Category: Korea

In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Park Dong-hun, 2022)

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Education is supposed to be the great leveller, a true meritocracy in which a combination of hard work and innate ability can enable anyone to follow their chosen path as far as it will go. The reality is however far less idealistic. Park Dong-hun’s In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Isanghan Naraeui Suhakja) is the latest in a series of Korean films taking aim at corruption within the educational system along with a persistent classism that ensures only the “right” kind of people are allowed to prosper. 

Han Ji-woo (Kim Dong-hwi) knows he’s not the “right” kind of person and feels out of place at the elite boarding school where he is bullied by teachers and students alike for being a scholarship boy amid the children of mostly wealthy families. Though he won the place though being a top student at his previous school, now his grades are merely average and he’s bottom of the class in maths. Ji-woo’s odious, elitist teacher coldly tells him that his case is hopeless and he’ll never get into a top league university with these kinds of grades at this kind of school. He pressures Ji-woo into applying to transfer out which he is reluctant to do because he knows how much his attending such a prestigious school means to his widowed single mother. In any case as we later discover, the teacher merely has it in for him openly complaining with other members of staff about having to fuss with paperwork for kids on scholarships and bursaries who in his opinion don’t really belong in a place like this which is clearly geared towards perpetuating the privilege of the children of the elite at the expense of those like Ji-woo. 

When Ji-woo is caught smuggling in pork and soju at the behest of his exploitative roommates he refuses to dob them in, making the unlikely claim that he intended to consume all four meals himself. The teacher first praises his idealistic stance but then calls him an idiot because the other boys wouldn’t do the same for him nor are they coming forward themselves to take responsibility. Perfectly happy to let the scholarship boy take the blame one of them even crassly slips Ji-woo some money afterwards, genuinely confused when Ji-woo tries to turn it down claiming such things are unnecessary between friends. Nevertheless, the incident brings him the attention of the “commie officer”, a North Korean defector (Choi Min-sik) working as the nightwatchman who easily solves Ji-woo’s impossible maths problems. The officer eventually agrees to teach him maths but only on the premise that he doesn’t care about tests or grades but solely on the art of learning. 

What he teaches Ji-woo is a valuable lesson that cuts straight to the quick of the issues within the educational system in which children are being taught to blindly answer standardised questions without developing critical thinking skills. The first problem he shows him has a deliberate error in it, but Ji-woo is so focussed on giving the correct answer he doesn’t stop to consider the question itself may be wrong and as the officer is fond of saying there can be no correct answer to an incorrect question. Yet this new philosophy of maths in particular being a purely rational science in which there is only one true answer brings Ji-woo back into conflict with his teacher who complacently teaches to test and humiliates him when he points out one of the test questions is badly formulated. The teacher tells them the correctness of their answer is irrelevant for they must answer in accordance with the textbook and willingly say that black is white if the textbook says it’s so. Meanwhile it also becomes apparent that he has been taking kickbacks from parents getting wealthy students into an elite tutoring group where he leaks the questions on upcoming exams.

This discovery prompts a minor rebellion by rich kid Bo-ram (Jo Yun-seo) who becomes disgusted with her elitist mother after being unwittingly enrolled in the cheating cabal while already resenting her for having made her give up playing the piano. For the officer, music is a mathematical language and merely an expression of the beauty of numbers which can used to explain everything there is in the world, yet as we discover he left North Korea after finding out that his research was used in weapons production only to become disillusioned with the South on realising that here people merely use it as a tool for advancement towards dull and conventional lives in the service of capitalism. When Ji-woo admits that he supposes he wants good grades to get into a good uni and then get a good job to be set for life, the officer decides to broaden his horizons encouraging the better instincts the elites at the school had rejected and showing him how to think for himself rather than blindly follow what he’s being taught. 

All that might seem quite ironic for a man from North Korea pointing out the unhelpful brainwashing of a rote learning system along with the unpleasant complacency of Ji-woo’s teacher not to mention his unethical hypocrisy. Nevertheless, the officer has his own tragic past which suddenly rears its head just as the two begin to form a paternal bond and Ji-woo finds himself at a moment of crisis once again pushed towards a transfer. Though the system is stacked against them, Ji-woo and Bo-ram eventually find their way through it in their shared resistance bolstered by the officer’s teaching as they gain the strength to fight back with honesty and integrity. It may be a slightly rosy conclusion implying the system has been corrected as if Ji-woo’s teacher were the only problem rather than the product of its corruption but does at least make the case that integrity is the one thing that pays but can’t be bought.

International trailer (English subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBJF_TZGWMY

The Starting Point (원점, Lee Man-hee, 1967)

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A hired thug and a sex worker dreaming of a new life are set on a collision course at mountain retreat in Lee Man-hee’s noirish thriller, Starting Point (원점, Wonjeom). A melancholy existential drama, the film nevertheless has a darkly comic absurdity and becomes for a time almost a satire of changing sexual mores and the anxiety surrounding the post-war population explosion while simultaneously hinting at corporate corruption in economically straitened times. 

