thomas4cinema

Deaf and dumb twen Ryu lives with his sister, and he wants to find her a new kidney for a transplant. He gets involved with an organ dealer mafia, and ends up minus one of his own kidneys and short of some million won to pay for his sister’s donation organ. In order to get the cash he plots the kidnapping of an industry manager’s daughter. To be honest, I had a hard time following the plot, partly because from the beginning, I was rather captured by the beauty of images and sounds (especially the stunning sound design inside the factory where Ryu works) and forgot to pay attention who is plotting what to what effect. It does not matter much in the end, because it gets quite clear that they are all heading for disaster, including Ryu, his sister, his friend with whom he is planning the kidnapping and who pays a high price when the stunt goes wrong and the father’s wrath turns against her. And the father himself, who has to realise that he has lost his family and life long ago, but loses everything again. I would not say that the film has the breath-taking strangeness of “Oldboy”, which I saw some years ago, but it may be even more powerful in being more human, focusing more on the characters as truly desperate beings. But – like “Audition” that I just write about a moment ago – a good representative of what was interesting about East Asian cinema in the last decade.