Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

Chinjeolhan geumjassi (2005), South Korea

It's a tradition to eat tofu upon release. 

So that you will live white as snow and never sin again.

Director: Chan-Wook Park

Synopsis

In Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the protagonist Geum-ja Lee is sentenced to 19 years for kidnapping and murdering a five years old child, being released from prison, at the beginning of the film, after fulfilling 13 years of punishment. The movie serves as the third and final installment of the "vengeance trilogy" initiated years before with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

Review

The movie deserves particular emphasis for achieving a slightly suspense-filled poetic narrative throughout the entire film, competently introducing the viewer to the deeply touching story of the protagonist. As commonly observed, similar background histories tend to naturally victimize the main character, forcing the viewer to instantly feel the desired compassion for the character. Interestingly, in this particular case, the empathy for the main character is conquered during the development of the story. The protagonist is far from being promptly characterized as a victim, as the character development is perfectly executed, allowing the viewer to fully appreciate the distinctive periods of her history. At some points, it may even be hard to feel any sympathy at all for the main character. The involving feeling of care, sympathy and compassion is nonetheless gently and emotionally constructed throughout the film. For that reason, a brilliant and incisive interpretation of the protagonist would be primordial for achieving the intended attachment. Yeong-Ae Lee delivers an extremely competent and secure performance, carefully allowing the viewer to observe the fissures of her character’s rigid personality that show her hidden fragility behind her tragic past. On a side note, and in agreement with the fact that I usually tend to dislike including foreign Languages when they are not perfectly executed (which was unfortunately the case), it must be pointed out that the dialogs in English seemed vaguely awkward.

Contrarily to Oldboy for example, the plot does not rely on shocking twists and turns. No big revelations wait at the end of the movie as on the contrary, the plot just beautifully reveals its essence piece by piece as the main events occur. The movie completes the vengeance trilogy, being aesthetically without a doubt the best achieved of the three. Beautifully shot, the particularly outstanding camera-work is only surpassed by the use of extremely contrasted and saturated colors, reflecting the beauty of the film itself. The movie reunites all the best elements Chan-Wook Park has proven to master. Filled with sporadic humorous and satiric moments as well as surrealistic settings contrasting the brilliantly executed scenes with real and extreme violence, the film transmits the usual aggressive character even though it might be considered considerably more lighten up compared with his antecessors. The superb soundtrack, for the most part composed by Choi Seung-hyun, brilliantly defines at the same time a few quirky moments and the saddest scenes during the film, embracing the nostalgic personality of the story.

Accordingly, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is a brilliant ending for the proposed vengeance trilogy. Although it may not be comparable to the genius of Oldboy, as the plot is somehow inferior and does not have the impact the latter had, it seems obvious how the director intended to focus on beauty itself, constructing a feeling of nostalgia and melancholia which allowed the trilogy to end with a warm and peaceful sentiment of goodbye, as revenge and remorse appear to serenely fade away, as the characters embrace purity at the end of the film. “Big Atonement for big sins. Small Atonement for small sins”. Substance and meaning seem to be carefully injected throughout the movie, replacing the raw character of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or the aggressive and brutally insane personality observed of Oldboy. Most importantly, the film stands on its own as an undisputable masterpiece from Chan-Wook Park.

Be white. Live white. 

Like this.

R-Point

Arpointeu (2004), South Korea

Director : Su-Chang Kong

Synopsis

A mysterious and disturbing radio call is received by the South Korean troops during the Vietnam War in 1972. Strangely enough, the message comes from a unit that had previously been dispatched to a zone called R-Point six months before and long assumed to be death. Accordingly, a new unit led by lieutenant Choi Tae-in is sent to investigate, having seven days to find out any traces of the disappeared soldiers. As the soldiers enter the R-Point, a frightening island seemingly devoid of human presence, a bizarre message written in a rock comes across – "He who sheds others’ blood cannot return".

Review

R-Point is extremely competent as a horror movie with a suspense-filled plot. An abandoned mansion, a soldier following a silent ghost unit believing he is following his own unit, a French cemetery appearing during a storm, a nerve-wracking tension particularly well constructed and developed. As the plot is played out, the pacing slowly increases and the viewer is allowed to question the veracity of the events. Is this a ghost story? Or are these ghosts only the result of dementia and isolation of a group of fatigued soldiers during the Vietnam war? Visually wise, the movie is particularly well-shot, capturing the growing paranoia felt by each soldier throughout the film, which as a major impact in the horror atmosphere that is intended to be created throughout the film. The locations – an enormous abandoned mansion or a jungle, for example – and the extremely adverse meteorological conditions were particularly well chosen for a horror movie set. The wartime setting serving as a backdrop for a horror movie served as a thoroughgoing experience of the fears, paranoia and inhumanity of a group of soldiers during the war. 

