Tag: Kim Young-Sung

The Journey to Gyeong-ju (경주기행, Kim Mi-jo, 2025)

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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)

Salmokji: Whispering Water (살목지, Lee Sang-min, 2026)

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Is there something a little bit uncanny about a manmade lake? Despite the sign warning of deep water and potential loss of life, the area surrounding the Salmokji reservoir is otherwise idyllic, its ominous “dead tree lake” name not withstanding. You wouldn’t necessarily know that it was only created in 1982 for the purpose of storing water for agricultural use. Its modernity seems slightly incongruous with the presence of a ghost.

Perhaps this is why it has become a tourist hotspot following the surprising success of Lee Sang-min’s low-budget indie horror Salmokji: Whispering Water (살목지), having previously mentioned on late-night TV show Midnight Horror Story. The location’s sense of eeriness ironically seems to stems from its disconnection from the modern world. A physicist who claimed not to believe in the supernatural reported that she nearly drove into the reservoir after her car’s GPS malfunctioned and subsequently suffered misfortune after visiting the area. The inability to get a phone signal or connect to cloud networks etc may of course be due to the fact that is surrounded by mountains and rocky terrain rather than the presence of a malevolent spiritual entity who is actively blocking digital signals. Yet its also true that the natural silence of this tranquil environment can be disquieting to those used to the ambient noise of a city.

In any case, within the world of the film the lake is a popular fishing destination as demonstrated by the couple visiting it in the opening sequence who are on what seems to be quite an early date in their relationship. The woman’s aversion to the worms used bait is also reflective of a new squeamishness regarding the natural environment that is also echoed when producer Su-in drops a box bait brought by her cameramen who were planning on staying behind once their job is done. Su-in’s irritation stems from a different source. They’re supposed to be here to work, and in fact to fix an urgent problem, though no one is taking it seriously and the team are largely behaving as if they’re here on a day trip. Junior producer Seong-bin has brought an intern with him he is clearly pursuing romantically, while she secretly plans to moonlight by filming footage for her personal horror vlog.

They’ve come to Salmokji because a ghostly figure has been spotted in a photo they uploaded, though it does not appear to have been one that was taken by them. As such, they urgently need to replace with a photo that is not cursed, because they’ve been getting complaints from the locals. It’s not really explained why they can’t just stop with deleting the original photo, but for some reason Su-in’s boss insists the image must replaced immediately. He even insists they stay overnight when it turns out further equipment is required and won’t reach them until after dark. This perhaps bears out another lingering horror in contemporary urban life with the pressure of workplace heirarchy and exploitative employment environments. The cameramen immediately resent Su-in for telling them off for bringing the fishing gear and subsequently reject her authority by disobeying her commands and belittling the idea of their actually being a ghost even when strange things start happening.

Su-in is also exposed as having tried to palm this job off on a colleague after visiting the area herself previously and deciding it was too creepy. Some suggest this is all then her fault, that the lake did this to make her come back and now she’s dragged all of them into it. She meanwhile seems to have been dealing with a potential crush on her team manager, a widower who may have been attracted to the lake by the rumours of it being somewhere that the worlds of the living and the dead intersect. The lake then also becomes a metaphor for a more literal drowning in grief, as if her co-worker willing embraced oblivion by walking into it in order to be reunited with his wife if in death rather than in life. The creepy old lady living nearby tells them to place a stone on a cairn and make a wish, but in reality this seals their fate just as getting even a toe wet later will. The real horror is that once marked by whatever is in the lake, there is no real possibility of escape and even if you think you’ve made it out, in reality you may not have. Incorporating some elements of food footage horror, Lee piled on the sense of supernatural dread right until the ambiguous ending that suggests all this has happened before and will happen again.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese & English subtitles)

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)