Tag: Choi Woo-shik

Time to Hunt (사냥의 시간, Yoon Sung-hyun, 2020)

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A little over 20 years ago, the Korean economy faced an existential threat in the face of the Asian Financial Crisis during which it defaulted on its loans, ran out of ready cash, and was forced to accept concessions some regarded as humiliating not to mention politically regressive as part of the bailout package it negotiated with the IMF. Returning nine years after his indie debut Bleak Night, Yoon Sung-hyun brings these events very much to the fore with Time to Hunt (사냥의 시간, Sanyangui Sigan) while blending them with a painfully contemporary take on “Hell Joseon” pushed into a literal dystopia in which Korea has somehow become a lawless police state in which the Won is now worthless as the government once again defaults and is forced to negotiate with the IMF while workers protest in the streets against mass layoffs and forced “restructuring”. 

It’s into this world that Jun-seok (Lee Je-hoon) emerges after spending three years in prison for a robbery which was supposed to be his first and last job. Unfortunately, the loot he got sent away for stealing turns out to be worthless, the Won being so unreliable that most shops no longer accept it and insist on trading with the American Dollar though currency exchange is also illegal. Jun-seok finds this out from his two sheepish friends who’ve come to pick him up but didn’t quite have the heart to explain just how much has changed. Previously civilised Korea is now awash with drugs and guns, and crime, it seems, is the only viable economy. While inside, Jun-seok received an invitation to a better place, a paradise waiting for him in Taiwan where it’s always warm and the water is a beautifully clear shade of emerald. The only problem is he has to buy in, and without the loot he’s stuck. Which is why he talks his friends, plus a guy who owes him money, into helping him rob an underground casino operated by gangsters. 

The force which binds the men together is futility. On their way to collect Jun-seok, Ki-hoon (Choi Woo-shik) and Jang-ho (Ahn Jae-hong) joke about trying to sell vintage clothes abroad. “This isn’t the time for pride”, they remark, “we’re penniless”. Ki-hoon isn’t keen on Jun-seok’s scheme, reminding Jang-ho that after the last time they swore they’d never do anything like that again. Jang-ho, however,  has decided to go for it, partly out of loyalty to Jun-seok who took the fall for them and went to prison alone, and partly because, well, what else is there? While Jun-seok was inside, they lived quiet, honest lives but it’s got them nowhere and all that’s waiting for them is more of the same. “We’ll just be bottom dwellers,” he sighs, “when we pull this off we can live like human beings”. 

Yet even between bottom dwellers there are further class divisions. Jang-ho is an orphan with no family to fall back on, while Jun-seok’s mother has passed away leaving him only with a vague dream of an island paradise, a 1950s-style postcard from Hawaii sitting next to her photo on a makeshift altar. Jang-ho also has asthma which means he was exempted from military service, something that leaves him at a disadvantage in the world in which he now lives as the only member of the group without weapons training. Ki-hoon meanwhile has two loving parents, but that also means additional responsibilities in exchange for a permanent safety net. 

Ki-hoon’s family is also evidence of rapid social change. His parents own a modest Korean-style home complete with a well which is a source of amusement to city-raised Jang-ho, while the boys are about to be kicked out of their tiny flat for failing to pay the rent. Ki-hoon’s dad is also one of the protestors outside the factory, loudly calling for the government to “secure laborers’ right to live”. Perhaps to his generation, protest has possibility, to Ki-hoon it seems not only “pointless” but potentially dangerous even as his dad grins ear to ear while shouting out slogans in the hope of social change. 

The boys take a desperate chance because they know nothing other than desperation. “We don’t have anything to lose now” Jun-seok points out, but immediately contradicts himself in claiming that he never wants to lose the “dream” of his Taiwanese paradise. Dreams are however also something which plague him, visions of accidentally causing the deaths of those close to him or scenes of blood and ghosts followed by the melancholy image of a friend finally returning. The tragedy is that the heist comes off without a hitch, they do everything right, but they’ve made a fatally naive mistake. In trying to cover their tracks, they swipe the CCTV footage, little knowing that the hard drives also host extremely valuable information regarding the casino’s police-backed VIP money laundering operation which is why they find themselves “hunted” by a cruel and relentless gunman. In over their heads, the guys think this is about the money and maybe they can just give it back, never knowing that they’re sitting on something much more valuable or why it is they’re really being chased. 