Apart from both the Lieutenant Choi and the Sergeant Jin, the characters are unfortunately mostly uninteresting, few to near none information is provided for each one of the soldiers appearing during the movie. The acting stays nonetheless competent and the supposed military skills of the characters are fairly observed throughout the movie. Woo-Seong Kam delivers once again an interesting performance in the same year Spider Forest came out. As the Korean troops were not particularly seen as heroes when the Vietnam conflict came to an end, the movie seems to suggest that even without blood on their hands (as the movie proves for more than once), each soldier was haunted during the movie, which may allow the viewer to conclude that the fact that they were soldiers in the Vietnam conflict was already enough.

A few flaws can however be easily pointed out. The presence of the presumptuous American troops was for instance particularly unnecessary, with dialogues being extremely awkward to say the least, and the attitude of the American soldiers seemingly being out of place during the referred scenes. Furthermore, from this point on, the viewer knows that for each character death will be certain, which allied to a poor character development, allows an obvious lack of interest for each secondary character. My major concern at the end of the movie relies however on the number of questions that the film does not answer. Although several movies allow the viewer to actively participate in the end, unfortunately with R-Point the atmosphere of extreme incertitude and the number of unanswered questions for the sequence of events are considerably unsatisfying. 

In the current cinematographic panorama, R-Point will serve most importantly as a refreshing change of pace in the horror genre, with a particularly interesting and historical background in which horror and mystery are furthermore satisfactorily conjugated. 

Spider Forest

Geomi Sup (2004), South Korea

Director : Il-gon Song

Synopsis

Kang-Min, widower and producer of a transmitting TV station, wakes up in the middle of a forest at night, where he finds a small cabin where a middle-aged man and Su-Young, Kang-Min’s girlfriend, have been brutally murdered. Chasing a shadow that appears to be the author of the crime, Kan-Min is attacked and bludgeoned into unconsciousness. When Kang-Min awakes, he walks up to a nearby highway only to be brutally hit by a vehicle at high speed.

Review

Visually stunning, impeccably performed and ornamented with a significant number of symbolic and metaphoric elements, defining Spider Forest in a single cinematographic genre might be considered however a hardly solvable question. Indeed, what starts as an undeniably horror movie, slowly metamorphoses its premise into a melancholic love story with tragic contours narrated in a depressing way. The argument of the film is based on a series of puzzles outlined by the death of two characters in a forest named Spider Forest. In accordance, after waking up in the hospital having miraculously survived after brain surgery, the now amnesiac protagonist is considered to be the main suspect for the death of his girlfriend and the brutally mutilated man in the cabin. The narrative is then, from this point on, defined by the presence of flashbacks, memories, illusions and reveries from the subconscious mind of the main character. As memories trigger more repressed memories and the story explores  the obscure details of Kang-Min’s story, his childhood, the tragic events of his life, his guilt and his own painful inner conflicts, the viewer will most likely be piecing together the fragments of what is no longer a bizarre dream, but an emotional and tragic love story. 

Several elements are delicately explored, although there is a leitmotif that goes through the movie materializing the solution (quite logical, in my honest opinion) of the puzzle at the end of the film. Unfortunately, the movie appears to leave too many loose ends (that may not be considered particularly relevant to the story) and a substantial number of open questions that the viewer will have to solve. The ambiguity of Spider Forest might in this context not be particularly appealing to the viewer at the end of the film, although at the same time it allows the viewers’ perception to be taken into consideration. 

Spider Forest remains a man’s spiraling journey of searching for the truth wrapped in a surrealist atmosphere, and without a doubt a very bizarre yet unique cinematographic experience.

