By Nia Edwards-Behi
Look, okay. I’ve got a thing for South Korea at the moment. I’ve gone full fangirl over K-pop, and South Korean cuisine seems to have awoken my inner chef (she’s not a very good one). We all know that South Korea makes some of the best cinematic thrillers, so plonk me in the middle of a festival which is showing loads of them, and too right I tried to see as many as I could. I suppose an argument could be made that these films aren’t necessarily even genre films, but given the successes (and excesses) of the likes of Oldboy, I think that Korean thrillers might even be considered a distinct genre of themselves, set apart from other, more anaemic thrillers.
One on One (Kim Ki-duk, 2014)
I’m not sure if One on One actually qualifies as what I’d normally call a ‘Korean thriller’, but thrilling it is, and it sure is very Korean. I’ve not seen any of Kim Ki-Duk’s previous films (Moebius is sitting on my shelf, begging to be watched), but he’s a filmmaker I know from reputation. Though I can’t speak directly of the shocking or transgressive nature of his previous work, One on One certainly impressed as something of an extreme character study (I mean extreme here in the sense that it is a film almost entirely concerned with character exploration).
On May 9th, a group of uniformed men murder a high-school student as she walks home. Some months later, those involved with the murder are routinely kidnapped, tortured, and released, by what appears to be a terrorist organisation, posing as various types of State officials – the army, the police, special forces.
The film is interesting in two ways: in its socio-political messages and in its structure. The first section of the film is repetitive, and plays out the film’s title. We see a man on a date with his girlfriend. He takes her home, and is kidnapped. He is tortured. A man having dinner with his wife leaves early before being kidnapped. He is tortured. Two men share a drink after work, before one is kidnapped. He is tortured. Then, there are scenes of the torturers own lives between these, which also take the form of ‘one on one’ interactions. The structure does eventually change, as we begin to unfold more of the plot, and dare I say it becomes a bit more conventional as it does. The political messages of the film are pretty obvious and didactic, but they’re not entirely distracting, either.
The film’s sole significant female character is, at first glance, painfully obvious and mistreated, but actually I did feel that Kim, in showing us her life, was offering quite a nuanced and non-judgmental depiction of the character. A particular scene relating to her character made me especially annoyed to be watching the film with BIFFF’s inappropriately shouty crowd (I felt quite the same watching Kotoko there a few years back), but at least my French isn’t good enough to understand what they were actually saying while laughing at a woman being extremely manipulated and abused by her boyfriend.
The film’s ending feels somewhat inevitable, but that doesn’t detract from what is, overall, a particularly interesting and compelling film. I can’t help but feel that if I knew more about the political climate of South Korea, I’d find even more to enjoy in the film.
The Target (Yoon Hong-seung, 2014)
I’m not familiar with the film The Target is a remake of, 2010’s French thriller Point Blank. If it’s half as exhilarating as Yoon’s film, then I must seek it out immediately and buckle up for another thrill-ride. An ex-mercenary, Yeo-hoon, is framed for murder and ends up in the hospital. The doctor attending to him, Tae-Joon, finds himself in deep trouble when his pregnant wife is kidnapped and further attempts on his patient’s life are made. The unlikely allies must join forces to save Tae-Joon’s wife and find the real murderer.
The Target opens with the attempt on Yeo-Hoon’s life, and honestly, it doesn’t let up from there. It’s a meaty, fast-paced 98-minute adrenaline ride. By the film’s climax, you may indeed need to be leaving your sense of realism out of your head to fully enjoy the events of the film, but as I tend to approach most films like that, the exhilaration as all the various threads of the film’s plot joined together left me breathless.
Again, unexpectedly, the female characters in this film really impressed me. Although at first the kidnapping of a protagonist’s pregnant wife made me roll my eyes, she’s somewhat beefed up by the fact that she uses her training as a psychiatrist to negotiate with her captor. There are also two female police detectives who, for me, are some of the film’s most interesting characters, and are central to the scene which signals the film moving from ‘good’ to ‘great’.
