A Film a Week - Revelations / Gyesirok

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Yeon Sang-ho first established himself as, potentially, the next big thing in animation with his debut- and sophomore features “The Fake” (2013) and “Seoul Station” (2016). With the latter’s live-action sequel, “Train to Busan” (2016), he nominated himself for the title of the new Korean master of genre filmmaking. However, the trilogy’s ending, “Peninsula” (2020) was underwhelming, to put it mildly, even for the COVID-era standards, while two more two more of his flicks, the superhero action comedy “Psychokinesis” (2018) and the Netflix-produced SF-action movie “Jung-E” (2023) were mere passable efforts.

The energetic filmmaker then turned to work on a couple of TV series, but now he is back to the big screens, conditionally, with “Revelations”, an adaptation of his own web comic. Conditionally because “Revelations” is a Netflix piece with no theatre- or festival screening intended, despite the backing from the powerhouse genre auteur Alfonso Cuarron who assumed the role of the executive producer here. Also, this is a step away from Yeon’s general habitat of genre spectacles and towards the psychological realism within the framework of a grim thriller revolving around a child molester / serial killer and a pastor and a police detective who try to catch him.

First we meet the pastor Min-chan (Ryu Jun-yeol, glimpsed in Hun Jang’s “A Taxi Driver”), a devout man of faith who has to face a double trouble in his earthly life. He has to deal with his wife’s infidelity, and also with a threat of a mega-church being built in his area of work by his former mentor’s son. When his encounter with a recently released sex offender Kwon (Shin Min-jae, re-uniting with Yeon after “Jung-E”) coincides with his son going missing for a while, he sets on catching and punishing him. Even when the son reappears, Min-chan is sure that Kwon is guilty of something and has religious visions as a “proof”.

On the other hand, Kwon is also pursued by the police detective Yeon-hee (Shin Hyeon-bin, lately mostly active on television) who also has a score to settle with him. Namely, he abducted and murdered her sister in the past, so the detective wants to bring him to justice. It might go against the idea that a police officer must not be personally involved with the case in order to close it efficiently and justly, but here it is taken as a “booster” for Yeon-hee’s motivation, which is further enhanced with wobbly flashbacks and visions of her sister.

If “Revelations” were more toned-down, psychologically dense drama about the characters’ motivations and convictions, it would probably be a better movie of a character study sort. The actors’ efforts go into that direction and Ryu Jun-yeol is the particularly good and convincing here. The actor’s ability to switch his presence from well-meaning to menacing perfectly matches the traits of the character he plays.

However, Yeon aims for a classical thriller here, so he puts an accent on the “race against time” trope. Unfortunately, it never gets a firm grip on the viewers and the reasons for that are several. Firstly, he does not vary his visual style enough, so Yeon-hee’s flashbacks are the only step away from the quasi-matter-of-factly realism that dominates the film’s atmosphere. Not even Min-chan’s visions get a special treatment. Secondly, it is obvious that the film was constructed for small screens, so the absence of the “movie magic” is felt, sometimes painfully. And finally, the only flourish present throughout the movie is the choral score by Kim Dong-wook and Alan Tyler that quickly becomes repetitive and tiresome in promising something Yeon does not want or does not how to deliver: an examination of the characters’ convictions, religious or otherwise.

Therefore, “Revelations” becomes and stays a generic “Netflix-and-chill” experience: watchable, but forgetable. It is so low-engaging that it will depart the viewers’ thoughts and memory way quicker than it entered them.

A Film a Week - Where the Wind Blows / Il vento soffia dove vuole

 previously published on Cineuropa

There are two characters named Lazarus in the Holy Bible. One, the better known of the two, Lazarus of Bethany, the brother of Mary and Martha, was resurrected by Jesus Christ four days after his death. The other Lazarus is a beggar from one of the cautionary tales from the Gospel of Luke, who, after suffering injustice at the hands of the rich during his earthly life, gets satisfaction in the Kingdom of Heaven, while his tormentors get sent to Hell. The latter individual gets a Bible passage about him read directly to screen in Marco Righi’s second fiction feature, Where the Wind Blows, which is vying for the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary.