Three... Extremes

Saam Gaang yi (2004), Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan

Synopsis

Three… Extremes is an Asian cross-cultural trilogy of horror films from three accomplished Asian directors of three different Asian countries. The movie is the second installment of the proposed series of two films, following its particularly well-achieved antecessor Three (2002). From the point of view of the viewer, Three...Extremes (or Three, Monster) had for objective to provide an improved installment of three segments, a task considered to be partly complicated given the many brilliant elements present in the previous compilation, but in the other hand plausibly realistic given the inexistent balance that Three failed to find. Three…Extremes comprises as indicated before three segments: Dumplings by Fruit Chan (Hong Kong), Cut by Park Chan-Wook (South Korea) and Box by Takashi Miike (Japan). With the movie clearly intended to heavily rely on two of the most promising names in the current Asian horror scene, Three... Extremes would be considered to be clearly superior, achieving the success that Three was never able to attain. The movie clearly reaches for the extreme that exists within the viewer, for our greatest fears, obsessions, repulsions, superbly bringing out the worst inside every single human being.

Review

Dumplings is the first segment of the film, introducing the viewer to the story of Mrs. Lee (Miriam Yeung), an aging movie star who has long ago lost the attention of her husband and has therefore decided to visit Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), an old woman who still has the looks of her youth due to a secret disturbing and gruesome ingredient in her own dumplings recipe. For those who are not familiarized with the work of Fruit Chan, up to the movie release and with the exception of the present segment, the director's filmography predominantly considered particularly uninteresting plots with prostitution and other problems of the modern Hong Kong society as its main backgrounds. Dumplings starts promptly, with the viewer being introduced in the first five minutes of the film, to the special ingredient in Aunt Mei’s dumplings recipes.  The director clearly does not fear to shock the viewer, being at this precise point that Fruit Chain clearly reinvents himself. Still focusing in previously developed work, with a dark satire of elements of the Hong Kong society, Dumpling provides a noteworthy clin d'oeil to a large range of social issues such as incest, the gap between social classes, the detrimental obsession with youth, immigration and clandestine abortions.  A brilliant nerve-racking soundtrack by Chan Kwong-wing is accompanied by a veritable parade of disturbing sounds and noises orchestrating a disquieting atmosphere, giving the film a tremendously well-achieved audible character and surely providing a constant feeling of repulsion. A 90-minute version of the segment was released in the same year, with a different twist at the end, and allowing Fruit Chan to explore a high number of elements that were somehow undervalued in the short story.

Cut describes the story of a filmmaker (Lee Byung-hun) kidnapped by a figurant/extra (Lim Won-hee) of a few of his previous movies, to whom is given the opportunity of saving his wife (Gang Hye-jung) by killing an innocent child. The genius previously observed in Park Chan-wook work (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Oldboy) is once more registered in the present brilliantly executed segment. The film follows in a distorted "quest for revenge" schema, reminding the viewer in some ways of the Vengeance Trilogy of the same director. Based upon a surrealistic reality, the film is most likely defined as an unclear voyage inside the mind of the protagonist, into an intriguing environment of uncertainty and terror where, beyond psychosis, the existing sporadic humor (particularly displaced and absurd), only leads to further confusion. Visually stunning and with a correct use of colour and light, Cut includes a few creatively executed scenarios, although for the majority of the movie, the action is claustrophobically confined to one single set. Cut culminates beautifully in a fatal climax, where the reality and the reality that the protagonist appears to see collapse in an abysmal emotional density. The short film is without a doubt a brilliant masterpiece and considered to be the best segment of the trilogy.

Kyoko (Kyoko Kasegawa) is a writer tormented by the accidental death of her twin sister, when they both had only ten years old. One day, the main protagonist discovers in her desk an invitation for a meeting in the exact same place where her sister died. The work of the controversial director Takashi Miike is long (Audition, Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q), shining in a considerably large range of themes. The film mixes in a particularly exacerbated way dream and reality, tending to be somehow confusing, and giving the viewer a certain insecurity concerning the direction of plot. Miike succeeds however to toast the viewer with a particularly outstanding camera-work, characteristic and constantly well-achieved during the film, with a few shooting elements consistent with the final twist and interesting visual effects that generate a suffocating atmosphere due in part to the disturbing horror felt by the protagonist. All in all, I tend to believe that Box represents in some ways the filmography of Takashi Miike in one single word: irregular. Therefore, although being considered in general a satisfying concise work, Box could clearly have been developed in a more brilliant way as Takashi Miike as previously proven to be capable of.

