identify Koreans for collective abuse or lynching. We at least get a Japanese villain who speaks like a real Japanese in Kim In-woo's Shimazaki, the third generation Korean-Japanese actor increasingly specializing in mustachioed, bespectacled Japanese villains with a prep school president diction, having essayed similar roles in Anarchist from Colony and The Last Princess. Kim seems to be a fine actor: it is too bad Shimazaki as written is barely above the level of Colonel Klink in terms of the richness (or thinness) of characterization.

The real issue with The Battleship Island is actually more to do with genres than with history. The kind of films Ryoo is presumably drawing upon as models, The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare and Stalag 17 are products of the era in which the experiences of the Second World War are safely positioned within the triumphant narrative of the Allied victory. These films do not try to evoke the Holocaust or even massive scales of civilian deaths during the Second World War, except as sidebar notes: portraying Nazi evils or sufferings of the Jews and other victims of the fascists "accurately" are not the point of these pieces of entertainment. Usually Ryoo's aggressive fusion of divergent cinematic traditions and conventions results in something creative, at least fascinating, but in The Battleship Island, all the efforts to integrate the genre-bound elements from these existing cinematic models into the tragic story of the coal mine produce exactly wrong chemical reactions. He could not prioritize these genre elements and ignore the "suffering Koreans" conventions of a colonial-period blockbuster, yet he also refuses to give up the former, either. The consequence is as if a motion picture that starts out as Schindler's List abruptly turns into Mission Impossible, yet dour and sullen, utterly devoid of any sense of "fun."

Once the narrative shifts to the overtly genre-bound, "made-up" sections, spearheaded by Song Joong-gi's "Liberation Army" agent, the movie entirely dispenses with its steady observation of the human foibles and resilience, and becomes progressively hysterical, with the levels of violence and carnage reaching alarmingly out-of-control levels. The B-52 bombing sequence already looked biblically hellish, akin to the conflagration of Rome in Quo Vadis, but that still did not prepare me for the extended climactic massacre of Koreans by the Japanese soldiers, which again openly references Saving Private Ryan (for God's sake, why?) and vituperatively kills off sympathetic characters, left and right, all set to an Ennio Morricone tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, of all things. This whole sequence is, instead of moving or shocking, merely grotesque and exhausting, and the apocalyptic coda with which Ryoo ends the movie, which I shall not reveal here, solidifies one's impression that the director is by then really punishing the viewers (presumably representing the mankind, not just Koreans) from the furious divine perspective. More alarmingly, this climax displays a dangerous sign that his indulgence in pure spectacle and money-drenched, large-scale production-- all justified in the name of nationalism-- is threatening to scuttle the filmmaker's true assets, including his unassuming affection for the unprivileged, common folks. It is dominated by a quality that I have always feared would someday explode like a Chestburster out of his cinema: the desire for an excess spectacle of agonistic bodies-- showering geysers of blood, bullets felling personages in blinking instances, and flames enveloping a screaming, twisting man in a slow motion dervish-dance-- overwhelming any form of rational restraint and fuming with the macho celebration of "cool" destruction and denigration, like the worst aspects of Chang Cheh and Tarantino DNA-combining into a mutant Action Troll.

I will reiterate that The Battleship Island is not an impersonal, generic blockbuster that only seeks to cater to the largest common denominator among the viewing public. I do not know how much the CJ studio and other outside forces intervened to ultimately influence the film's contents, but it does look like most of Ryoo's personal designs have been realized, one way or another. Yet, by the end the film feels like a superbly athletic and tough soccer player who dashes around the field, does all kinds of snazzy tricks with the ball and gets into brutal, bone-breaking fights with his opponents, and fails to score a single goal. There is no catharsis, not even the chauvinistic kind of seeing Japanese villains getting just desserts, and no real historical lessons either, since most Koreans already know that this heinous massacre depicted in the movie is fictional. It serves no dramatic or thematic purpose: it only exists as the equivalent of a long, drawn-out scream at the end of a metal band performance.

The Battleship Island would have worked better, if it had been from the get go conceived as a critique of the ugly, horrific war initiated and pursued by the Japanese state and capital, with Koreans and Japanese laborers finding common grounds for resistance, or, for that matter, tragically unable to overcome ethnic prejudices toward one another (in other words, a film that truly explores the nature of Japanese colonial exploitation of Korean laborers, driven and abetted by class distinctions, ethnic chauvinism/racism and wartime mobilization). Conversely, it could have been a bona fide action thriller that merely used the Hashima setting as an exotic background-- for instance, designed as a "treasure hunt" mystery thriller focusing on a McGuffin hidden in the mine during wartime confusion and taking place some time after Japan's defeat, with the coal mine's sad history told through vivid flashbacks, perhaps. In actuality, a viewer expecting either a thoughtful reflection on the experiences of Korean laborers in Japan, or an enjoyable action film with some unobtrusive, but not-too-serious historical lessons on the side, might come out of the theater feeling punched in the face. Perhaps either alternative version might have come off as an unacceptable compromise for Ryoo, but there is no denying that, in the film as it stands, he failed to satisfactorily integrate these disparate elements into an emotionally balanced, dramatically coherent whole.

I still believe Ryoo's heart is in the right place, and I hope The Battleship Island represents an isolated incident of miscalculation. My wish is that, given the traumas he had to go through due to this project (Even though as of August 11, 2017, the motion picture raked in the ordinarily impressive 6.2 million tickets, there is now a concern that it might not earn back the production plus marketing expenses, its break-even point pegged at around 8 million tickets), for his next project he turn away from studio-bound mega-productions and return to the smaller, more intimate filmmaking that explores quirky and unusual characters like the father-daughter team of Gang-ok and So-hee. I wanted to stay with their colonial adventures rather than the oppressively tragic saga of the Gunkanjima coal mine, which, after all the pontification and emotional hostage-taking, does not even tell the "real" story of its inhabitants anyway. Ryoo should by now realize that the Korean "ethnic nation" (minjok) as ideologically constructed by the mainstream Korean viewers (and therefore not identical to the "real" Korean minjok out there in the world, far more diverse and open), does not really desire his services, nor does it appreciate his talents. It is God of Cinema who does, and it is His voice he ought to follow.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Midnight Runners

Ki-joon and Hee-yeol are students at the Police Academy. Although opposites in many ways - Ki-joon is warm and relates easily to other people, while Hee-yeol is brilliant but cold and socially awkward - they work together well, and as time goes on they become friends. One thing they do have in common is that in contrast to many of their classmates, neither of them are quite sure that they really want to become policemen.

