Jang Cheol-soo

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) South Korean cinema still doesn’t quite make sense to me. I’m not saying this pejoratively—I think it’s great that there’s a strong film industry there, and it has clearly shown that it has the means and the ability to go head-to-head with much of Hollywood. But when I start looking at individual films from a North American perspective, I often notice odds pacing issues, structural problems, character incoherencies and narrative shortcomings—South Korean cinema often looks good, but with vexing issues underneath. Take Bedevilled, for instance, which is apparently about a detestable young woman heading to an isolated island where she grew up, and encountering various horrors over there. When the action gets cracking, she’s not even the protagonist of the story: another woman, her old childhood friend, cracks up under the constant abuse she gets from others on the island and goes on a gory murderous spree. Once that’s resolved, the story goes back to our initial protagonist to (unconvincingly) show us her personal growth from the ordeal. Bedevilled, it should be noted, is an out-and-out horror film, and South Koreans don’t mess around when it comes to blood sprays and aberrant psychopathy—as such, I’m not on firm ground in talking about a national cinema based on my problems with a single genre. (Although I’ll note that Bedevilled collected two armfuls of awards, both in South Korea and overseas, so it can’t be that off brand.) But still: there’s an awkwardness to storytelling here that I find curious and can’t quite pin on cultural factors. Director Jang Cheol-soo creates maybe half of the effect I was expecting in his depiction of an isolated island filled with dysfunctional people, and the script doesn’t dig into the areas I would have found most interesting. Everything seems geared to prepare and react to the sudden burst of violence that wipes an island’s population off the map, and I’m not sure I’ve got the patience for such nihilism anymore. Of course, there’s a difference between Bedevilled-the-film-from-a-decade-ago and a larger report on contemporary South Korean cinema, but this isn’t the first time I’m noticing something weird, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.