Three

Saam Gaang (2002), South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong

Synopsis

Three comprises three short films from three different directors of different nationalities: Memories by Jee-woon Kim (South Korea), The Wheel by Nonzee Nimibutr (Thailand) and Going Home by Peter Chan (Hong Kong), producer of the sequel The Eye. The movie is the first installment created as an international cooperation between three different Asian countries, followed two years later by the successfully acclaimed Three... Extremes. Due to the success of the later, Three is sometimes considered to be a sequel of the second movie, having even been "incorrectly" denominated as Three Extremes II.  Interestingly, each segment of both movies tends to reflect the culture of each country, its own beliefs, traditions and mysticisms.

Review

With Memories, Jee-Woon Kim demonstrates the quality that turned out to be observed a year later with the brilliantly executed A Tale of Two Sisters. The segment describes the story of a man (Bo-seok Jeong), with no recollection of the moments leading up to the sudden disappearance of his wife a few days before, and the story of an amnesic woman (Hye-su Kim), who wakes up in another part of the town, trying desperately to remember her way back home. The film is mostly a concise work, well accomplished and particularly well structured, notwithstanding the somehow predictable (but still well achieved) final twist. Competent acting, visually captivating with a beautiful camera-work and easily instilling a good sense of terror in the viewer, Memories is nonetheless slightly corrupted by an obvious (and sometimes fastidious) similarity to the film Ringu and to classic clichés of the actual Asian horror scene.

After Memories, The Wheel is somehow a clear disappointment, going far beyond from the fact that I usually tend to not particularly appreciate films where the main terror source is an evil puppet, as the present one. The segment is about an arts troupe grappling with the curse of an evil puppet that surrounds the obscure deaths of a high number of characters. Beyond the predominantly annoying poor acting during the film, The Wheel fails principally by suffocating a poor plot with exacerbated horror and dramatic elements comprising drownings, fires, asphyxiations, sudden agonizing deaths, suicides, prohibited passions, possessions and even ghosts. Tedious, The Wheel is undoubtedly the piece that does not fit in the compilation, alienating a possible smooth transition between the three short stories and becoming (after a few hilarious moments) a constant exercise of patience. The story allows however the viewer to have an interesting cultural experience of rural Thailand, introducing us to a few traditions, mysticisms and to a genre of dance drama from Thailand (Khon), being culturally the richest segment among the compilation.

“A cop searching for his missing son when he is kidnapped by a man who keeps his wife locked inside their apartment” is the premise of Going Home, which is by far the longest and clearly the most developed segment of the three stories. A grotesque love story, reaching the limits of the macabre. Clearly lacking the frightening factor and punctuated by a series of events constantly introduced in a particular slow pace, the film excels by its nature undoubtedly touching, intelligent, and with an unpredictable twist at the end for a story impeccably performed and interpreted.

Hansel & Gretel

Henjel gwa Geuretel (2007), South Korea

Synopsis 

Eun-su, a troubled young man, has a car accident in a lost mountain road. When Eun-su wakes up, he finds a mysterious girl, dressed up like Little Red Ridinghood that helps him leading him into a fairytale scenario, into her own house deep in the middle of a forest. The main character soon meets her siblings and the couple supposed to be their parents. An obvious nerve-wracking tension and a mysterious atmosphere dominant inside the house contrast with the colorful and visually detailed ambiance of each different set. The story then details each day in which Eun-su tries desperately to run away from the house, without success.

Review

Hansel and Gretel is a well-known fairytale of German origin describing the story of a young brother and sister threatened by a cannibalistic witch living in a deep forest in a house made of cake and sugar. As it is later revealed in the movie, the storyline has a direct inspiration in the fairytale itself, including several references that may therefore be observed during the film, gently reminding us of the fairytale: the house, the forest, cupcakes, cookies, cream and sugar, the bread crumbs or an adult pushed into a burning fireplace.

Although for some of us, children may represent one of the best explored scary sources in horror movies, with Hansel and Gretel, the director has decided to take a different path for a story that may not even be considered as a horror film. As soon revealed, the children have supernatural powers, punishing the bad grown-ups which continue to disappoint them. Although some scenes are particularly well achieved in the horror domains (transformation of one of the characters into a living doll or the suggestion that another character was literally cooked and eaten by the inhabitants of the house), the supernatural powers of the children are somehow poorly developed during the plot. As the film goes and the tension increases, the plot appears to take a different path becoming in a certain way a meaningful story that has something to say about the abandon and the abusive treatment of children or about the hypocrisy of Christian institutions. Hansel and Gretel is thus probably better described as a mysterious dark fantasy played safely, with strong points of interest but somehow lacking something more. 