One night the two of them are out on break, and while walking down a quiet street they see some men in a van pull up beside a young woman, grab her and throw her inside. They chase after the van, noting its license plate number, but fail to stop it from speeding away. Their first instinct, of course, is to report the incident, but it soon becomes clear that the cops on duty are busy with higher-profile cases. Although they caught only a glimpse of her, and although their training at the Police Academy is far from complete, Ki-joon and Kee-yeol decide to apply what they've learned in an effort to rescue her.

A highly entertaining movie that manages to be funny, disturbing, and inspiring all at once, Midnight Runners is a celebration of the impulsive idealism of youth. (The Korean title translates as "Young Cops".) Ki-joon and Hee-yeol really have no business running around Seoul chasing after these kidnappers. They're in far above their heads, and in one sense their professor is right when he tells them they should hold off on real-world crime fighting until they finish their studies. Nonetheless, they are the only ones who step forward to make an effort. The tired, apathetic response of the professional police force throws the young duo's determination into bittersweet relief.

In both this film and his independent feature debut Koala (2013), writer/director Jason Kim shows a real talent for creating rounded, memorable characters who are fun to watch. Scene by scene, the easy rhythm of the film makes the time go by easily. That said, there are segments of Midnight Runners that go into some pretty dark places, and the film doesn't shy away from making its audience uncomfortable. Some critics also raised objections at the way it portrays certain ethnic Chinese neighborhoods as essentially lawless. Despite the controversy, the movie enjoyed strong word of mouth during its release, and ultimately sold 5.7 million tickets.

Good casting was another key factor in the film's success. Park Seo-jun (Ki-joon) is a familiar face on television, but this is his first leading role in the cinema. His assured performance landed him several 'Best New Actor' prizes at local film awards ceremonies. Kang Ha-neul (Hee-yeol), on the other hand, is emerging as one of his generation's busiest actors, playing a variety of comic and serious roles ranging from Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet (2016) and New Trial (2016) to thriller Forgotten (2017) and Rotterdam Film Festival premiere I Have a Date with Spring (2018). His cool intensity is a natural fit with this role.

Most films turned out by the mainstream Korean film industry these days are centered around emotional effect. Through a combination of mood, violence, spectacle and melodrama, such films aim to flood the viewer in impressions and emotions. There are times when this works well, but it's become rarer to see films that get by merely on good storytelling and memorable characters. Perhaps that's why, despite its fairly simple storyline, Midnight Runners came across as refreshing and different.      (Darcy Paquet)

    The Mimic

Hee-yeon (Yeom Jeong-ah, A Tale of Two Sisters) moves with her husband (Park Hyuk-kwon, A Break Alone), her young daughter Joon-hee (Bang Yoo-seol) and her mother-in-law who suffers from dementia to Jangsan (a district in Busan not far from the Haeundae beach). Settling down in an isolated villa, she first stumbles on a strange, abandoned shack that seems to have been bricked off to keep something or somebody from escaping. And then she "rescues" a prepubescent girl (Shin Rin-ah, Ode to My Father), who is seemingly amnesiac and initially speaks only by mimicking Joon-hee's voice. Drawn to the little girl, partly due to the devastating memory of having lost her son five years ago, Hee-yeon soon realizes that the girl is connected to a dreadful, supernatural presence responsible for a slew of missing persons in the area. And that presence seeks to reclaim the girl.

The Mimic's Korean title Jangsan-beom, literally the Jangsan Tiger, refers to a mythical creature who mimics the voices of loved ones to lure unsuspecting humans to its lair and consume them. I am not sure if such a local legend actually exists in the Jangsan area (the Jangsan region is densely populated and urbanized today, so much so that the location filming had to be done in the mountains of Gangwon Province), but the campfire story sets up the basic approach of this 2017 summer horror entry: to mount a supernatural horror without explicitly showing its monster, by suggesting its terror through voices in the dark. The idea, while not as original or daring as the marketing people made it out to be, certainly raises one's hope for the kind of subtle, slow-burn terror that must have been a refreshing turn for the domestic viewers. Garnering its share of critical praise, with a few critics seeming to overpraise it on the account of its admittedly ingenious premise, The Mimic ultimately sold approximately 1.2 million tickets nationwide, a considerable success considering its non-bombastic approach.

The Mimic takes its time depicting Hee-yeon's guilt-induced neurosis, and does it in such a way that viewers might become suspicious of her perception of "reality." Yeom Jung-ah, used to playing sharp-tongued, stiletto-eyed termagants, gives a expertly modulated, painful portrayal of a mother obsessed with her missing child to the degree that she risks neglecting her living one. Her strange bond with the lost girl manages to evoke a good deal of sympathy for both characters, although we all know that this relationship cannot end well. Director Huh Jung, responsible for the uber-creepy urban thriller Hide and Seek, one of 2013's biggest hits, does a great job fostering the atmosphere of oppressive dread without relying on standard shock cuts or bad CGI effects.

It is too bad, then, that in the end the movie never transcends the hoary trope of Motherhood as Ultimate Sacrifice that Korean cinema has exploited for decades, and refuses to either turn Hee-yeon into an active agent capable of besting the man-eating monster, or openly confront the process of her descent into insanity, with the Jangsan Tiger more explicitly designated as her fantasy creation. Director Huh tries to have it both ways, to keep baiting the viewers with the possibility of psychosis on the part of Hee-yeon, yet dangling before the viewer's nose a promise for a deeply frightening, perhaps even transgressive, monster-show that would reveal the true nature of the beast lurking in the darkness. The Mimic, therefore, inevitably turns anticlimactic when viewers sense that the latter is not going to happen, and that the Jangsan Tiger, even when existing independently from Hee-yeon's imagination, is more of a metaphoric, literary entity than a full-fledged cinematic threat. Sure enough, there are great horror films that refuse to show the monsters, such as Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), but in these cases cinematic techniques and mises-en-scenes themselves become "monsters," as in an unforgettable (and super-scary) scene wherein the camera seems to plummet directly into Julie Harris's screaming face. In any case, I found The Mimic's ending, faithfully following the logic of the Motherhood as Ultimate Sacrifice ideology, utterly predictable.

I agree that The Mimic deserves respect for its effort to overcome tiresome summer-horror clichés, but in other ways it is just as conventional. When all is said and done, I cannot quite put it among the ranks of great recent Korean horror films such as The Wailing and Train to Busan. For a horror film enthusiast, however, it is definitely worth a look, and I concede that Yeom Jung-ah's heart-aching portrayal, going against her usual image, almost (but not quite) elevates the film to another plane of quality.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Running Actress

Many film fans might dream of living the life of a well-known actor. But as with most things, the reality of such a lifestyle may not be as we imagine it. With her directorial debut, the acclaimed actress-turned-director Moon So-ri shows us a more honest portrayal of a life spent working in films, and in the public eye.

