Cast:
Kim Jin-kyu (Dong-sik Kim), Ju Jeung-ryu (Mrs. Kim), Lee Eun-shim (Myung-sook), Um Aing-ran (Kyung-hee Cho), Ko Seon-ae (Seon-young Kwak), Ahn Sung-ki (Chang-soon Kim), and Lee Yoo-ri (Ae-soon Kim) Directed, Written, and Produced by Kim Ki-young.
Review:
"When you autopsy human nature, black blood will flow out. That is what we call desire."
Under different circumstances, perhaps this should have been done months before. But it is possible that discovering a film and waiting to give it a spotlight is just as worthy when it comes to discovering a key piece of Korean cinema. This film, alongside its director, is held up by several prominent directors as an influence on their own careers. One influence of Bong Joon-ho's modern classic Parasite (2019) was in fact this film, and he described the director once as his mentor, citing his films as "grotesque and bizarre but great", and it is considered by some to be one of the greatest films from South Korea. His films, particularly those released in the 1960s, have been referred to as part of what has been referred to as the "Golden Age" of Korean cinema, with one nickname of his being "Mr. Monster". His films have been argued to have a distinct focus in realism and expressionism within either society or within the inner world. Kim was born in Seoul and raised there for the first few years of his life before moving into Pyongyang, where he developed an interest in writing and medicine. He planned to be a dentist, studying at Seoul National University, but his interest in the theater sprung into focus at that time as well. He graduated from the university not long before the Korean War broke out, with him serving first as an intern at a hospital, but it was a meeting with Oh Young-jin (who was part of helping with Korean News by the Bureau of Public Information) that got him a chance to do newsreels for the United States Information Service. He spent a few years with the service before utilizing excess material of film stock and camera to make his debut feature with expired film stock and a manually operated camera from the U.S.I.S. to make this debut feature in Box of Death (1955). Kim was described as writing his films away from home, listening to the murmurs from his neighbors for at least three months while in a hotel (his films were generally financed by his wife's dental practice). This was his ninth career film, and he would make 32 overall films before his death in 1998. His reception in Korea and abroad varied in the years after the 1960s, but he managed to experience a revival of sorts just before and after his death with retrospectives, and it is a thankful opportunity that we can even watch this film, since a portion of the film was considered lost until found in 1997, with subsequent restoration occurring thanks to the Korean Film Archive with help by the World Cinema Project.
Sometimes one can only marvel at the claustrophobia of the middle class with films like this. It is definitely clear to see the influence that this had on Parasite (2019) in its clear-cut tale of obsession within a movie that can be thought of as a psychological thriller or even horror (the basic core elements will seem familiar for home invasion connoisseurs). It is one that could be construed by the regret of someone who simply desired a bigger house...or maybe not, depending on one's perception of its ultimate conclusion with a certain wink to the audience for that they see. It moves forward in unsettling its audience through the art of gradually peeling the layers back in chills within the confines of home that still strike a chord today for their relevance in human nature that can pervade those who are not careful enough to curtail certain obsessions. In short, no one is who they seem in terms of their life in society versus at home when it comes to interactions, where the pendulum swings between fragility and cruelty at any point in time, with no one really being spared in the display of striking imagery in depressing detail. One starts with the family in Kim, Ju, Ahn, and Lee. Each have their own crucial part to play in setting up the illusion needed in the opening parts, whether that means squabbles between siblings or worrying about the state of needing to keep up with their own wants and needs. Kim does well with playing the frustration that comes with a mix of insecure authority, one wracked with what tempts him that at the very least is understandable to us (if not easily sympathetic). Ju captures anxiety as the other main figure in the film (reflected in what the film needs to show of her in comparing herself before and after childbirth), a reflection just like Kim in the unwieldly meshing of home and the workplace that gets jolted into trappings of fear. The strangest thing about seeing Lee Eun-shim's performance is the fact that it was her debut role that essentially proved her most iconic in a short career. She described the process of her performance as one where the director (who saw something "extraordinary" about her in her hire) helped to demonstrate how to act. If one searches the Internet, they might interpret her short career to her iconic femme fatale role typecasting her in the perceptions of Korean audiences, although she did have a few roles in the latter part of the 1960s before leaving acting on her accord to be with her husband in Brazil. In any case, it is a devastating performance, one that never leaves your attention whether on or off the screen, a perfect rendition of star-crossed craven nature. Um is the last piece of the puzzle in her own nature shared with Kim, cloying but right on target with establishing the layers of obsession and paranoia needed. With a 108-minute run-time, one can enjoy the film for its measuring of society dealing with its unsettling look upon human nature with a Gothic sensibility that makes for quite a shocker for its ending in more ways than one, which he would go back to in two further films in Woman of Fire (1971) and Woman of Fire '82 that updated the premise, and a remake was done in 2010. It reflects its time with no sense of being trapped there with soothing expression that delivers disturbing results from a director that achieved what he wanted to say in all the right ways that still permeates cinema and its native country after 60 years.
Overall, I give it 10 out of 10 stars.
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