“This isn’t the world you used to live,” Jun-seok is warned once again, “no matter where you are, you cannot escape”. Han (Park Hae-soo), the relentless hunter, becomes an omnipresent threat fused with the shadows as a representative of the societal corruption which cannot it seems be overcome. Shiny LCD screens pepper the landscape as a grim reminder of a possible future, the tech giant of the world now a lawless wasteland filled with derelict buildings and shuttered businesses, a corrupt police state in which the police is the biggest gang and the man owns the streets. Jun-seok dreams of an island paradise where everything is calm and airy, he owns a small shop repairing bicycles, and goes fishing on the beach. Such a wholesome future is more than he could ever expect to gain, but eventually he realises that you can’t escape the spectre of control by refusing to face it and the only way to be free in your own personal paradise is to exorcise your demons so you need not fear the darkness.  

Time to Hunt is currently available to stream worldwide via Netflix.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Parasite (기생충, Bong Joon-ho, 2019)

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“So metaphorical!” the ambitious son at the centre of Bong Joon-ho’s class war melodrama Parasite (기생충, gisaengchung) is fond of saying, and he’s right – it really is. “Hell Joseon” rears its ugly head again, only it’s not just the young who can’t climb out but mum and dad too. Sticking together all the way, this enterprising family have realised that the only way they’re going to enjoy the fruits of the modern society is by becoming hangers on, feeding off someone else’s perhaps unfairly gotten success, and if that means stomping on a few others just like them to get there then so be it. There’s no room for love or fairness in a class war. 

The Kims – mum Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin), dad Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), and grown up kids Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and Ki-jung (Park So-dam), all live together in a tiny semi-basement apartment in a rundown slum. Unable to find steady jobs, the family make ends meet with casual jobs like folding pizza boxes while cadging wi-fi to look for better opportunities. Better opportunities only arise, however, thanks to Ki-woo’s upper middle-class college kid friend Min (Park Seo-joon) who brings them a special gift from his dad of a stone said to attract wealth, and a hookup for Ki-woo with a possible job coaching the pampered daughter of a superrich tech entrepreneur. After faking his credentials, Ki-woo gets the job, and wastes no time at all bringing in his sister as an “art tutor” for the couple’s apparently “troubled” young son. Together, they conspire to get the chauffeur fired so dad can take over, and then plot to do the same to the housekeeper so mum can come too, colonising the house and living alongside the wealthy Parks with a view to someday ousting them. 

The house, a fabulously modern take on the traditional designed by a famous architect who sold it to the Parks when he moved to France, is a kind of “host” in itself. We might not all admit it, but there are few of us who would not want to live in a house like this, especially if we feel it has been deliberately placed out of our reach. The Kims are envious, yes, but not perhaps malicious. They simply want a kinder life, one free of the anxiety of always having nothing and then getting that taken away from you too. In a running gag, a drunk keeps peeing right in front of the Kims’ window, and later they literally find themselves drowning in a river of shit when torrential rain causes the local sewer system to backup and flood their fetid, low-lying slum forcing everyone into a makeshift “evacuation” centre where insincere public servants try to make excuses about not being bothered enough to make sure those with no money don’t drown just because it rained. 

The Kims aren’t bad people, but their desperation means they can’t afford to be kind. The true “villains” of Parasite aren’t the Parks or the Kims themselves, but the system which forces one set of oppressed people to oppress another. The Kims know they’re responsible for displacing people just like them – getting the driver fired, going after the housekeeper, etc, but they can’t afford to think about it, pausing only to wonder if maybe they found other jobs once they themselves start to feel comfortable. “She’s rich but still nice” Ki-taek says of Mrs. Park (Cho Yeo-jeong), only for his wife to counter no, “she’s nice because she’s rich”. Mrs. Park can afford to be nice because she has plenty. She has no need to worry about taking things from others, and is secure enough not to have to worry about people taking things from her. That makes her easy pickings for a family like the Kims, but it also hints that “niceness” is the natural condition of being human, the way we’re supposed to behave to each other in an ideal world where none of us are hungry or afraid. 