Moon stars as herself in The Running Actress, which is in part based on her own experiences, and in part fictionalized. It's with a self-deprecating humor and an honest candor that she shows herself being turned down for major roles, running out of money, getting yelled at by her mother, interacting with obnoxious fans, being begged by independent directors to act in their films for free, and all the while feeling like she's mentally and emotionally exhausted. In particular, Moon depicts some of the frustrations of working in an industry that values physical appearance above all else, and the countless small humiliations that result from being recognized at all times, wherever you go.

The film is divided into three "acts", and in fact each of them were shot separately as short films during Moon's enrollment in an MFA program at Chung-Ang University (hence the separate end credits). Moon was said to have been initially unsure about the idea of releasing the three works together as a feature film, but they blend together seamlessly, and indeed each act gains resonance when placed beside the other two.

Act 1 depicts Moon spending an afternoon hiking with two of her friends, when they run into producer Won Dong-yeon (playing himself; his credits include Masquerade and Along With the Gods) with two male colleagues. Later, the six of them end up together at the same restaurant, but the attention of the two men soon turns into something uncomfortable. The plot of Act 2 is more diffuse, as Moon deals with a host of obligations, favors, and meetings over a typical week. The iconic image from this act is the one that gives the film its title; while driving in her van, Moon suddenly barks to her manager, "Stop the car!" She then gets out and runs screaming down the deserted road, as her manager flies into a panic. It's both funny and a bit pathetic; a defiant assertion of freedom, and a demonstration of just how little freedom she actually has.

For me it was Act 3 that achieved the most depth of feeling. Moon attends a nearly deserted wake for a recently deceased film director. She had not been on good terms with him, so she doesn't plan to stay there long, but she ends up sitting down for a contentious conversation with an old acting acquaintance (Yun Sang-hwa). Soon a young actress arrives (played by rising indie star Jeon Yeo-been), and the scene that follows is blackly funny but also quite sad. It's a moment of reflection back on filmmaking and the things we leave behind in life.

In her first turn behind the camera, Moon So-ri shows a good feel for storytelling and comic timing. There's a natural flow to each scene that leaves one anticipating more directorial work from her in the future. It also won't be a surprise to hear that the acting is a strong point. Of course with Moon herself it's a foregone assumption, and she carries the film in many ways. But she's also assembled a quite remarkable cast of unfamiliar faces (and a few familiar ones) who all provide utterly natural turns in front of the camera. Even her real-life husband, the film director Jang Joon-hwan (1987: When the Day Comes) makes an memorable appearance in Act 2, lending a personal touch to this intimate but thought-provoking and insightful film.      (Darcy Paquet)

    The Outlaws

On a crowded street in Garibong District in Seoul, two young thugs get into an argument. Tempers flare, and one pulls a switchblade. The other grabs a knife from a nearby market stall. The threat of bloodshed hangs in the air, but Ma Seok-do happens to be walking through the crowd, speaking on his cellphone. Without even breaking from his conversation, he swings his fist, disarms the two men and leaves them nursing their wounds. This is how the law is enforced in Garibong, and Ma Seok-do is the cop who nobody dares to provoke.

But there's a new arrival in the neighborhood. Jang Chen is an ethnic Korean gangster from Harbin, China who specializes in collecting debts. After landing in Seoul, it doesn't take long for him and his subordinates to clash with the Venom Gang ("Heuksapa") who control the area. But Jang Chen displays a ruthlessness and cruelty far beyond that of his adversaries, and it's not long before a full-scale turf battle is underway.

The Outlaws is based on a real-life gang war known as the "Heuksapa Incident", which took place in 2007. But the film is not concerned with portraying contemporary social ills, so much as it aims to be an action-packed, engaging piece of entertainment. In that it certainly succeeded - thanks to strong word of mouth, the modestly budgeted film smashed all expectations and sold 6.9 million tickets, ending up as the third-best selling Korean release of 2017.

It's not hard to see what audiences were attracted to in this film. Lead actor Ma Dong-seok (in English, he uses the name Don Lee) has appeared in 60 films and TV series since his debut in 2004, but it's only after his highly charismatic turn in the breakout zombie film Train to Busan (2016) that he has become a household name. The Outlaws is more or less made to showcase all aspects of his appeal: his brawny physique, his perfect comic timing, his skills as a fighter, and the unusual expressiveness of his eyes which reveal a sympathy beneath his rough manner. His character in this film is a law unto himself, but when the gang war starts to spin out of control, he takes on the impossible task of apprehending the entire mob at once.

There's no question that The Outlaws is a brutal film, with some genuinely disturbing moments of violence. But debut director Kang Yoon-sung keeps the conflict restricted to knives and fists, so it never loses its human dimension. For the villain he cast against type, with former singer Yoon Kye-sang taking on the role of Jang Chen. Korean viewers have praised him for this daring change of pace, and for the way he communicates menace mostly through his voice, rather than physical bravado.

At first glance, The Outlaws may look indistinguishable from countless other Korean cop thrillers, and it occasionally resorts to cliche. Nonetheless it succeeds on the whole thanks to the kinetic energy that pervades the film. And in no way does its success feel like a fluke. Director Kang clearly has a talent for juggling action, characterization and a bare-bones plot in a way that pulls viewers in. It wouldn't be the least bit surprising to see him establish himself in the coming years as a vital new player in the action genre.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Heart Blackened

Jang Tae-san (Choi Min-shik, The Tiger) has an awkward dinner meeting with his rebellious teenage daughter Mi-ra (Lee Su-kyung, Coin Locker Girl) and his prospective new wife, a popular singer Park Yu-na (Honey Lee, Tazza: Hidden Card), during which the former clearly indicates her disapproval of her father's impending marriage. One night, Mi-ra, wasted and spiteful, calls the singer to a dance club, after discovering a sexually compromising video of the latter in the internet. Next morning, she has no memory of what happened, but the CCTV seems to indicate that she has deliberately run over and killed Yu-na with her car. Jang retains the services of Choe Hye-jung (Park Shin-hye, The Royal Tailor), Mi-ra's former teacher and now a defense lawyer, to prove that Mi-ra might have been framed by one or more among other suspects, the roster of which includes the creepy and rude hacker Dong-myung, lecherously obsessed with Yu-na (Ryoo Joon-yeol, A Taxi Driver), her explosive-tempered former manager (Jo Han-cheol, Papa Zombie) and, as Choe increasingly comes to realize, Jang himself.

