Movies Reviews

Bedevilled - New York Asian Film Festival Review

By Ron Wilkinson Jul 6, 2011, 17:08 GMT

When her pleas for help are ignored and cause her daughter\'s death, a woman seeks revenge on the person she blames. ...more

Although still an exploitation flick, this movie does it better than most. Horror, creepiness and a lesson in the land that time forgot.

First time direct Jang Cheol-so’s “Bedevilled” screened at this year’s New York Asian Film festival and turned out to be a corker of a film. It borrows from the female revenge flick “I Spit on Your Grave” as the oppressed and imprisoned female gets her dues. More interesting is the connection with the moody and very disturbing Lars van Trier / Nicole Kidman drama “Dogville. In that film the woman appeals to strangers for help and is initially sheltered. When the shelter turns to imprisonment and abuse the woman finds her only way out is to revisit a life she thought she left behind.

“Bedevilled” is not as well acted, directed or written as is “Dogville” but it is a step above “I Spit on Your Grave.” On one level it is a straightforward horror flick. Be forewarned, there is mayhem galore in this film and not a little down and dirty sex. Leave the under-16 kids at home. On the bright side, the heroin of the film, Hae-won (played with through professionalism by Seong-won Ji) goes through a positive transformation because of her traumatic visit to her childhood home on the island of Moo-do.

Starting out with a solid dose of crisis and remorse, the pretty and poised Hae-won flips out at her upscale banking job in Seoul. She is one of the new breed, the country girl who left marriage and family duties behind to come to the big city and learn the ways of the world. This behavior is the tip of the iceberg.

When she ventures back to the forgotten and nearly abandoned island she brings back with her a curse. It is the curse of knowledge---the carnal knowledge of worldliness. She could not shake it if she tried. Her childhood best friend Kim Bok-nam (played to the hilt by Yeong-hie Seo) greets her at the landing. Kim Bok-nam has been writing Hae-won for years asking her to come back and visit. The newly christened big city girl finally stopped reading the letters, although she kept them in a drawer.

Travelling back to the isolated village Hae-won enters into a land that time forgot. Her childhood friend (and girlhood fantasy lesbian lover) has become a babbling ignoramus, substituting a huge quantity of worthless words for the simple but taboo message that she desperately needs help. The other seven people on the island eat a mysterious leaf that has opiate and/or hallucinatory properties. It helps them cope with the boredom but intensifies their isolation. They have become brooding and brutal to each other even beyond the effects of their abandoned and marginalized existence.

As Hae-won enters into this scary group her guilt and doubt about her job melds with her guilt about having ignored Kim Bok-nam’s letters. This guilt intensifies quite nicely as the inhabitants demonstrate, one-by-one, that they are barking mad.

Hae-won’s presence catalyzes a pent-up homicidal madness that was bubbling below the surface. You will never look at a scythe the same way, again.

As the madness become manifest, Hae-won ignores it, as she has been taught to do in the big city. She ignores it until it is too late. At that point there will be consequences that follow humans even after death. This is one of the very good points of the screenplay (great work by Kwang-young Choi). Like the world at large, when we ignore injustice, it gets worse.

As in many Asian films, the pacing of this Korean movie is slow for Americans. However, it is almost never boring. There is a steady build-up of tension between the madness that is evidenced in the details such as when Kim bolts down huge quantities of food while her brain dead husband has sex with a prostitute in the next room. One of the inhabitants is an old man who never says a word the entire time. Good, creepy stuff.

The cinematography contrasts the lushness and beauty of the shimmering island with the people on it. The shots of the rugged coastline makes the viewer want to go there and tour the island, at least now that everybody is dead. There is thick, tall grass and abundant food. It is a paradise of madness. An exquisite sanitarium in which the inmates imprison themselves so as to torment each other.

The newcomer has the ability to right wrongs both on the island and in her newfound world of urban luxury. However, she may be unwilling to pay the cost of that transformation.

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Directed by: Chul-soo Jang
Written by: Kwang-young Choi
Starring: Yeong-hie Seo, Seong-won Ji and Min-ho Hwang 
Release Date: New York Asian Film Festival--June 29, 2011
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 115 minutes
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
Color: Color