Identified a pattern here: mother issues I already found in my previous Korean film marathon. Now I feel there are police issues as well. Issues with police officers closing their eyes when faced with family atrocities (“Bedevilled”) and officers prone to beating and abusing suspects and prisoners (basically all the films I’ve recently seen, particularly disturbing maybe in “Mother”, or in “3-Iron”).
So when these issues meet “Bedevilled”’s topic (family violence, if you want), it is not surprising that things get a bit out of hand, i.e. violent, which again seems to be the overall topics of at least the Korean films I come across (or I need to check my selection procedure, might be it says more about me than about Korea).
Here we have a particularly pretty city girl visiting her particularly sad childhood girlfriend, who is stuck on a remote island with an abusive husband and a bunch of senior citizens that would give Macbeth’s witches a run for their money.
Emotional discrepancies, betrayed childhood memories, moronic brothers… through that into the mix with the above-mentioned features of any good Korean movie character, and you can guess this ain’t gonna end well for some, worse for others.
While “Bedevilled” may not have the most original script in how it makes the drama evolve, it is yet another piece of evidence that Korean cinema is very authoritative when it comes to depicting people pushed to the edge and beyond. Maybe there’s no need to watch too many of these, but catching up once every decade is definitely worth it. There is an abundance of competent directors, actors and screenwriters that can at any time pull off an entertaining night drenched in blood.
thomas4cinema 