Then again, the Parks are not wholly “nice” even if they are polite in a superficial, wholesome sort of way. Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun) in particular has a curiously feudal outlook in which he is perpetually preoccupied with the idea of his servants “crossing the line”, making it plain that there is a clearly defined border between those who rule and those who serve. The Parks’ young son is the first to notice that the Kims all smell the same even if he does so innocently, they all obviously use the same soap and detergent after all. Mr. Park, however, later takes it further, complaining about the way Ki-taek stinks up his car, resenting the smell of “poverty”, the mustiness born of living with damp and mould. To him, the Kims are not so much different from stink bugs, squatting in his home, members of “the great unwashed” unfit for his society. 

He does, however, need them. The Parks are as dependent on the Kims as the Kims are on the Parks, and they all need the house. Unfortunately, peaceful coexistence seems to be a distant possibility in a world of such fierce inequality as to encourage the most casual of cruelties. “All you have to do is walk up the stairs” Ki-woo later tells his father, but that’s easier said than done, especially when everything is telling you that you’ll always belong in the basement. 

Parasite is released in UK cinemas on 7th February.

UK release trailer (English subtitles)

The Divine Fury (사자, Kim Joo-hwan, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

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Divine fury poster 1“If you have faith you have nothing to fear” the veteran priest explains to his protege in Kim Joo-hwan’s The Divine Fury (사자 Saja). The hero is not quite so sure. A tale of grief and resentment, The Divine Fury revels in supernatural dread, but makes plain that the origins of evil lie in the human heart and that it’s a failure to forgive that invites the darkness in.

A brief prologue introduces us to the young Yong-hu whose mother passed away shortly after he was born. His doting dad leaves him at home alone at nights while he works as a regular beat cop. Unfortunately Yong-hu’s earnest father is killed one evening by a rogue driver, leaving the boy orphaned and alone. Though his dad had been careful to take him to church and explain to him about the power of prayer, Yong-hu feels distraught and betrayed by a god who refused to listen and took his dad anyway even though he prayed as hard as he could. Vowing never to set foot in a church again, Yong-hu refuses to believe in anything at all.

20 years later, he’s a world famous MMA star with vengeance on his mind. Plagued by voices telling him to go back and take revenge on the priest who told him everything would be OK, Yong-hu (Park Seo-joon) buries himself in violence and superficial pleasures. Everything changes on the flight back from an international bout when Yong-hu has a dream of his father in which he grabs a cross and wakes up with stigmata on his right hand. When doctors can’t explain his strange injury which refuses to heal, he turns to a shaman who tells him that he is rife with demonic energy and is only protected by the shining goodness of his father’s wedding ring which he still wears on a cord around his neck. Perhaps surprisingly, the shaman advises him to follow the cross and go to a church at a certain time where a man will help him. The man turns out to be father Ahn (Ahn Sung-ki) – a Vatican-based exorcist currently in the middle of a case so difficult it’s sent his assistant running for the hills in terror.

Anyone who knows anything about exorcism in the movies knows you need an old priest and a young priest. Ahn is more or less resigned to working alone, exorcism is no longer cool with the youngsters it seems, but nevertheless remains keen to court the enigmatic Yong-hu and his all powerful demon banishing hand. Yong-hu, however, remains reluctant. He doesn’t believe in God and resents the old priest as a symbol of all that’s betrayed him. Gradually he begins to warm to Ahn, seeing in him a kind of goodness as he selflessly battles the forces of evil and releases the tormented from their supernatural oppressors even if it might take longer to help them escape their darkness. Meanwhile he continues to hunt the “Dark Bishop” who feeds on fear and negativity in order to secure his own immortality.

Ahn is fond of saying that there’s a reason for every torment and that it’s all part of God’s grand plan. As far as the film goes, he may very well be correct at least in providing the mechanism for Yong-hu’s eventual path towards re-embracing his faith. Still missing his father and nurturing intense hurt and resentment, Yong-hu invited the darkness in, beginning to hate where he should have learned to forgive. As Ahn tells him, you can’t hate something you never loved which might explain why the darkness has never been able to fully consume him. Still battling his father’s absence, Yong-hu remains doubly conflicted, falling into an easy paternal rhythm with the older man yet also resenting him both as a potential father figure primed to betray and as a symbol of the Church in whom no he longer trusts.