So, Righi’s film has a lot to do with the Bible, which it often quotes from the title on, and one might have to join some religious study group just to pick up on all of the references. It tells the story of Antimo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori, glimpsed in Rainbow – A Private Affair), a young man who accepts his daily routine of household chores, working on his father’s farm, and Mass and confession at the local church in a village in the Apennines. There is no deeper understanding between him and his younger sister Marta (Yile Lara Vianello, the child star of Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo Celeste), and no deeper affection between him and his girlfriend Miriam (Gaja Masciale). One day, he meets Lazzaro (Fiorenzo Mattu), an illiterate worker at the neighbouring farm who has spent all of his life in pain and poverty. The encounter and the friendship between the two reignite the spark for the religious work Antimo used to do before, but which got left by the wayside somewhere along the way. However, his teachings differ greatly from those one might find at a service or in Sunday school. Is Antimo a heretic or the second coming of the Saviour himself?

Righi knows how to envision and execute simple scenes in an effective way, how to use David Becheri’s natural- and analogue-looking cinematography to set the mood, and how to utilise Luca Giovanardi’s music, varying from gentle piano to pulsating electronica, with lots of synth in between, to highlight the emotion. Together with Roberto Rabitti, Righi also keeps the editing under control, keeping the pace meditative, which suits the film’s topics, while the cast members play their characters in a nicely subdued manner.

However, there is such a thing as too much subtlety, and Where the Wind Blows clearly suffers from it, ending up being so ambiguous that it actually seems completely ethereal. On the way, we get some bits and pieces of Antimo’s background (he is a seminary dropout, for undisclosed reasons, but it is safe to assume that his faith was purer than the Church could tolerate), and insights into the questions that trouble him (whether his mother is in Heaven, since she hid her illness, rejected medical treatment and even stopped praying before her death, which all points to an involuntary suicide, of sorts), but it is still hard to draw a concrete conclusion, or even to answer the question of what the film is about. Sure, the whole slow-paced affair is less about specific actions, and more about the character and the philosophical questions he is grappling with, but it still seems like the filmmaker’s own theological musings converted into a small, arthouse film.

A Film a Week - Svaha: The Sixth Finger / Sabaha

previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

"Svaha: The Sixth Finger" was never intended to be an award-grabbing festival darling, and its distribution trajectory, having a domestic release before becoming a minor hit world-wide on the internet market, clearly shows that. Neither the film, labelled as a supernatural thriller, nor its director, Jang Jae-hyun, known for his writing and directing work on similar projects like "The Priests" (both writing and directing credits) and the remake of the Venezuelan minor horror sensation "The House at the End of Time", renamed "House of the Disappeared" for Korean version (written by Jang and directed by Lim Dae-wung), fit the festival kind of profile. But envisioned and crafted properly, "Svaha: The Sixth Finger" is more than a decent past-time, far better than Dan Brown novels' screen adaptations (the DNA of the script and the characters has some similarities with them), but still not quite as brilliant as Na Hong-jin's "The Wailing".

The original title "Svaha" ("Sabaha" in the transcription from Korean) has its roots in Buddhism and Hinduism, as it is a word that is used at the end of mantra. From Sanskrit, it is translatable as "Well said", while in Tibetan, the meaning is closer to "So be it", which sounds eerily Abrahamic. The expression travelled together with Buddhism, from India to Tibet, China, Japan and Korea. On the other hand, "The Sixth Finger" (pun intended) part, added for the international video markets, is a plot point that will not be discussed any further in order to keep the spoilers at bare minimum in this pretty much plot-driven story.

The film opens with a narration by Geun-hwa (Lee Jae-in), a simple country girl, who explains that she was born with a demonic twin sister, that she lost her parents early on and that she was raised by her grandparents. As a character, she will find her way to the centre of the plot around the midpoint of the film, but as a narrator, she will be absent until the very end, making a full circle, which is a bit schticky, but efficient.

The story itself revolves around the murders that lead to the pseudo-Buddhist religious cult called The Deer Mount and its mysterious founder and leader Ye-seok (Jeong Dong-hwan). While they are being officially investigated by the police and its chief Hwang (Jung Jin-young), they also draw the attention of Pastor Park (Lee Jung-jae), a man specialized in investigating and exposing the cults and pseudo-religious groups, who becomes our protagonist. With the help of the two of his employees, driver Joseph and deaconess-secretary Sim (Hwang Jung-min) and the valuable information provided by his Buddhist monk friend Hae-an (Jin Seong-kyu, glimpsed in "The Extreme Job"), he is on his way to solve the mystery that exceeds the borders of the material world.

In the exposition stage of the plot, "Svaha: The Sixth Finger" is an intriguing and high-revving piece of movie fun, with a couple of set-piece scenes that provide a nerve-wrecking tension and are directed with elegance and efficiency by Jang. Also, the setting of the urban and rural areas with different religious backgrounds around the Christmas time fills the film with a pretty unique atmosphere. The technical component of the film is usually spot-on, and Jang does his best to shift the tone either by fine-tuning, or by shifting gears regarding the tempo.