Played in near total silence, the opening pre-credits scenes find the otherwise unnamed (the name given in the promotional material is never spoken) lackey (Shin Seong-il) raiding an office building with the intention of retrieving some mysterious documents the people who hire him later claim threaten to expose their “seven-year-secret”. The Lackey takes time to smoke a cigarette and read through some of the papers before putting them into a briefcase to make his escape but is soon met by a man with a rifle who challenges him. A fight ensues on the staircase from which the Lackey is able to escape, activating a rolling gate to get out of the building. But the other man keeps coming after him, managing to cling on the briefcase while his neck is crushed by the unstoppable motion of the shutter. 

Mirroring him, the unnamed Sex Worker (Moon Hee) is also intruded in a wordless sequence shot with the kind of realism seen in American independent and European arthouse cinema as she stares forlornly at the pretty dresses behind the glass in a small boutique before sadly making her way towards a streetlight near the Choseon Hotel where she wordlessly picks up a customer through suggestive looks and gestures. 

The Lackey knows too much, which is why his bosses want to take him out but for unclear reasons Mr Choi comes up with a bizarre and convoluted scheme which involves hiring the Sex Worker to pose as the Lackey’s wife during a honeymoon getaway to Mt. Seorak. What the Lackey thinks is going on or why the mountain is important is never really explained just like the nature of the seven-year-secret, but once there the film changes tack becoming a kind of ensemble mystery as the various guests each become suspicious of one another while the Lackey and the Sex Worker slowly fall in love for real perhaps bonding their mutual sense of existential peril and outsider status. 

In the liminal space of the mountain, both fear rejection by those around them who come to represent mainstream society, the Lackey because he has killed and Sex Worker because of her profession. Ironically, one of the other guests is a dodgy gynaecologist who makes a point of saying that most of his clients are sex workers from around the Choseon Hotel at least implying that he regularly performs abortions. He recognises the Sex Worker as a previous patient and tries to take advantage of her sexually but commits a breach of medical ethics by leaking her profession to the rest of the group who then shun her. When the planned camping trip encounters a snag seeing as only two tents have been provided and the obvious solution is for men to take one and the women the other, the women all immediately leave on the Sex Worker’s arrival refusing a share a space with a “fallen woman” in case they are somehow tainted by her shame. 

But then, the goings on at the mountain inn are strange in themselves. A middle-aged man who inexplicably doesn’t seem to have encountered a transistor radio before accidentally tunes into a news broadcast discussing the effectiveness of the contraceptive pill while the young people dance with wild abandon to music they don’t really understand. Meanwhile, the gynaecologist wades in when another of the women experiences terrible stomach pains insisting that he is “familiar with women’s issues” and informs the husband that his wife is pregnant which is confuses him because they only married the day before and he’s been a good boy so the news is perplexing. He spends the rest of the film counting dates on his fingers and at one point attempts to hang himself certain that his wife must have slept with another man before their wedding instead of maybe considering that the dodgy gynaecologist may be mistaken.  

When the couples are divided into separate tents, one guest quips that it’ll be good for keeping the birth rate down hinting at an anxiety about a new sexual freedom among the young coupled with the impact of the ongoing baby boom and its economic implications. The gynaecologist’s wife is the first to join in with the youngsters, but she’s also a rabid penny pincher making sure the newlywed husband pays for her husband’s treatment of his wife while intensely jealous constantly trying to keep the randy doctor’s attention off the other women. The sense of economic anxiety is echoed in the Sex Worker’s melancholy longing onto looking into the shop window while dreaming of opening her own hair salon though sex work is the only way she can support herself and leaves her with intense shame that like the Lackey exiles her from mainstream society. 

As she says while embracing her covert identity as a cheerful newlywed, she’s been looking up all her life and would like to look down for once which she ironically does atop the stairway on which the Lackey fights his existential battle with Choi and his minions. They each want to find a way to get off the mountain and return to the world, but are prevented from doing so by the forces that pursue them and will not let them go. Finally questioned, the Sex Worker is forced to admit that she knows nothing about the Lackey, not his name or where he lived or what he did for a living, only that he did not hate her which is as close to a declaration of love as it might be possible to get in this cold and dark world of exploitation and violence. Lee films with a noirish intensity and melancholy fatalism as the pair attempt to fight back against the forces which constrain them with the pureness of their love but later discover that, as they feared, all that is left to them are painful memories of momentary happiness. 

The Apartment with Two Women (같은 속옷을 입는 두 여자, Kim Se-in, 2021)

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A mother and daughter remain locked in a toxic cycle of resentment and dependency in the debut feature from Kim Se-in, The Apartment with Two Women (같은 속옷을 입는 두 여자, gateun sogoseul ibneun du yeoja). While the English title may have an unfortunate sexist connotation implying that such a dysfunctional relationship is inevitable when two women live together, the Korean “two women wearing the same underwear” more closely suggests the awkward intimacy between them as they each seem to seek escape from the other but in the end are left with no option than to return or choose independent loneliness.