Heart Blackened is the latest film from the veteran Jung Ji-woo whose low-budget 2016 entry Fourth Place won much critical acclaim thanks to its gentle yet precise portrayal of the process through which the inhumanly competitive Korean society squashes the lives of children beneath its iron wheels. Considering the success he had scored with the resolutely small-scaled previous film, it was somewhat surprising to see him back at the helm of a glossy commercial project, even a remake of a Hong Kong film at that. The original, Silent Witness (2013), directed by Fei Xing and starring Sun Honglei in the tycoon role, is a fast-paced courtroom thriller that relies on its Rubic's Cube plot turns and twists to keep the viewer interest going. Jung, and the screenwriting team consisting of Lee Chung-hyun, Hong Yong-ho and Ha Goo-dam, do very little to tinker with mechanics of the plot, not trying very hard to plug rather glaring holes in the original narrative (For one, any American lawyer worth his or her salt is likely to work toward "proving" the initial "murder" was technically an accident, which negates the very premise of the "murder mystery."). As such, those who have liked the original for its mystery-novel intrigue might find the remake either strangely subdued or even lackadaisical.

Well before the investigation into the film's McGuffin, the CCTV footage that purports to show who really killed Yu-na, goes underway, it becomes pretty clear that Jung's agenda as a director lay somewhere else from the conventional thrills and suspense. Heart Blackened, as its English title surreptitiously indicates, is really about broken relationships, dehumanizing effects of personality-consuming, media-saturated modern life on such relationships, and desperate and sometimes wrong-headed efforts by the characters to mend them, even at the terrible personal cost. Jung, in the manner reminiscent of both his earlier (possibly) magnum opus Happy End as well as his more recent Fourth Place, carefully examines the deeply entrenched unhappiness underlying social relations of Koreans, rich and powerful or overworked and unprivileged, arrogantly committed to their value systems or confusedly flailing around, stewing in directionless resentment. Many of his dialogue scenes, usually filler material or little more than devices to plant clues that pay off later in a thriller like this, have emotional weights that call attention to the character's true motivations rather than their designated roles in the chess play.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in Jung's version of this story, Tae-san, the main character, Yu-na, the victim, and Mi-ra, the suspect, all manage to emerge as more than mere stereotypes, if not daringly original creations. The director plays fair to them by patiently laying out their temperamental as well as moral complexities before the viewers, and it is in the end these nuances and shadings to their characters that remain the most satisfying element of the film. Anchoring it is Choi Min-shik's admirably restrained performance, collaborating with Jung for the first time in eighteen years since his star-making turn in Happy End. Jang Tae-san's polite, reasonable demeanor initially presents a vexing contrast with his almost archetypically crude, sub-capitalist faith in the power of the money. As the film peels off its layers of intrigue, we realize that we are more interested in figuring out his positionality in the moral calculus, or to be a bit old-fashioned, his soul, rather than whether he has indeed murdered Yu-na, whom he at one point confessed to have loved more than his own daughter. Honey Lee, often cast in light, confectionary femme fatale roles in other films, leaves a striking impression in the opening section as a glamour goddess with just a hint of deep fatigue and irritation at the world. Jung sets it up in such a way that, despite her relatively short appearance, her presence continues to haunt the rest of the film. Lee Su-kyung also rises to the occasion, portraying with conviction an affluent teenager equipped with a bountiful amount of vocabulary to hurl hostility, anger and contempt at other human beings, but little resources to construct meaningful relationships.

One unfortunate casualty of the directorial focus on these three figures is Park Shin-hye's defense lawyer, who is supposed to be the investigator of the mystery yet is ultimately overshadowed by them. Counsel Choe pretty much disappears from the final section of the movie, which seems to confirm that Jung was not really invested in the resolution of the mystery, nor in its legal-ethical implications. Instead, he stages the film's climax in a fascinatingly self-reflexive manner, essentially calling attention to the movie's own identity as a motion picture, and inserts a "cinematic" reconciliation between two characters that had never taken place in "real life." It is to the credit of both Jung and his chosen cast that this scene does feel emotionally authentic despite its flagrantly "artificial" texture. I actually was greatly intrigued by Jung's approach in this section, but I also felt that it frankly would have worked better without the mystery-thriller trappings that served as its raison d'etre.

Production quality, beautifully lensed by DP Kim Tae-gyung (The Beauty Inside, 26 Years) and Lighting Director Hong Seung-cheol and designed with austerity but a sense of expansiveness by Production Designer Lee Ha-joon, (The Face Reader) is top-notch. Music score by Yeon Ri-mok, the keyboardist for the indie rock band Nunco (short for "Nuntteugo Kobein," derived from the traditional proverb "[Seoulites] slice your nose off while your eyes are wide open," but also a riff on the Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain), is suitably minimalistic yet elegantly affecting.

Heart Blackened is a high-quality piece of sophisticated and thoughtful filmmaking, with excellent performances spearheaded by Choi Min-shik, essaying a deceptively complex character thoroughly unlike those he portrayed in, say, Oldboy or Lucy. On the other hand, it is something of a bust as a mystery thriller, not really improving on its Sinophone model that had its own share of problems. Regrettably, the mid-budget thrillers relying on smart wrangling of the plot increasingly seem to be one of the more obvious casualties of the South Korean obsession with "ten-million-ticket blockbusters."      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Room No. 7

Doo-sik (Shin Ha-kyun, The Villainess) is a fortysomething owner of a scuzzy DVD-bang ("bang" as in "room") in a corner of the supposedly wealthy Apgujeong streets in Seoul. A DVD-bang, in case you are wondering, is sometimes deployed as a poor man's "love hotel" (if you have never heard of a "love hotel," I don't know where to even begin, buddy, sorry), a place wherein a couple could rent a movie and enjoy two hours' worth of sexual tryst, with or without seeing the movie. Doo-sik, previously a green grocer who had seen his marriage dissolve due to his business failure, is desperate to sell off his property to another clueless sucker who wants to open a shop in the area, believing (erroneously, as it turned out for Doo-sik and many others) that the Apgujeong-dong's aura automatically means a huge business and quick money. His only employee, Tae-jung (Do Kyung-soo, a.k.a. D. O. of the K-pop sensation EXO), an aspiring music artist, is sullen and misanthropic. When Doo-sik hires a Korean-Chinese migrant worker Han-wook (Kim Dong-young, The Age of Shadows), he sniffs at the latter's naÏveté. However, to his surprise and delight, the latter's sincerity and diligence manage to turn things around for him. Not only does the business suddenly pick up, a former high school president (Kim Jong-gu, Pandora) with a voyeuristic streak agrees to purchase the property at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, as you could expect in a satire like this, a tragic accident takes place to throw Doo-sik's plan haywire. His impromptu plan to keep the problem at bay, until the day of signing off the property, centers on the room no. 7, which he proceeds to lock up. What Doo-sik does not know is that Tae-jung has been working as a courier for a band of drug dealers and had already stashed a box of "goods" in the room that needs to be retrieved by a designated day as well.

