Lee Hyun-kyun – Windows on Worlds

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)

“Why did you turn this place into hell?” a reformed gangster asks his defeated enemy only to be told that nobody made the world this way, it is just is. In any case, Yoon Young-bin’s purgatorial gangster epic Tomb of the River (강릉, Gangneung) finds itself in a world of conflicting moral values in which organised crime has become increasingly legitimised conducted by men in sharp suits sitting in elegant surroundings but no less thuggish, violent, and immoral than it ever was.

The two opposing forces are hippyish middle-aged enforcer Gil-suk (Yu Oh-seong) whose boss has adopted an anti-violence philosophy, and the psychotic Min-suk (Jang Hyuk) whom we first meet as the only survivor of a smuggling boat massacre hiding in the hold eating the dead bodies of his comrades whom he may or may not have killed himself. The battle ground is a new casino resort in the previously peaceful rural backwater of Gangneung shortly to host the upcoming 2018 Winter Olympics. Gil-suk’s ageing boss decides to hand him the reins of the business but he objects out of old-fashioned gangster etiquette because the complex is technically located in an area handled by his colleague Chung-sub (Lee Hyun-kyun) who is currently in the boss’ bad books after a group of young people were found passed out having taken drugs in one of the karaoke rooms he manages.

Gil-suk is perhaps a representative of disingenuous contemporary corporatised gangsters who still operate like thugs but do so with a veneer of elegance, his now elderly boss having achieved a state of zen in giving him small pieces of wisdom such as “don’t fight. If you fight you suffer whether you win or lose”. Gil-suk later echoes him when he tells his friend to leave Min-suk alone and that rather than fighting they should share a meal with him sometime instead acknowledging that his gang members’ lives seem to have been hard. But his compassion is as it turns out, misplaced, Min-suk is not the sort of man who can be befriended or softened with kindness for he is the personification of humanity’s baser instincts in unbridled selfishness and destructive desire.

“I did it to survive” his underlings often justify themselves, believing they have no other option than to behave the way they do while Min-suk exploits the venality and misfortune of others as a kind of get out of jail free card promising to wipe their debts if they take the fall for his crimes. Sooner or later everyone betrays everyone else for reasons of greed or self-preservation, even Gil-suk eventually pulled towards the dark side while his policeman friend (Park Sung-geun) attempts to save him from himself. “What other choice did I have?”, he asks, but to conform to the dubious morality of the world around him. He criticises the police for a lack of action, but watches and does nothing as Min-suk carves up his entire squad of foot soldiers while patiently making his way towards him.

The irony is that Gil-suk had been the good gangster, never wanting more than he needed and always happy to share. He is confused by the betrayal of his closest friends because he cannot understand their motivation. He had always thought of the resort as “ours” never considering that it could be “mine” while his friend tells him he should take it all because if he doesn’t someone else will. To prove his point Gil-suk tries to broker a peaceful solution by offering to share control with Min-suk in a process of appeasement, suggesting he take the club while he keeps the casino and they split the profits between them before eventually deciding to surrender it entirely in order to curry favour with an even shadier corporate gangster whose polite interest in the resort he’d previously rebuffed.

Taking on spiritual dimensions in its gloomy backgrounds, battles fought under the light of a full moon, and the snow falling over the living and the dead in the melancholy final sequence Yoon’s hellish tale seems to take place in a gangster purgatory in which as Gil-suk finally announces romance really is dead, in its place only internecine violence and the intense desire to survive by any means possible mortal anxiety provoking only preemptive greed and cruelty. As Min-suk suggests “only death will end things” but everyone here is in a sense already dead only trapped in the eternal limbo of the gangster mentality.

Tomb of the River streamed/screened as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Lee Hyun-kyun

The Beast (비스트, Lee Jung-ho, 2019)

Tomb of the River (강릉, Yoon Young-bin, 2021)