The awkwardness is obvious from the opening scenes as middle-aged, pink-haired mother So-kyung (Yang Mal-bok) chats to a friend on the phone while using the toilet even as her 20-something daughter Yi-jung (Lym Ji-ho) washes her undies in the bathroom sink. Once done, So-kyung slips off her underwear and simply throws them in with the others for Yi-jung to scrub, taking one of the newly washed but not yet dried pairs as a replacement before breezily leaving for work. So-kyung often becomes angry with her grown-up daughter for no ostensible reason, hitting and slapping her while a defeated Yi-jung can do nothing but cry no longer seeing much point in even asking what it is she’s done wrong. Matters come to a head when the pair argue in the car at supermarket car park. Yi-jung gets out and begins to walk away, but her mother suddenly jumps on the accelerator and hits her. So-kyung tries to claim the car malfunctioned but Yi-jung has long believed her mother would prefer it if she were no longer alive. 

During a blackout towards the film’s conclusion, So-kyung again insists the accident wasn’t deliberate reminding that Yi-jung that it wasn’t the first time she swore she’d kill her and forcing her to admit that she remained so calm because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. Later someone asks why she didn’t leave seeing as she is a grown woman with a salaried job capable of supporting herself and she answers that she thought she needed to save more money before making her escape but it’s also true that years of So-kyung’s emotional abuse have eroded her confidence in her ability to survive alone and that finally she is just so lonely that even her mother’s continual resentment is preferable to being on her own with no other friends or family to turn to. 

Yi-jung begins to bond with a woman at work who is in a similarly abusive situation with their employer, disliked by her co-workers and exploited by the boss who often hands her additional tasks to be completed for the next morning when everyone else is about to go home. But So-hee (Jung Bo-ram) evidently has troubles of her own, and in any case Yi-jung simply ends up in another apartment with two women while beginning to realise that So-hee is not interested in a close friendship with her for she too longs for “independence” and is turned off by her obvious neediness. So-kyung meanwhile is in a relationship with a genial man of around her own age, Yong-yeol, who has a teenage daughter, So-ra, to whom So-kyung more well disposed than to own but eventually cannot stand. So-ra is in many ways much like herself and So-kyung’s narcissistic tendencies prevent her from sharing Yong-yeol with another woman. When it comes to picking an apartment for them to live in after they marry, it comes as a surprise to her than Yong-yeol intended to bring So-ra to live with them roundly telling him that the “spare” room is for storage not a daughter. Given this ultimatum Yong-yeol choses So-kyung, agreeing that So-ra will live with her grandmother in a decision that shocks Yi-jung on discovering his letter prompting the realisation that her mother will happily abandon her too. 

Su-kyung is in many ways a narcissistic nightmare, refusing to apologise for who she is and always insisting other people are to blame for the way she treats them. All Yi-jung wants is an apology but what she gets is justification as her mother explains to her that her clients at her massage parlour dump all their negativity on her though she is also living a stressful life and so she dumps all of her negativity on Yi-jung whom she resents for trapping her poverty and loneliness as a reluctant single mother. Yi-jung asks her what she’s supposed to do with that, but her mother simply tells her she should have a daughter too. In any case it appears as if Yi-jung may finally be finding the strength to extricate herself from her toxic familial environment, finally being measured to figure out her correct bra size having presumably been forced to wear whatever her mother wore throughout all of her adult life in a moment which brings us back to underwear once again. At times darkly comic, Kim Se-in’s intense family drama circles around toxic dependency and an inescapable cycle of cruelty and resentment but does at least allow its heroines the glimmer of new beginnings in a more independent future.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Spring Bears Love (봄날의 곰을 좋아하세요?, Yong Yi, 2003)

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Sometimes it’s nice to think there’s more to life, that that there’s some kind of greater plan or grand adventure in the works but there’s always the danger of falling into the wrong story on a desperate quest for meaning in the mundane. This is in a sense what happens to Hyun-chae (Bae Doona), the quirky heroine of Yong Yi’s charming rom-com Spring Bears Love (봄날의 곰을 좋아하세요?, Bomnalui Gomeul Johahaseyo?) as she comes to believe that someone is leaving her secret messages in a series of art books she’s been borrowing for her hospitalised father from the local library. 