Room No. 7, the sophomore effort by Lee Yong-seung, whose debut feature 10 Minutes (2013) garnered some critical notices for its sympathetic portrayal of the Korean youths trampled underneath the wheels of capitalism, treads a familiar territory in terms of the plot: the McGuffin hidden in the room no. 7 is in the end not that significant. What Lee is truly interested in appears to be ethnographic details of young and middle-aged Korean men making do at the outer perimeters of the tourist-ready, high-rise-filled metropolitan Seoul, desperately trying not to slip and fall into the abyss of abject poverty. Doo-sik's warm relationships with his natal family-- it is nice to see Hwang Jung-min, who co-starred with Shin as the circus-bred Soon-yi in the cult classic Save the Green Planet, cast as his sister-- as well as the interactions between him and a bizarrely style-conscious detective get as much coverage as the main plot: for the viewers who savor this type of character-driven, locally-grounded flavors in a movie, Room No. 7 provides some honest, non-nasty chuckles.

Much of the film's humor derives from Doo-sik's hilariously bipolar responses toward his shifting fortunes, as he in turn cajoles, pleads, threatens and spectacularly blows up at his family members, real estate brokers and Tae-jung. Shin Ha-kyun, one of the most reliable Korean actors and could play beatific and earnest in one film and pathetic and unstable in another, dominates the screen as the hapless DVD-bang owner. He is fully energized and spry like a nervous cat, yet effortlessly conveys through slapstick antics the inner sense of existential fatigue at having to compete full throttle in the rat race despite having had his butt kicked once. Shin is such a sincere actor that he makes the movie's climactic "sudden burst of tears" scene work: had it been played by another, merely competent thespian, it would have come off as obvious or even mildly hypocritical. On the other hand, Do Kyung-soo is merely okay as Tae-jung. Frankly, I felt a more seasoned young actor (Veteran's Yoo Ah-in, for instance) could have brought more of his own quirks and colors to this rather generic character.

There is nothing seriously wrong with Room No. 7: it is an amusing and even occasionally moving diversion, and director Lee's humanistic disposition comes through clearly. The movie simply lacks the hutzpah to leave a strong impression through outrageous displays of creativity or aggressive manipulation of the viewer's sentiments. It is primarily recommended to the students of the social geography of Seoul (admittedly a fascinating topic) and fans of Shin Ha-kyun (nothing useful for the EXO fans worldwide from me, sorry).      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Chase

Shim Deok-soo (Baek Yun-shik, Tazza: The High Rollers), a locksmith by profession, is a cranky old landlord of a low-rent apartment complex in the fictional street of Aridong in a Cholla Province town (actual location shooting was primarily done in the harbor city of Mokpo). Not exactly popular with the neighbors, Shim is nasty toward the tenants late in rent payment, including the disabled, retired policeman Choe (Son Jong-hak, Pandora) and a young girl named Ji-eun (Kim Hye-in, The Throne). When two oldsters in the town are found as dead bodies under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Deok-soo is chastened and decides to open up, if only a little, to Detective Choe and Ji-eun, learning that the former is still unofficially investigating an unresolved serial murder case of young women in the area thirty years ago. Soon, however, Detective Choe himself turns up dead, and Ji-eun goes missing. Deok-soo becomes convinced that something sinister is afoot. The police of course ignores him, but he finds an unexpected ally in another retired detective Park Pyeong-dal (Seong Dong-il, The Accidental Detective), who dresses and behaves as if he came straight out of an '80s Kang Woo-suk action-comedy.

Yet another "quirky" variant on the "based on a real-life crime" socially conscious thriller subgenre initiated by Bong Joon Ho's Memories of Murder (2003), The Chase is also one of the increasing number of Korean films to be based on a web comic series ("webtoons"), this time Aridong Last Cowboy (originally serialized in 2010) by Jepigaru (a popular web comic artist whose Steel Rain has also been adapted into a motion picture). Jepigaru's original is perhaps a bit angrier at the anomie and Social Darwinist violence of the contemporary Korean society than the film adapted from it. The old man Deok-soo in the comic comes off as a really old curmudgeon (quite unlike Baek, who can still look like a dashing ladies-man at the age 71) and his background including the horrifying trauma suffered during the Korean War has been dropped from the movie version. In general, the movie is brighter than its source, although some of the atrocities the villain commits are conceptually horrifying, borderline offensive.

Not surprisingly, The Chase is dominated by its two early old-age leads (these days 65 can hardly be considered a true "old age," even in South Korea, wherein the 2015 life expectancy is 85.5 for female and 78.8 for male citizens), Baek and Seong. Baek has always been a marvelous poker-faced actor peerless at revealing glimpses of vulnerability and anxiety beneath his cool-dude demeanor: he always appears to be just slightly mocking the naïveté of the world his character inhabits. In addition to humanizing the misanthropic landlord character, Baek brings a subtle touch of droll, knowing humor to the role of Deok-soo. His consummate skills are most evident when, as in Save the Green Planet, he is working with less experienced younger actors or the opposing parts engaged in flashy emotional outbursts. Seong Dong-il's retired cop, on the other hand, is a much more broadly "comic" character, beating up local punks, leering at female characters and affecting the deliberately uncouth air of a '70s American TV drama cop. His Pyeong-dal might rub some viewers in a wrong way, especially considering the plot revelation around the two-thirds of the film that radically changes the meaning of his previous behavior (this plot twist is plenty shocking, but its implication is also more or less ignored in the movie's climax).

Pyeong-dal's character arc is one of the more glaring missteps by screenwriter-director Kim Hong-seon, whose debut film Traffickers (2012) likewise features a radical plot twist that just skirts the edge of credibility, but otherwise he displays a sure hand in keeping the kettle boiling until the drawn-out (and admittedly funny) geriatric action sequence. A special mention must be made of the always-reliable Cheon Ho-jin's (Veteran, Lucid Dream) contribution as a mild-mannered herbalist, No. 1 in Pyeong-dal's list of the suspicious locals. Another veteran Bae Jong-ok (In Between Seasons, Chilsu and Mansu) plays the survivor of a serial killer attack who holds the key to the latter's true identity, but her snack shop owner is flagrantly based on a similar character in Memories of Murder, and amounts to little more than a plot device. The production quality is good, with the set designer Lee Jeong-woo (Part Time Spy), special make-up artists Yun Hwang-jik, Kim Se-hee (Traffickers), DPs Choe Joo-hyung (Black House) and Jo Young-cheon (indie documentary Ryeohaeng) all showcasing their talents.

