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You know what they say, if you’re going to seek revenge, you’d best dig two graves. In a way, that’s what the bereaved mother at the centre of Kim Mi-jo’s familial vengeance comedy The Journey to Gyeong-ju (경주기행, Gyeongju gihaeng) ends up doing, but really what she wants is to repair her fracturing family which has been torn apart in the wake of her youngest daughter’s brutal abduction and murder. The killer was caught, but as the judge saw something in him that suggested he might be a candidate for rehabilitation, he handed him a comparatively light sentence that Ok-sil (Lee Jung-eun) in particular feels provides no sense of justice for her daughter.
For that reason alone, she decided to accept a cash settlement rather than press charges knowing that the killer, Sang-hyun (Byun Yo-han), would be released relatively quickly so she could kill him herself with the help of a shady underground fixer she met at a support group. To pull this off, she enlists her three surviving daughters, most of whom have their doubts about this plan, not only the morality of it but whether a group of four ordinary women who’ve never done anything like this before can really hold a brutal killer captive and torture him to death. They are, though, largely unable to directly defy their mother and are therefore looking for other ways to stop her from going through with this by pretending to play along. Ok-sil, however, feels like this is the only way that she will be able to move forward with her life.
The irony is that they frame this as a family trip to honour Gyeong-ju’s birthday, all of them piling into the now beaten up camper van father Mu-il (Kim Hak-sun) bought when Gyeong-ju was born hoping they’d take a lot more family holidays. The age gap between the sisters, however, meant that they only took one all together and that was, like this trip, impromptu and rolled in with a business obligation, or maybe the other way around. When oldest daughter Jang-ju’s (Gong Hyo-jin) husband and young daughter turn up announced, in a way, it’s like the family is restored with Seok-man (Kim Young-sung) taking Mu-il’s place while Yun-ji takes that of the absent Gyeong-ju. Waking up in the middle of the night at the remote villa they’ve rented, Ok-sil does a quick head count, realises someone’s missing, then looks over at Yun-ji and acknowledges there are the right number of people after all. They took this trip for the purposes of murder, but also ended up having a nice family holiday while creating “alibis” at various local tourist spots and posting pictures on social media.
What did they didn’t really know was that Sang-hyun had figured out they probably took the settlement money with the intention of killing him, and so is actually intent on killing them first. There is something bestial about him in the way that he can’t be subdued and immediately begins a crime spree after managing to escape. It’s difficult to see why the judge felt he might have a chance at reform given the nature of his crime and the probability that Gyeong-ju was not his first victim. The fact that Sang-hyun is actively trying to kill her lends a kind of moral justification to Ok-sil’s plan that might not otherwise be there, even as he pleads and wheedles, suddenly playing the mild-mannered fool who made a mistake, is very sorry, and is not going to do anything like this ever again.
Still, Ok-sil’s determination is born from a desire for vengeance rather than by the fact that Sang-hyun will go on creating more victims as long as he walks the earth. Confronted by her daughters, she has to face the ways in which her grief has caused her to shut out those who are still living while meditating on the dead. Killing Sang-hyuk won’t help her put her family back together in the way she thought it would, while strangely going on holiday together seems to have done the trick. Despite the absurd humour of the film’s early stretches as these very ordinary people try to get their heads around the practicalities of killing while largely trying to ignore the psychological pressure and affects of taking another person’s life, there is a genuine poignancy to its scenes final scenes in which Ok-sil realises she will finally have to let her daughter go.
The Journey to Gyeong-ju screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.
Trailer (English subtitles)