The notes in the books are poetic if a little absurd which Hyun-chae attributes to their nature as a code which she’s come to believe is exclusively for her. She has no real reason for thinking this yet is determined to find the author whom she’s privately called “Vincent”. Meanwhile, she abruptly runs into an old high school friend, Dong-ha (Kim Nam-jin), who has since become a train driver and is currently working as an operator on the Seoul underground (according to Hyun-chae he’s only there as a ringer crossing a picket line). It’s quite clear that Dong-ha has designs on her, in fact he says she’s the whole reason he came to Seoul in the first place. Yet Hyun-chae isn’t really interested, partly because she’s hung up on her illusionary romance with Vincent and partly because it seems she just looks down on him, idly catching sight of his oil-stained fingers as they sit down at a greasy burger bar. 

It has to be said, Dong-ha is his own kind of strange as obsessed with trains as Hyun-chae is with Vincent yet his interest is at least practical and down to earth. As he says, thousands of people travel on the subway every day. It’s a good steady job with a nice salary and drivers’ families can ride for free. By contrast, Hyun-chae’s high school dream was to become an air hostess travelling the world literally with her head in the clouds. Now she’s working a dead end job at supermarket and lamenting that nothing, not even her love life, seems to go her way. Her dilemma is in a sense between fantasy and reality dismissing the wholesome practically of a man like Dong-ha for the ethereal romanticism of Vincent whom she has after all almost entirely constructed in her mind without really even knowing if the messages were actually intended for her in the first place. 

Her taste for fantasy can be seen in her tendency take off on flights of fancy imagining herself in theatre scenes inspired by the paintings in the books and starring her current Vincent suspect. Her more worldly friend, Mi-ran (Yoon Ji-hye), tries to explain to her where she’s going wrong with dating leading to a flashback in which she’s basically Dong-ha on a date with a sophisticated guy who is clearly exasperated with her constant slurping of a soft drink and chattering through the movie (One Fine Spring Day), describing song at a restaurant they go to as reminding him of Bagdad Cafe while she sings loudly and publicly. 

During her search for Vincent, she ends up on a date with the librarian (who later claims to be married) to a zoo where he mainly gives her lectures about bears which had featured in the first note and she tries her best to play the straight woman to his absurdist banter. Uncharitably her journey could be read as one of learning to settle, that she should give up on her dreams and submit to the practicality of Dong-ha, yet for her it is perhaps shaking off her fear of the real letting the idealised vision of Vincent go while coming to accept Dong-ha’s earthiness. Then again, he does hide a few truths from her in order to manipulate her feelings, so perhaps not all that wholesome after all even if he does put it right in the end and can always be counted on for midnight ramen. Replete with zeitgeisty detail and and absurdist humour, Yong Yi’s quirky comedy may not have all the answers in its convoluted mystery but does at least allow its heroine to find her feet finally getting the message and running fast towards her certain destiny.

The Beast (비스트, Lee Jung-ho, 2019)

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Internal police politics frustrate the hunt for a potential serial killer in Lee Jung-ho’s dark social thriller, The Beast (비스트) inspired by Oliver Marchal’s 36 Quai des Orfèvres. As a pathologist suggests, we all may have a hidden beast and it’s certainly true of the film’s conflicted protagonist, thuggish policeman Inspector Jung (Lee Sung-Min) who finds himself dragged ever deeper into a mire of corruption as a natural result of a series of bad decisions that started long ago, while his rival, Captain Han (Yoo Jae-Myung), presents the facade of efficient modern policing but inevitably turns out to be little better. 

As the film opens, Jung and his subordinate Yang are each wearing balaclavas while driving a heavily tattooed man out into the middle of nowhere though only for the purposes of frightening him so that he’ll back off their informant, local bar owner Madame Oh (Kim Ho-jung). Jung’s inner conflict is palpable as stares at his bloodied, shaking hands asking himself how it is it’s come to this while Yang later reminds him not to become too attached to his sources because once they’ve exceeded their usefulness they’ll simply be arrested. While all of this is going on, the police force is under immense pressure and receiving a lot of negative press over their handling of the case of a missing teenage girl, Mi-jin. Unfortunately, the girl later turns up dead with the murder enquiry split between two teams, those of Jung and Han each of whom are in the running to take over from the superintendent who before all of this happened was about to be promoted which is why he is desperate to solve the case as soon as possible. 

It might at first be tempting to read Jung and Han as representatives of different kinds of policing with their rivalry representing a battle for the soul of the police force only as it turns out each is merely corrupt in their own way. Jung is very much of the jaded veteran cop school, wanting to shift the case off his books as soon as possible by pushing the most likely suspect to confess. In this case that’s a shady pastor at a church Mi-jin used to frequent who was found in possession of her underwear and a series of photos of very young girls. Jung pushes the pastor to “confess” by selling him a story that a woman he was accused of assaulting in university took her own life as did her mother while her father later developed cancer as a result of all the stress and tragedy. Of course the pastor breaks down insisting that he killed her and it’s all his fault, only he’s talking about the other girl not that Jung cares too much about that. Han meanwhile quickly exonerates him by doing actual investigating, but only really so that he’ll still be in the running to solve the case and get the big promotion thereby besting his former partner turned rival. Jung had been the first to mention the possibility of an active serial killer only to be shut down because that would mean they’d lose the case to Major Crimes and therefore the personal opportunities for career advancement solving it would present. 