The Chase is a comic buddy film grafted onto a serial killer mystery, which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. I think director Kim handles its wild shift in tones pretty well: my criticism is that it is ultimately a rather conventional film, not as brazenly satirical (or in-your-face crazy) as, say, A Hard Day (2013), with Seong's old-dog copper a throwback to the macho, gruff-but-warm-hearted "tough guy" characters of yesteryears. It is a reasonably pleasant and well-made diversion with some excellent performances from Baek and Cheon: they are the likely reasons for checking this one out by the fans of Korean cinema.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Forgotten

Jin-seok (Kang Ha-neul, New Trial) moves into a new house with his family, consisting of Dad (Moon Seong-keun, The Tooth and the Nail), Mom (Na Young-hee) and his brilliant but disabled brother Yu-seok (Kim Mu-yeol, Northern Limit Line, who looks eerily like the leftist critic Chin Jung-kwon with glasses on). He dismisses the uneasy sense of déjè vu, especially regarding a sealed chamber facing his bedroom. Everything goes fine, until Yu-seok is kidnapped by a group of thugs on a rainy night. Returning nineteen days later, the elder brother does not seem to remember anything that happened to him. Jin-seok, however, begins to notice some alarming details: Yu-seok sneaks out of the house at night, meeting suspicious characters and talking like a gangster boss: he seems to forget which leg of his is disabled: and so on. Jin-seok becomes convinced that someone else is impersonating his brother. However, the truth he uncovers is far stranger and more devastating.

Forgotten has scored a moderate hit at the domestic box office, collecting 1.83 million tickets during the winter season of 2017, probably attributable to the drawing powers of the young two leads, Kang and Kim, who have developed a substantive fan base among musical and TV drama enthusiasts. The film is also a return to big screen by the screenwriter Jang Hang-jun, who had made a feature film debut with Break Out (2002), a sophomoric but proficient star vehicle for then-young Cha Seung-won and Kim Seung-woo, but since his second film Spring Breeze (2003) has spent most of his time working for TV dramas. Jang's original screenplay is a curious contraption, one that feels like a compressed entire season of an oughts TV drama spiced with gore and F-words. Unlike more loosely constructed and conceptually weird Korean thrillers adapted from web comic series, Forgotten, while just as far-fetched as them, at least manages to hold viewer interest with its elaborate Rubic's Cube narrative tricks that we all know are hokey but compulsively watch anyway. Those who are less beholden to Korean TV drama-like stylistics, with the requisite deployment of slow motion footage, rapid cuts and long-form expository narration, might find the whole show hopelessly artificial or even dull.

More problematic for me are the film's rather blatant references to Oldboy and the ways in which Jang chooses to process them in its second half. Like some scholars who insist on reading Oldboy as a parable about a Korean everyman's (losing) struggle against the evils of neoliberal capitalism, Jang is determined to retell the traumatic story of the so-called IMF financial crisis in 1997 under the skins of a mystery thriller. That in itself might or might not be a decent idea, but then it becomes abundantly clear that, to make this point, Jang wants to go the whole melodramatic distance, pulling one tear-jerking cliché after another out of his sleeves. At the end, every single plot element or characterization, including Yu-seok's real identity and the truth behind Jin-seok's suppressed memory, is flattened under the big boo-hoo moment both directly cribbed from Oldboy and Joint Security Area and a stultifying, old-fashioned "tragic" denouement wherein nobody actually confronts his or her moral responsibility, because, wouldn't you know it, the foreign-originated IMF crisis was really to blame for everything.

The cast valiantly tries to sell to the audience the convoluted narrative and equally muddled character motivations. Kang Ha-neul is clearly a trouper, considering the grungy make-up he had to wear in the second half but not able to do much with his role. Kim Mu-yeol fares better, but his characterization makes little sense either: why would these cool, calculating characters who could convincingly impersonate a loving, caring sibling at one point feel the Pavlovian compulsion to succumb to the super-emotional behavioral patterns of a late '90s Korean leading man at the end of the movie? Among the technical staff, DP Kim Il-yeon and Lighting Supervisor Kim Min-jae (both worked together previously in The Mimic and A Single Rider) employs a thick, shadowy palette with stabs of glaring light illuminating select areas of the screen, enhancing the bleak atmosphere of the house and endowing the proceedings with a measure of visual dignity at the same time.

Forgotten can divide the viewer sympathies, depending on one's tolerance level regarding the heightened melodramatics, redolent with the kind of plot twists that ultimately feel hollow if you had expected some genuine historical or moral reflections to come out of them. Sure, it is no Blow-Up, or Oldboy for that matter. However, in my opinion, Jang could have ended up with a much better film if he had hired a younger screenwriter (preferably female) to judiciously prune the masculine breast-beating and jeremiad against the millennial traumas of the Korean people, already spoken for more than once in other, better films.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The First Lap

Kim Dae-hwan's sophomore work, The First Lap, is, like his debut feature End of Winter (2014), a story of characters struggling outside the comfort of a warm homestead in the cold winter season. The protagonists Su-hyeon (Cho Hyun-chul, TV drama Argon) and Ji-young (Kim Sae-byuk, The Day After) are living together, in a steady relationship going on for seven years. Ji-young is a sub-contractor at a TV broadcasting agency. Su-hyeon teaches fine art. Neither has a secure employment that would alleviate the concerns about their financial future together, nor is particularly good at working social connections or manipulating the human resources around them. They are not even shameless enough to take advantage of their parents. Compounding their anxiety is Ji-young's suspicion that she is pregnant. The entirety of the film traces the couple's journey from visiting Ji-young's parents in Inchon, and to meeting Su-hyeon's family in the snowbound Samcheok.

The First Lap has no sleight-of-hand tricks hidden in its sleeves. All elements of the film, its characterization, plot and theme, are conveyed with extreme clarity and precision. The two youngsters are scared of getting married and settling down. They are scared of becoming parents, especially the parents resembling their own. The future is murky, displaying few signposts for the right direction. Their trip to the parent's abodes merely exacerbates their uncertainties, rather than resolving the latter.