A Blood Pledge

Yeogo goedam 5: Dong-ban-ja-sal (2009), South Korea

Synopsis
A Blood Pledge is the fifth film in the film series telling the story of four girls, Eon-joo (Jan Gyung-ah), So-yi (Son Eun-seo), Eun-young (Song Min-jeong) and Yu-jin (Oh Yeon-seo), which apparently make a collective pact to commit suicide. Although all of them seem to climb to the roof of the building, only one of the students jumps to her death. Among speculation of what actually happened, rumors of the reasons for Eon-jon's suicide and the appearance of Jeong-eon (Yoo Shin-ae) the younger sister of the victim, the story quickly seems to take its shape through the contours of the truth.

Review
Series of American films, with special emphasis on those concerning the horror genre, are usually known by their apparent tendency to repetition and rapidly exhausting the originality sometimes achieved in the first film. The series Whispering Corridors is however the opposite of this american tendency, being apparently able in five films and ten years after to keep a simple premise and combining differently terror adjacent to ghost stories.

Contrary to some of the previous films in the series, A Blood Pledge clearly proposes itself explicitly as an horror movie, investing in concrete elements supposed to scare the viewer, and limiting in an obvious way the investment in the history plot. The film follows the possibly least interesting and most generic of the arguments registered in the series, although being the first that considers the topic of group suicide among students in Korea. The characters are particularly uninteresting (especially the main protagonist and the ghost), with ineffective and exaggerated acting being often registered. The explanation of the events is done in a slow pace, with no particular final twist (as commonly observed in the current panorama of classic Asian cinema). A Blood Pledge stands out as the first film repeating obvious elements previously used in the series, recurring to a few acceptably well done scares under the clear influence of Ringu. A wide range (not guaranteeing its effectiveness) of special effects is also used, usually with an unreasonable exaggeration of blood and a few laughable moments of attempt of terror (special emphasis on an exploding head...). All in all, A Blood Pledge still provides a good entertainment, but is merely a simplistic horror movie devoid of anything even considered remotely interesting.

Voice

Yeogo gwae-dam 4: Moksori (2005), South Korea

Synopsis
Voice is the fourth installment of the proposed series of films "Yeogo gwae-dam", following the line of its predecessors whose narrative revolves around a school haunted by a former student, with the present one describing the story of Young-eon, an aspiring singer whose talent seems to be thoroughly recognized by her best friend Seon-min. However, early in the film and while practicing, Young-eon is mysteriously attacked by a supernatural force, and her body enigmatically disappears. Waking up the next morning as a ghost, Young-eon who can only count on the help of her best friend, who seems to be the only one able to hear her voice, is determined to uncover the mystery surrounding her apparent death.

Review
According to the film, after death, a ghost's voice can be kept as a way to communicate with those human beings with whom the ghost had a strong connection in life. However if the connection is weakened, then the ghost starts loosing its voice and can no longer communicate with humans, becoming invisible and inaudible. The voice does not vanish all at once, but will disappear intermittently over the course of hours and days, which can be observed during the film when the friendship between the two main characters becomes strained. The relationship between the two girls is then once again the basis of the story as previously observed in the series. Moreover, following the line of previous films (in particular Memento Mori, the second installment of the series), Voice cannot be described as an horror film although it seems to be clear that no attempts were made in that direction. On the opposite, the film is better described as a emotionally touching story about friendship and loneliness, with one of the strongest plots of the series. 

Particularly, I must confess that I was pleasantly surprised during the unfolding plot. A beautiful and talented Kim Ok-Bin at the beginning of her career (later better known for her superb performance in her role in Park Chan-Wook's Thirst) as the protagonist, surrounded by a female casting marked by competent performances during the film, flickering lights and classic lightning techniques to achieve dark contrasts, a particularly beautiful soundtrack, with the action being claustrophobically confined to just a few sets since the ghost could not leave the school ground. The movie plays with the different feelings of each character, exploring the selfishness and the altruism of Young-eon, obsession, manipulation and suicide as a consequence of being chastised in a korean high school. Moreover, Voice stands out chiefly by allowing the viewer to have a different vision of a typical ghost story movie, showing the isolation and loneliness of a ghost in its first moments after being dead, exploring the fear of being forgotten, revisiting the most meaningful moments in a ghosts life. Ultimately the film scrutinizes the many reasons of why some ghosts seem to stay among us. Revenge, the truth. Being a dog and becoming a wolf. And the one reason that eventually becomes the final twist in this film.