Both men eventually end up at the showdown by each of their respective routes implying there’s little practical difference between them. Han jeers that he can’t tell anymore if Jung is a bad guy or a cop but all he can answer is that it might be a matter of perspective, while he is also aware of Han’s backdoor deals and willingness to compromise himself in order to win advancement. In the midst of all this jockeying for power, it gets forgotten that a young woman lost her life in the most heinous of ways while whoever really did it may still be out there looking for the next girl to torture and kill. Everyone may indeed have a beast inside them, Jung already acquainted with his in his morally compromised soul while Han battles his internal ambition but the real beast may be the contemporary city and the infinitely corrupt hierarchies of the modern Korea along with the toxic masculinity that forces these men to betray their ideals simply not to be accounted a failure trapped at the bottom of the pyramid by their own problematic righteousness. When they’ve served their usefulness, the system chews them up and spits them out but until then it’s only hanging on as long as they can in the utter futility of a morally bankrupt existence. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

12.12: The Day (서울의 봄, Kim Sung-soo, 2023)

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Sometimes, the bad guys win. Kim Sung-soo’s long-awaited return after superb underworld drama Asura, 12.12: The Day (서울의 봄, Seoul-ui Bom) explores one of the darkest hours of recent Korean history as all hopes for democracy and freedom are dashed by a 1979 coup by General Chun Doo-hwan whose reign turned out to be far worse than that of his predecessor, Park Chung-hee who had been assassinated by a member of his own security team some months previously.

Yet Kim is less concerned with the coup itself than why so few people tried to stop it. Though everything appears to be going very badly for Chun (Hwang Jung-min), he eventually succeeds in taking Seoul by force while opposed by a solo general who is the lone guardian of justice and righteousness. Lee Tae-shin (Jung Woo-sung) first turns down a promotion to command the Seoul garrison and accepts it only when it’s explained to him that Jeong (Lee Sung-min), the army chief of staff, hopes to use him as a bulwark against Chun whom he fears is indeed preparing for an insurrection. Sure enough, Jeong is eventually abducted by Chun’s minions, who run the security division, on a trumped up charge of being involved with Park’s murder while Chun desperately needs the duly elected president of a democratising Korea to sign his arrest warrant so his blatant power grab will be legitimised rather than branded a “coup”.

Only the president doesn’t play along. He insists on following proper protocol and getting the approval of the defence minister all of which is vexing for Chun who is left humiliatingly standing in his office while the president holds his ground. The defence minister has, as it turns out, fled to the American embassy in his pyjamas where he finds little sympathy while the film subtly implies that the Americans advise him to return and back Chun who is doubtless considered much more useful to them politically.

Though Tae-shin and another officer at HQ try to warn of a brewing coup, their orders are often overruled by superiors either because they do not take the situation seriously or are actively siding with Chun whose “Hanahoe” faction has taken over a significantly large proportion of the military. Kim zooms in on militarism as the fatal flaw in this botched defence system as it seems no one can act without first receiving an order from above nor are they equipped to make critical decisions on a personal level as to whether or not an order should be obeyed. Tae-shin calls on countless devisions for backup but finds them either actively allying with Chun or refusing to get involved believing it is a hopeless battle. Tae-shin asks what the army is for if it refuses to fight at the crucial moment and abandons its responsibility to protect the interests of its citizens in simply allowing Chun to seize power but receives no real answer. 

Chun has already aroused suspicion for his handling of the investigation into Park’s death, reportedly bringing in countless people with no obvious connection to the case and torturing them. The men who support him want to continue Park’s “glorious revolution” which was in itself a repackaging of Colonial-era Japanese militarism, and fiercely resist the idea of “democracy” advocating totalitarian views that the ordinary person longs for a strong hand at the wheel and to be absolved of the responsibility of choice which ironically fits perfectly with hierarchal structure of the Army. The film paints Chun, slight, small, and bald, as a man with a chip on his shoulder apparently resentful of military elites and the wealthy. He craves power because of his own insecurity and a desire to get one over on righteous men like Tae-shin which might be why his line about Chun being unworthy of the uniform of a Korean solider seems to get to him. 

Using the film language of the 1970s such as heavy grain and split screens, Kim keeps the tension on a knife edge even though the conclusion is all too inevitable. Tae-shin cuts a heroic figure, standing alone on a bridge and forcing back the advancing tanks solely with his imperious righteousness but in the end it’s not enough, there are too few like him and too many like Chun whose maniacal laughter is intercut with scenes of Tae-shin in the torture facility which lies beneath the facade of government. Bleak, but also angry, Kim’s extraordinarily controlled political thriller is damning in its condemnations of a militarising culture and the ever present threat which accompanies it.