As you might have guessed, in this film the plot is not nearly as important as realistic and persuasive portrayals of the anxieties and terrors about the future felt by the two protagonists. Director Kim chooses to explore these emotions by closely following their trip on the ground level, rather than pouring the sentiments on the figures in the usual top-down manner. Not surprisingly, a considerable proportion of the film is constituted of improvised performances by the actors, organically responding to the environments they found themselves in without prior design. These environmental factors range from such happenstances as the unexpected pouring of heavy snow on a location site, or a dove flying across a running car giving the cast members an unanticipated jolt, to the so-called Candlight Demonstration of winter 2016 that had brought down the previous President, rendering the film an intriguing documentary feel, closely recording the political atmosphere of South Korea in 2016. So does the Candlight Demonstration inspire the protagonists to find answers for their dilemma? Of course not. Things are not that easy in real life.

And so, we know that The First Lap takes real life seriously. By this, I do not mean the kind of "realism" indulged by a typical Korean macho film claiming to expose the "dirty reality" of the Korean society by jamming the viewer's throats with insults and violence. In fact, there are no scenes involving insults or violence in this motion picture, with the exception of one or two minutes near the very end. The protagonists are simply too shy and sensitive to callously spread around their resentments, in any case.

The First Lap is meticulously, exquisitely put together. It works closely with its talented cast to capture the small echoes lost in the midst of loud roars and screams, one by one. Never self-indulgent, the film is instead merely honest, touching and beautiful.       (Djuna, translated by Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Steel Rain

Um Cheol-woo, a highly trained, lethal officer in the North Korean army, is given an unusual order one day by his superior, General Ri. He is asked to come out of early retirement and travel to an economic zone in Kaesong, a city just over the border from the South, to assassinate two men who pose a grave threat to national security. Um goes as instructed, but an unexpected scene greets him in Kaesong. North Korean soldiers plotting a coup have managed to hack into a highly sophisticated U.S. rocket launcher, and they fire its payload (nicknamed "Steel Rain" for the devastating shrapnel it spreads) directly at Kaesong's center. As it happens, the North Korean leader (referred to in the film as "No. 1") is visiting the city that day. But despite causing widespread destruction, the coup plotters' attempts to kill No.1 are thwarted by Um, and in the resulting confusion Um manages to cross into South Korea.

Steel Rain is a complicated film, but the turns of its plot (both plausible and far-fetched) are more fun to discover on your own, so I won't reveal too much here. Suffice it to say, amidst the state of emergency that spreads across the Korean peninsula, Um Cheol-woo ends up in Seoul with the key to preventing nuclear war. But there are few places he can turn to for help. Eventually he forms an uneasy partnership with Kwak Cheol-woo, a South Korean security secretary with whom he happens to share a given name. If Um gets by with reflexes and combat skills, Kwak's strengths are of a different sort: his ability to remain calm in a crisis, his analytical mind, and his communication skills. But much depends on the two men's ability to work together, despite cultural differences and decades of accumulated mistrust.

Director Yang Woo-suk's debut film The Attorney (2013), although a runaway smash hit, was nonetheless short on spectacle - the film relied on accomplished acting, subtle drama and appeals to idealism to create its impact. Steel Rain however is much more of a traditional blockbuster, with well-choreographed action set pieces spread across its running time, and references to the current geopolitical situation that feel frighteningly relevant. Released in December 2017, at a time when tensions between the U.S. and North Korea had reached fever pitch, this work which at other times might have come across as paranoid or exaggerated instead seemed nothing of the sort. It's not clear whether the final box-office tally of 4.5 million admissions was boosted or depressed by real-life threats of war and boasts about "nuclear buttons".

One of this film's strengths is its great ensemble cast, with even some of the smallest appearances leaving a lasting impression. But the two men at the top deserve special notice. Kwak Do-won, best known for his leading performance in The Wailing (2016), is down-to-earth and nuanced in this role, suggesting someone worn down but not burnt out by his time serving in the top circles of government. Kwok is an actor who can come across as highly likeable or highly unlikeable depending on the role, but here for most of the film he remains somewhere in the middle. Jung Woo-sung, meanwhile, was known in the 1990s as just a pretty face, but his career continues to thrive in his mid-40s, even as many of his contemporaries have faded from view. (Not to imply that he's still not good-looking...) The role of Um sees him as a legitimate action hero, but one who is scared about the fate of his country, and confused in unfamiliar surroundings. Jung captures these conflicting emotions in one of his best performances to date.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Along with the Gods

Ja-hong (Cha Tae-hyun, Scandal Makers) is a heroic firefighter, who, as the movie opens, saves a young girl but tragically falls to his death in the process. As soon as his heart stops beating, however, he is accosted by three black-clad figures, Grim Reapers sent to collect his soul: the handsome and svelte Gang-rim (Ha Jung-woo, The Handmaiden), also serving as the defense attorney cum case worker for the befuddled firefighter, the cynical Won-maek (Joo Ji-hoon, Asura: The City of Madness), Gang-rim's assistant, and the young and perky Deok-chun (Kim Hyang-gi, A Werewolf Boy), a sort of telepathic paralegal. The three Reapers are tasked with taking Ja-hong through Seven Circles of Hell, each Hell specifically designed to address the sins committed by the deceased: murder, sloth, lying, vices, betrayal, violence and defilement of filial relations (A very Confucian Hell, this). Ja-hong being such an obsessive do-gooder, the trio are initially quite confident that he will pass through the judgments of the Hell's tribunals with flying colors and earn them credits to be spent on being reincarnated as humans again (Apparently this is the best thing that can happen to a soul in this universe. You gotta be kiddin', right?). However, they soon discover that Ja-hong's life holds some mysteries that threaten to put him in a bad light, especially regarding his mute mother (Ye Soo-jung, Train to Busan). Meanwhile, a new complication arises, when Ja-hong's brother Su-hong (Kim Dong-wook, The Cat) dies while serving his military duties, and turns into a Vengeful Spirit. Gang-rim must investigate the hidden truths behind Ja-hong's family relations, and hunt down Su-hong before the latter could derail his brother's case.

Along with the Gods is yet another recent Korean motion picture based on an online comic series. First serialized in 2010 by Joo Ho-min, the series was popular enough to have been adapted into a Japanese-language version, a radio drama and a musical (!). The original, which incorporates various Korean folklores and myths into its storyline, is heavily satirical, notorious for its droll, fatalistic humor. The motion picture adaptation, long time in gestation, was originally slated to be directed by Kim Tae-yong (the Late Autumn remake starring his wife, Tang Wei, Memento Mori), but eventually was taken over by Kim Yong-hwa, a dependable crowd-pleaser with Take-Off and Mr. Go in his resumé. The commercial instincts of the producers proved correct, as Along with the Gods beat other New Year season competitors to claim, as of early February 2018, the position of the third all-time biggest domestic hits, with more than 14.2 million tickets sold.