Kim shifts away from the comedic banter which made Midnight Runners such an unexpected treat for something more melancholy as his heroes ponder the wages of grief and the demands of responsibility. Cynical, Yong-hu forgot his father’s ghostly instructions to him to grow up to be a good person who helps others and stands up to those who harm the weak (like demons) but eventually comes to reconnect with his dad’s essential goodness when realising that he’s been guided onto a unique path as an MMA star with a magic demon vanquishing fist. Having conquered the evil inside him and accepted his father’s legacy, Yong-hu is ready to take on the forces of darkness with a divine fury of his own while saving the souls of those in peril from threats both earthly and supernatural.

The Divine Fury was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival. It will also be released in cinemas across the US and Canada courtesy of Well Go USA from Aug. 16.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion (마녀, Park Hoon-jung, 2018)

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There’s probably something quite profound to be said about the folkloric tradition of the foundling child and untold destiny, that exiled nobility can salvage the best qualities of the place they escaped in a rural paradise before returning to make their restoration. Superheroes do indeed seem to find frequent refuge in the wholesome plains of farm country where the salt of the Earth raises them into upstanding people with the right kind of values to couple with their “unnatural” powers to enable them to “save the world” in ways both literal and metaphorical. Perhaps there is darkness in that idea too, that we need such people to save us rather learning to save ourselves or that we secretly long to believe in our latent specialness and hidden destiny, and of course those rightful values may also be inherently conservative in that they aim to preserve a particular vision of “goodness”. In any case, the heroine of Park Hoon-jung’s The Witch: Part. 1. The Subversion (마녀, Manyeo) is not so much out to save the world as engaged in a war to save herself and that particular vision of goodness she’s been gifted by good people (or, then again, perhaps not).

Park begins with blood as a little girl manages to escape a massacre at some kind of shady facility before passing out in front of an idyllic farmstead where she is eventually taken in and nursed back to health by a kindly older couple, the Koos. 10 years pass. The little girl is now the teenage Koo Ja-yoon (Kim Da-mi) and an archetypal farm girl albeit an extraordinarily pretty one with straight A grades and fierce love for her now struggling adoptive parents. With the farming industry in crisis and Mrs. Koo suffering with Alzheimer’s, Ja-yoon finds herself bullied into taking part in a televised singing competition by her boisterous best friend Myung-hee (Go Min-si), which is not the best idea if you’re trying to hide from shady government forces. Sure enough, the past begins to resurface leaving Ja-yoon with a series of difficult choices.

Like many other recent Korean action dramas with female leads, The Witch steps back into the familiar territory of “good” mothers and “bad” while uncomfortably asking if childhood corruption can be cured by love alone. Living as Ja-yoon, the unnamed little girl has been reset. Given a “normal” childhood, she seems to have become a “normal”, perhaps ideal, young woman who does well at school, is confident and self possessed, and dearly loves her family and friends. When we finally meet the woman responsible for her corruption, Professor Baek (Jo Min-su) who presents herself again as a maternal figure and Ja-yoon’s “creator”, we learn that Ja-yoon is a creature born of icy violence, raised without compassion or love for no greater purpose than destruction.

Mr. Koo (Choi Jung-woo), perhaps understanding Ja-yoon a little better than she understands herself, often tells her not to go out “like that” which seems like slightly archaic paternal sexism but is also an attempt to soften those “male” instincts towards violence which are so much a part of her early life and of her essential nature. Frightened by her “unnatural” cruelty, Mr. Koo wasn’t sure if they should keep Ja-yoon with them but his wife (Oh Mi-hee) disagreed, believing they could heal her by raising her in love. The choice Ja-yoon faces is whether to embrace her persona as Koo Ja-yoon as raised by her adoptive parents, or the psychopathic killer which lies underneath.

Park leaves the dilemma very much in the air with “Ja-yoon” a vacillating cypher whose internal divisions seem to become ever more stark as she begins to wall off her various personas. “The Witch”, as the title implies, may itself have its misogynistic overtones in pointing directly at Ja-yoon’s transgressive femininity, both innocent farm girl and unstoppable killing machine, but as the subtitle hints Ja-yoon is also attempting to subvert herself in service of a greater mission which (for the moment) remains unclear. Park opens the door to a sequel in which subversion might not be the aim, sending Ja-yoon further along the path of dark self exploration which promises still more violence and mayhem before her bloody work is done.