International trailer (English subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmQKt07PaHs

The Man with Three Coffins (나그네는 길에서도 쉬지 않는다, Lee Jang-ho, 1987)

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“What a piteous soul who wanders around with sorrow.” The echoes of a funeral song haunt the melancholy hero of Lee Jang-ho’s Division Film, The Man With Three Coffins (나그네는 길에서도 쉬지 않는다, Nageuneneun kileseodo swiji anhneunda). Adapting a novel by Lee Je-ha, Lee Jang-ho positions the divided nation as a more literal kind of limbo filled with wandering ghosts and souls who no longer have a home to return to in which the echoes of shamanism ring with fatalistic intensity.

In Lee’s elliptical screenplay, moments replay and reverberate in a stream of memory that echoes the protagonist’s fractured state of being. What eventually becomes apparent is that he is on a quest to return his wife’s ashes to her hometown, the problem is that she was one of many displaced by the Korean War. She became separated from her parents and no longer knew where her hometown was except somewhere in the North. The man who is being discussed in the opening sequence, Mr Kim, is also on a quest to return to his hometown but like that of Sun-seok’s wife (Lee Bo-hee) it lies in the North and it is unlikely he can reach it. The old man tightly grips a photograph of his family before the war, finally releasing it only when some henchman working for his son who only sees the South as his home come to retrieve him and destroy his hopes of dying in the place where he was born.

During his journey, Sun-seok (Kim Myung-gon) passes a sign which reads “Road to Reunification” but the bridge alongside it has been removed with only the supports remaining like thorns embedded in the landscape. Another sign reads “Restricted Area” marking the line beyond which Sun-seok cannot pass, like the man in the funeral song unable to pass through mountain or water. As he nears his destination, Sun-seok’s paths are blocked by snow preventing him from moving on or from returning to his ordinary life in Seoul. He is in more ways than one a purgatorial figure, a man already dead but trapped in the mortal realm even as the shamans attempt to guide him towards his rightful direction, a direction which Sun-seok may finally realise only on witnessing a woman with whom he may have fallen in love join in with the shamanistic dance though she two had been as soulless as he was and it may be impossible to say which of them is bound for the land of the dead. 

Mrs. Choi (Lee Bo-hee), the only woman given a name, remarks that a shaman had told her that at 30 she would meet a man by a river who was carrying three coffins and that this man was her husband in a previous life. This might explain why all of Sun-seok’s women are played by the same actress, as if they are all echoes of the same soul though equally it could reflect Sun-seok’s myopic view in which there is only ever really one woman. In any case, their connection seems both fated and frustrated because in this divided world there are only ever partings. Unable to reach his destination, Sun-seok scatters his wife’s ashes in the closest town to the DMZ, the same town where Mrs Choi and Mr Kim are also prevented from moving forward though in this case pulled back towards the soulless capitalism of the contemporary South as symbolised by Mr Kim’s son and his political ambitions. 

The implication is that is the division itself which caused the death of Sun-seok’s wife, ultimately unable to reconcile the division within herself and eventually consumed by it. Her death is echoed in that of a sex worker who dies gripping her throat and foaming at the mouth shortly after an encounter with Sun-seok, while a sex worker he meets in another town suffers a similar fate as if he were somehow spreading death along his way bringing him to his three coffins, which are in a way one and also four including perhaps his own. The washed out red of Lee’s distinctive colour palate lends the dusty land a hellish glow while the unusual camera techniques, a copulating couple superimposed on Sun-seok’s playing cards and a giant hand suddenly appearing in the sky for example, add a sense of ominous dread enhanced by the constant intrusions of shamanic ritual. It seems that as the song says, a funeral lament for a boy who disappeared feared drowned but also for Sun-seok himself, he really can’t go anywhere and is condemned to wander, a lost soul in a divided land who cannot any longer return to his home.

Noryang: Deadly Sea (노량: 죽음의 바다, Kim Han-min, 2023)

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The strange thing about Noryang: The Deadly Sea (노량: 죽음의 바다, Noryang: Jugeumui Bada), the third and final instalment in Kim Han-min’s trilogy about 16th century admiral Yi Sun-sin is that everyone wants to end the war but they all want to end it definitively and so are unable to simply let it run its course. Then again, there is a little more complexity involved in the depiction of Yi in asking whether his desire to repel the Japanese once and for all is really about the national good or personal vengeance for the death of one of his sons at the hands of Japanese raiders.

The opening scenes taking place in 1598 witness the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi who had launched two invasions of Korea in the previous decade which were in themselves precursors to an invasion of Ming China in an attempt to disrupt the Chinese Tributary System that prevented Japan from trading with China without agreeing to pay them taxes and recognise their political superiority. In the film at least, his deathbed order is to withdraw troops from Korea where they had been unsuccessfully fighting for the previous year. The leader of the Japanese forces, Konishi Yukinaga (Lee Kyu-hyung), is however prevented from leaving by a naval blockade placed by Admiral Yi around their fort on Suncheon Island. With Hideyoshi dead, Yukinaga is keen to return to Japan as quickly as possible in order to defend Hideyoshi’s young son, Hideyori, from Tokugawa Ieyasu who makes a very sinister appearance at Hideyoshi’s deathbed.