For a slick and stylish thriller The Target also manages to be quite moving, as various ties between characters are tested and teased out. But, it is of course the fast-paced action of the film that truly makes it stand out, and it’s got that by the bucket-load.
No Tears for the Dead (Lee Jeong-beom, 2014)
I was expecting No Tears for the Dead to be a film more like The Target, but its first half is certainly more drama than it is thriller, but once things come to ahead some spectacular action kicks in. Abandoned in America as a child, a hitman, Gon, is devastated when he accidentally kills a little girl while making a hit on her father. Although he wants out of the business that’s raised him, Gon’s bosses send him to South Korea for one last hit – that little girl’s mother, Mo-gyeong. Gon is torn between his professional duty and his sense of guilt, and slowly finds himself drawn into a much bigger mess than he anticipated.
The most notable thing about No Tears for the Dead is that it’s very well-acted in its central roles, but is really rather hammy elsewhere. Jang Dong-gun manages to make Gon likeable, and makes his sense of guilt and trauma truly palpable. The same can be said for Lee Min-hee as Mo-gyeong, who not only grieves for her husband, and the daughter she sent to America, but also cares for her senile and dying mother.
The importance of these strong central performances is further highlighted by the extremely convoluted narrative, which I admit I lost track of completely by the end of the film. Several interested parties are now trying to kill Mo-gyeong, or Gon, or both of them, and without those central anchors to root for I’d have been very lost indeed. However, once the action does kick in it is wonderfully choreographed and a real thrill to watch. There are moments of humour – an exchange between corrupt investment bankers and a cleaning lady is particularly entertaining.
Luckily the film has a very strong ending, which could easily have been fluffed with so many different threads to the plot and so many characters to follow. No Tears for the Dead therefore saves itself from being unsatisfying by dint of being very well made, so my recommendation of the film comes with something of a proviso that you must be prepared to get a bit lost along the way.
The Terror Live (Kim Byung-woo, 2013)
A riveting central performance is key to the success of The Terror Live, a curious film about a terrorist attack on Seoul. Disgraced TV news anchor, now radio host, Yoon Yung-hwa (Ha Jung-Woo) dismisses a caller on air after he threatens to detonate a bomb on Mapo bridge if the host doesn’t listen to him. The man was not lying. Yoon spots an opportunity to reclaim his fame with an exclusive link to this terrorist, but finds himself manipulated just as much by those around him as he hoped to manipulate the terrorist and his audience.
Ha’s performance as Yoon Yung-hwa is captivating, and it needs to be. We need to, very early on, be on-side with this ambitious media type, and that’s not an easy thing to achieve. He is achingly professional – after bridge explodes and he realises a televised opportunity, he is already well-prepared and has soon donned a jacket, a tie and done his hair. He repeatedly sips from a bottle of iced-tea, and scribbles notes until his pen runs out. These tiny details are visually interesting and are a wonderful shorthand in demonstrating Yoon’s professionalism.
It takes more than that, though, to make us sympathise with the man who wants the exclusive. At each turn Yoon is lied to, or manipulated, or betrayed: by his boss, his producer, other TV channels, the police, the military, the government…his ambition has made him a pawn in the negotiations. It is the terrorist on the other end of the phone line who is most honest with Yoon…and well, the outcome is really quite fascinating for a film like this.
It’s not just the exploration of terrorism (it’s domestic terrorism, I should note) and politics that makes this film interesting, but also the exploration of press ethics. Should Yoon have been so keen for this exclusive? Should his boss have lied to him in order to further his own position? Should any of this be broadcast at all? Nicely, the film doesn’t offer any clear message of what it wants us to believe: it simply offers a situation, and we witness it play out, free to make up our own minds about the rights and wrongs of it.
This sense of ambiguity is what makes The Terror Live more than a gripping thriller – it genuinely makes you think a bit too. It’s exceptionally topical, and I suspect it will remain so for some time.