The film's tremendous box-office success is actually not that difficult to understand. It is a slick, if not altogether sensible, commercial extravaganza streamlined to do just two things: plunk the viewers down through the amusement-park ride of disposable thrills, and also wring as many teardrops out of their eyes as humanly possible. Whatever satirical intent that Joo's original comic originally contained had largely been cleansed out of the palette. Screenwriter-director Kim and the production team reduce the Hell-scape into a series of CGI-dominated fantasy vistas both overly familiar and pointlessly busy. None of the Seven Circles of Hell, as visualized by Production Designers Lee Mok-won (Train to Busan) and Park Jae-wan (Tazza: The Hidden Card) as well as the SFX crew, has the genuinely disturbing power of the technically crude but conceptually nightmarish depictions of the torment visited upon the sinners in, say, The Great Hell (1972). The impressions of light amusement are reinforced by comedic performances delivered by the actors playing prosecutors and judges in the Hell's courts, ranging from the ubiquitous faces like Oh Dal-soo and Lim Won-hie to bizarre cameos like the voice actor Jang Gwang (Silenced) and the child actress Kim Soo-an (The Battleship Island). All this is mildly amusing but hardly innovative, suspenseful or genuinely involving.

For me, the most technically impressive and, relatively speaking, most interesting portion of the movie depicts Gang-rim's investigation of Su-hong's death in the military camp. In these sequences Ha Jung-woo is in his elements, speeding up or rewinding the time flow to locate clues, teleporting himself like flying bullets across the night sky, and nonchalantly blending in with the living population (modest running gags in this section, like a hospitalized old man who can see and recognize Gang-rim as a Grim Reaper, are in fact a lot funnier than the broad comedies displayed in the Hell-set sequences). In the end, unfortunately, all this CGI-buffeted blockbuster action amounts to little, as it becomes clear by around two-thirds of the running time that the film is plunging headlong into the anticipated Great Tear-jerking Climax, in which the firefighter's long-suffering mother will be apotheosized as the Ultimate Self-Sacrificing Korean Matriarch. It is difficult to determine which is more depressing: that a talented actress like Ye Soo-jung is yet again stuck essaying a profoundly retrograde, emotional button-pushing narrative device (I would not deign to call this a "character"), Mother Who Cannot Speak (except when allowed to do so by her Male Heirs), or that this kind of heavy-handed tear-jerking tactics worked like gangbusters for most of the contemporary Korean viewers.

Along with the Gods is, in stark terms, the latest money-making model put together by the Korean movie studios in their efforts to replicate the Hollywood tent-pole franchise blockbusters, and sure enough, the movie cheerfully promises more adventures of the Grim Reaper trio to come. I suppose congratulations are due to Kim Yong-hwa's Dexter Studios, Realize Entertainment and Lotte Entertainment for successfully "localizing" the commercial model of tent-pole franchise movie-making for Koreans. And to think all those struggles to protect the Screen Quota were for this. For me, Along with the Gods has the flavor of something like a '90s Jerry Bruckheimer "action blockbuster" remake of a classic film blanc such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan, wherein Mr. Jordan would be played by machine-gun-toting, one-liner-spewing Bruce Willis. And that project would have made money in the US, too, probably (Sigh).

Well, in any case, do not bother to sign me up for the sequel. And dear Korean filmmakers, please, please, let's not use a Mother Who Cannot Speak as a shinp'a device ever again.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    1987: When the Day Comes

The events of June 1987, in which millions of people poured into the streets to resist the oppressive military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan, hold a monumental place in South Korea's history. Over three weeks of protests, the people proved stronger than the government and their instruments of control, setting the stage for democratic reforms which have lasted to this day. It might seem like an obvious subject to turn into a movie, given that the Korean film industry has had such success dramatizing other major events from recent history.

But it has taken until now for a director to bring these events to the screen. For one thing, the so-called June Struggle is not the simple, uplifting story of triumph over oppression that it may appear to be from the outside. Koreans who lived through this era recall it with far more complicated emotions, given that the military dictatorship ultimately hung onto power for another five years, and the transition to democracy was agonizingly slow and painful.

Over the years, several other film projects about 1987 have failed to come together, partly because of the challenge of capturing the complex dynamics of that moment. But with surprising success, director Jang Joon-hwan (Save the Green Planet) has made a film that not only rings true for people who experienced it first hand, but has also captivated younger viewers, resulting in a critical hit that sold over 7 million tickets.

1987: When the Day Comes (in Korean, the title is simply '1987') focuses not on the protests themselves, but on the events that led up to them. In contrast to a movie like A Taxi Driver (2017), which centers in on a touching personal story that symbolizes the broader event, 1987 follows a very large cast of characters, moving back and forth between their various stories. The result is that we not only get a broader cross section of society on screen, but that the film manages to capture how a slow-burning sense of rage spreading throughout the populace gradually builds into a powerful social momentum.

The film is bookended by the deaths of two students -- real-life incidents that would be well-known to the Korean audience. The first is Park Jong-cheol, a linguistics student from Korea's leading university who died while being waterboarded by police at the Anti-Communist Investigations Bureau. Realizing how potentially explosive news of this incident could be, at a time when society is already on edge, the director of the ACIB (Kim Yun-seok, in a chilling performance) orders that his body be quickly cremated. However this requires the approval of the temperamental and evidently alcoholic Prosecutor Choi (Ha Jung-woo), who whether out of idealism or a petty sense of rebellion, refuses the order and demands an autopsy. Thus begins a slow chain reaction in which doctors, journalists, activists, prison guards, and frustrated police detectives all contribute small acts of resistance, which snowball into an escalating crisis for the government.

If there's one character who symbolizes the populace as a whole it's Yeon-hee, a university student who initially shows little interest in politics, until a fellow student starts to challenge her complacency, and the government's oppression hits closer to home. One of the few characters not based on a real-life person, her trajectory may seem a bit too pat, but her role is given life by the spirited performance of Kim Tae-ri, fresh off her star-making performance in 2016's The Handmaiden. Sure enough, 1987 makes ample use of star power in its ensemble cast, which occasionally hit false notes but which on the whole makes the film's blend of social commentary and entertainment all the more effective.

Sometimes timing is everything for a film. In late 2016 and early 2017, a year before this film's release, crowds of a similar magnitude filled the streets of Seoul and other cities demanding the impeachment of the corrupt and incompetent president Park Geun-hye. It was a watershed moment for South Korea's young and resilient democracy, making it all the more appropriate that a film like 1987 should appear and shine a light on the sacrifices and struggles that allowed that democracy to be born.      (Darcy Paquet)

Koreanfilm.org, last updated October 12, 2018.