One might wonder why Yi does not allow Yukinaga to simply leave and return to Japan now that the war is technically over yet he insists that without a full surrender nothing is guaranteed and the Japanese may simply regroup and return as they had done before. Then again, he’s haunted by nightmares of his son’s death in which he witnesses him cut down by Japanese pirates while unable to intervene dragged back by shadowy figures rising from the water. Yi also later makes clear that his motivation is coloured by a desire for revenge to the extent that he is willing to sacrifice his life for it, which is one thing but it also necessarily means he’s willing to risk the lives of his men over what is partly a personal vendetta. 

Yukinaga, meanwhile, and the Japanese in general are depicted as cruel, ruthless, and cowardly. Shimazu (Baek Yoon-sik), the admiral leading the reinforcements sent to help spring Yukinaga, wilfully fires on his own men in order to cut his way through to the enemy and then threatens to execute sailors who tried to desert. In the end Yukinaga breaks his promise and declines to come to the assistance of Shimazu’s fleet as arranged, turning away and sailing back to Japan (he is subsequently beheaded after being on the losing side of the battle of Sekigahara as he was unable to commit ritual suicide because he was a Christian). They had originally been let down by a Chinese general they’d bribed to assist them but had decided not to turn up given the war was already over, making a secondary agreement with Admiral Chen (Jung Jae-young) who also desires a peaceful end to the disruption but vacillates between each side while not really wanting to get involved before making a fairly disastrous intervention in the final battle. 

There is something a little a uncomfortable in the film’s framing and most particularly in its post-credits scene which reinforces Yi’s conviction that the war isn’t really over without a complete surrender from Japan. In any case, Yi becomes a literal beating heart of the battle banging the drums of war to encourage weary fighters that it isn’t over yet and to keep going to the last man buoyed by the spirits who appear to him of his son and allies who lost their lives fighting similar battles in the previous films. That aside, Deadly Sea is mostly standalone though some knowledge of Japanese and Korean history in the late 16th century is undoubtedly helpful. Kim devotes the second half of the film to a lengthy series of naval battles as Yi tries to lure Shimazu to a vulnerable position, eventually shooting a harrowing long take from the perspective of an ordinary sailor trying to cut his way through after boarding a series of enemy boats. The senseless futility of the violence is the point, but it’s one that’s continually lost on Yi who continues to insist that this war will never really be over until they chase the invaders all the way back to their own islands and into total capitulation even as his quarry sails away towards his own unhappy destiny in an equally turbulent Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Ransomed (비공식작전, Kim Seong-hun, 2023)

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A jaded diplomat finds himself caught between competing factions both at home and abroad while trying to rescue a kidnapped colleague in Kim Seong-hun’s action dramedy, Ransomed (비공식작전, Bigongsigjagjeon). Inspired by true events, the film ironically echoes the recent Chinese hit Home Coming which was itself at least incredibly indebted to Escape from Mogadishu in praising the efforts of a civil servant who braved a war zone to rescue a stranded colleague but received little support from his conflicted government.

During the time the film takes place, Korea is caught in a moment of transition technically still under the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan but with the first democratic elections already scheduled and the 1988 Olympics in the offing. Diplomat Oh Jae-seok (Lim Hyung-guk) is kidnapped in during the civil war in Beirut in 1986 and believed dead after efforts to retrieve him fail. Nearly two years later, jaded Foreign Office Middle East specialist Lee Min-jun (Ha Jung-woo) picks up a call and hears a message in morse code including a special diplomatic password and the claim the that it comes from Jae-seok who is alive and requesting rescue. The problem is that both the Foreign Office and the KCIA are on the fence about taking action, each wanting the glory of bringing Jae-seok home but fearful of being professionally embarrassed if it turns out that the call is a hoax and they pay a ransom for a man who’s already dead. 

Min-jun finds himself caught between the two while essentially forced to set up a secret covert operation through former US CIA officer Carter (Burn Gorman) and a wealthy Swiss businessman with connections in Lebanon. The irony is that both he and Pan-su (Ju Ji-hoon), a Korean taxi driver he inexplicably runs into in Beirut, only want to go to the US, Min-jun desperate for a more prestigious positing to advance his diplomatic career while Pan-su, technically undocumented, seeks a better life in a more stable environment. As such, Min-jun’s motivations for rescuing Jae-seok are only partly a sense of responsibility as a fellow diplomat and the man who took the call that Jae-sook was alive, hoping to prove himself to his superiors only agreeing to the job on the promise of a transfer to a major US city resentful of having been passed over for a position in London in favour of an elite graduate of Seoul University. 

