BEDEVILLED (Mongrel, 2010) D: Yang Chul-soo, w/ Seo Yeong-hie, Ji Seong-won. Rating: NNN DVD package: none. Rating: NNN
As women’s revenge movies go, Bedevilled is more tragedy than fantasy. It’s less in the vein of Jodie Foster’s The Brave One and more like I Spit On Your Grave, though it lacks that film’s extreme violence and has an explicit social agenda at odds with an endorsement of vigilantism.
Burnt out and in trouble at work, Seoul bank employee Kim Bok-nam (Seo Yeong-hie) vacations on a remote island where she once summered as a girl.
Now only nine people live there, and her childhood friend Hae-won (Ji Seong-won) has become a virtual slave to everyone and is severely abused by her husband, who may be molesting her 10-year-old daughter. Eventually, Hae-won snaps and gets busy with a scythe.
Tension is present from the start, but the movie takes its time developing. Director Yang Chul-soo makes sure we understand the island’s social dynamics and everybody’s complicity in Hae-won’s abuse. He also explores Bok-nam’s uneasy friendship with Hae-won, an emphasis that gives the climax a resonance it wouldn’t otherwise have.
Yang knows how to give his movie style when it needs it, but for the most part, deceptively plain visuals and performances lend Bedevilled the plausibility of a newspaper story. However, there is one narrative flaw toward the end: it’s never clear how Bok-nam winds up in a cell or how Hae-won finds her. It looks like a dream sequence, but it isn’t.
I’d like to know whether or not Bedevilled is based on a real case. Sadly, there are no extras to tell me.
EXTRAS Widescreen. Korean audio. English subtitles.