The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion is released on Digital HD in the UK on April 22nd courtesy of Signature Entertainment.

UK release trailer (English subtitles)

The Princess and the Matchmaker (궁합, Hong Chang-pyo, 2018)

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Princess and the Matchmaker posterLove – is it an act of fate or of free will? For the women of 18th century Korea, romance is a girlish affectation which must be outgrown in order to fulfil one’s proper obligations to a new family and the old by becoming the ideal wife to a man not of one’s own choosing. Love, in this world, would be more than an inconvenience. It would be a threat to the social order. In Hong Chang-pyo’s The Princess and the Matchmaker (궁합, Gunghab), each and every decision is dictated by birth, but as our soothsayer reminds us, serendipitous meetings can change all that’s gone before.

A severe drought is plaguing the subjects of Joseon, and their eyes are on their king to sort it out. For complicated reasons, many assume the pause in the rains is down to the gods’ wrath over the aborted wedding of problematic princess Songhwa (Shim Eun-kyung) some three years previously. Even before her failed marriage made her a flawed woman, Songhwa had always been tainted with an aura of ill fortune seeing as her mother died in childbirth. A reading of her astrological charts implied her presence was bad for the king (Kim Sang-kyung) and so she was sent away only to be called back when another reading revealed her presence may be essential to the king’s recovery from illness. She’s been at the court ever since but the taboo of her supposed bad luck has never left her. The king determines he’ll have to marry Songhwa off to improve the public mood but with her reputation who will they be able to find for a husband? With names thin on the ground, the king decides on a series of open auditions with the royal astrologer announcing the “winner” after a thorough examination of their birth charts.

It goes without saying that no one is especially interested in Songhwa’s opinion. Still naive and innocent, Songhwa is quite looking forward to finally getting married though a frank conversation with a recently hitched friend perhaps helps to lower her expectations. Still, she’d at least like to see the face of the man she’ll be spending the rest of her life with and so she sneaks out of the palace and goes investigating. Her first ventures outside of the walls which have protected her all her life are marked by a sense of magical freedom, though what she sees there later shocks her. Her subjects starve, and blame her for their starving. Lamenting the poor nobleman who will be taking one for the team in marrying the notoriously ugly and difficult Princess Songhwa, they pray for her wedding day and the rain they fully expect to fall.

Given all of this ill feeling towards the princess, it doesn’t take much to guess what sort of men are prepared to toss their hats into the ring. The suitors may look attractive on the surface, as Songhwa discovers, but each has faults not visible in his stars. One is a child, another a womanising playboy. It comes to something when the worst possible match isn’t the murderous psycho posing a philanthropist but the ambitious social climber who will stop at nothing to advance his cause.

Some might say the sacred art of divination is a bulwark against court intrigue, but this like anything else is open to manipulation. The king’s old astronomer has been taking bribes for years – something brought to light by ace investigator with a talent for divination Seo Do-yoon (Lee Seung-gi) with help from shady street corner soothsayer Gae-shi (Jo Bok-rae). Appointed to the position himself, Seo unwittingly holds the keys to Songhwa’s future though that isn’t something he’d given particular consideration to. His job was just to read the charts before everything started getting needlessly complicated. When his list of candidates goes missing he has no choice but to start visiting the ones he can remember in person which is how he ends up repeatedly running into Songhwa in disguise and, despite himself, beginning to fall in love with her.

Songhwa, trapped in a golden cage, longs to live a life of her own free from the patriarchal demands of a hierarchical society. She bucks palace authority by sneaking out on her own, but never seriously attempts to avoid her miserable fate or resist the tyranny of an arranged marriage, only to be allowed foreknowledge of the kind of life for which she has been destined. Nevertheless, determining her own future later becomes something within her grasp once the corruption has been uncovered and the art of prophecy exposed for what it is. Destiny is more malleable than it first seems and as Seo advises the king, when compassion reigns the heavens will open. True harmony is not born of a rigid adherence to facts and figures assigned by the arbitrary conditions of birth, but by a careful consideration of the feelings of others. A life without love is as starved as one without rain and the truly harmonious kingdom is the one in which all are free to feel it fall where it may.

The Princess and the Matchmaker was screened as part of the 2018 London Korean Film Festival.

International teaser trailer (English subtitles)