The irony is that once in Beirut he’s faced with a further series of kidnap threats, another random militia hot on Min-jun’s trail hoping to capture at least one Korean in the hope of a major payout though Min-jun’s problem is that the government only agrees to send more money after each step has been completed endangering the efficacy of the rescue mission while leaving him at the mercy of the militia leader the government has secretly and perhaps questionably agreed to pay to broker the negotiations to secure Jae-seok’s release and passage out of the country. Caught between competing militias in Beirut, Min-jun is also a victim of the push and pull between the waning influence of the KCIA and the Foreign Office with his fate decided largely by political infighting while in the end it’s his colleagues who eventually take a stand each chipping in three months’ salary to fund his rescue out of a sense of solidarity in the reflection that their job is only really possible given their government’s assurance of protection when they undertake dangerous work overseas for the national good. 

As expected, Min-jun soon rediscovers his sense of duty as does shady taxi driver Pan-su though more thanks to the shaming of his Lebanese girlfriend who points out that it’s not a good look to run off with millions of dollars intended to save to save a man’s life. Despite the constant precarity of the situation, what arises is an awkward brotherhood between the two men brokered by an uneasy trust and genuine fellow feeling as they try to rescue Jae-seok while evading the militia trying to kidnap them along with the wider civil war. Undercutting the seriousness of the situation with a healthy dose of irony and black humour, Kim lends his otherwise grim tale of citizenry held hostage by a bureaucracy in flux a degree of positivity if only in proving the power of the individual over a dysfunctional system. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Iron Mask (만분의 일초, Kim Sung-hwan, 2023)

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A young man seeking revenge sets his eyes on kendo glory in Kim Sung-hwan’s sporting drama Iron Mask (만분의 일초, Manbun-ui Ilcho). As his coach reminds him, a swordsman’s only opponent is himself though he continues to fixate on the man he blames for the destruction of his family still as an adult seeking reparation for the paternal influence he feels was stolen from him and the right to a legacy he feels to be rightfully his.

That might be one reason Jae-woo (Joo Jong-hyuk) is sometimes taken to task for his “entitlement” while some of the other students attending this training camp in the hope of making it onto the national team think he shouldn’t even be here seeing as he only came second in a regional competition when the others are veteran champions. But then as it turns out, Jae-woo has an ulterior motive for his participation. He is obsessed with number one challenger Tae-su (Moon Jin-seung) but for reasons outside of the sport, apparently hellbent on taking his revenge through kendo though it isn’t particularly clear what he hopes to achieve by it save personal vindication.

Kim pays particular attention to the peculiar rituals of the sport, a sense of rigorous order in the folding of the bandannas and tightening of the strings that fix the mask to the swordsman’s face while it’s clear that Jae-woo’s weakness is his emotional volatility. Though he manages to strike an impressive blow against Tae-su on the first day, his game then declines largely thanks to a hand tremor partly caused by a blow from Tae-su but also a manifestation of his jangling nerves.

He resents Tae-su on a personal level, irritated when he hears him talking on the phone to his wife about parenting their young daughter outraged that this man who he holds responsible for the implosion of his family has a family of his own while Jae-woo appears to have nothing other than his rage and resentment. He cannot forgive his estrangement from his kendo master father or that he chose to train another boy and not him, though perhaps that was simply his father’s way of coping with an impossible situation in the hope of making something good out of a personal tragedy. As another kendo master later tells him, as his father once did Jae-woo will have to find his own answers if he is to find success in kendo and indeed in life.

Still he struggles with fatherly relationships, first bonding with an older man who has two sons of his own and tries to impart paternal wisdom and comfort to the volatile Jae-woo but later accidentally injuring him during a sparring match when his temper gets the better of him. The only way he can free himself, is by moving past his image of his father to become his own man and also claim his own kendo rather than being resentful of that which was not bequeathed to him but to Tae-su for whom kendo is also a means of atonement and honouring of a paternal legacy.

Kim lends the battle a quasi-mythical quality, shooting a realm of eye-shaped mist as Jae-woo confronts Tae-su in his mind seeing only clashing swords and shadows while still unable to recognise that the man he is in competition with is only himself, his resentment and hurt in his abandonment, still a lonely little boy failing to become a man while Tae-su at least seemingly has been able to move on and make something of himself. Only by calming his nerves can he begin to perfect his art, taking the advice given to him by the team’s video replay expert seriously and apologising for his petulant behaviour. 

In essence, he has to escape from the “iron mask” of his repressed emotion and deal seriously with the traumatic past in order to progress to adulthood and also assume his rightful place on the kendo board. A psychological sports thriller, Kim lends a noirish touch to Jae-woo’s dark obsession even as it continues to consume him but finally implies the implosion of his rage through a dissolve transitioning to the falling snow as he now in white allows his resentment to melt away in favour of a more balanced hope for a peaceful future.

Iron Mask screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)