However, when all the threads converge into one, Svaha becomes pretty much straight-forward piece where every character does what it is supposed for them to do. Jang's attempts to change the rhythm with the flashback moments seem a bit clunky and the flashbacks themselves are quite unnecessary, since they tend to over-explain the clues and the twists planted just several scenes earlier. In the end, some 15 minutes of slightly over two hours of runtime could easily be trimmed off.

The thing that elevates "Svaha" above the line of average is the film's carefully picked cast. The actors are making an effort to breathe the life into the characters that are either stock, broadly sketched or a bit underdeveloped. Pastor Park even has some franchise potential as a character, while Lee has the star power to carry it. Park Jung-min's efficiency, complete with a dash of humanity, in his role here definitely paved the road for him for bigger things, like this year's Berlinale title "Time to Hunt". Jin Seong-kyu is quite compelling as the protagonist's consultant with a dash of nerdiness, while Lee Jae-In hits the right tones as Geum-hwa. Little known David Lee also puts himself on the map of talent with his role of Joseph that exceeds the frame of a basic sidekick.

Masterfully acted and for the most of the time efficiently directed, easy to follow "Svaha: The Sixth Finger" simply works as a good enough fun, regardless of occasional errors and clichés that could be traced back to the script. Make no mistake, this is not a masterpiece on any level, but it is still an example of a good genre film that works ideally on home platforms.

A Film a Week - Agape

originally published on Cineuropa

Branko Schmidt’s new film Agape is his third collaborative effort with screenwriter Ivo Balenović and serves as a conclusion to their informal social criticism trilogy, following Metastases (2009), set in a milieu of lowlifes, criminals, drug addicts and alcoholics echoing the recent war and Vegetarian Cannibal (2012), which deals with the interconnected worlds of organized crime, corrupt police and flawed health system. Revolving around the issues of church, paedophilia, God’s love and intolerance amongst the Croatian youth, Agape, which world-premiered at the recent Pula Film Festival, goes even deeper, acting as an exposé of a failed society, church practices and neglected youth and exploring the more philosophical and more universal topics of love, understanding and morality.

The story follows Miran (played by Goran Bogdan, an actor glimpsed in virtually every Croatian film lately), a parish priest in the Zagreb suburbs and a catechism teacher in a local high school. He tries to be role-model to “his children”; he drives a motorbike, plays basketball with them, drinks beer and invites them over for video-game sessions. He pays special attention to Goran (young Serbian actor Denis Murić of No One’s Child fame), a boy from an orphanage; this gets noticed by Goran’s fellow classmates and lands the boy in trouble. But the priest’s problems soon multiply when an angelic-looking, intelligent, but vain new classmate Gabriel (Murić’s buddy from No One’s Child Pavle Čemerikić) appears on the scene and becomes Goran’s rival for Miran’s attention and affection. Besides the unhealthy climate in class, the real problem emerges as Miran slowly but surely loses balance between the highest form of God’s love that he preaches and tries to live according to it, and, for a man of Catholic faith, unpleasant labels that arise from speculations about his interest in boys.

Veteran Croatian filmmaker Branko Schmidt deals with a number of interconnected, thorny topics and manages to unfold and examine them in a lean 77-minute format. This was not an easy task, since he and Balenović (together with Sandra Antolić and Zrinka Katarina Matijević) came up with numerous drafts and versions of the script trying to correctly develop the characters and create the right tensions between them. Schmidt unfolds the story like a true master, taking his time, and lets the characters breathe and atmosphere build up. Filming the characters and the modernist, cube-like architecture of new-built churches with a hand-held camera in cold tones and using almost no background music at all, Schmidt aims for the realistic effect that will only be broken in the emotionally tense last scene with Miran’s beaten-up face in the rear-view mirrors of his motorbike. Keeping in mind the intesitiy of it all, Agape is a film that demands some time to settle in the viewer’s mind.

Another of the film’s strong points is the acting. Almost all of the hard work had already been done once a well thought-out cast had been chosen and other preparations had been made, including vocal coaching for the two young Serbian actors. The only thing Schmidt had to do was to have enough faith in his actors, which he does. Bogdan is capable of plumbing emotional depths, expressed solely through his facial expressions, whilst Murić has a bright future ahead of him, since he is capable of sharing the frame with almost any actor without being intimidated or out-acted. The dynamics between him and Čemerikić work well, and the performance by veteran Croatian actor Ivo Gregurević as a pragmatic bishop is a particularly nice touch.