James Y. Lee
Every major film festival on TIFF’s level is a great opportunity to seek out the newest in Asian cinema, and this year’s TIFF had no shortage of high-profile showings from various East Asian countries. At the end of it all, in this critic’s view, Lee Chang-dong’s endlessly dense and potently layered Possible Love, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s immensely touching and mournful Look Back adaptation, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s richly optimistic and life-affirming All of a Sudden were almost certainly the three forefront films of this year’s TIFF—standouts even in a compilation of some of this year’s most anticipated fall festival releases. These are all sharp-edged, refined works from longtime filmmaking masters, with a taste for character-focused and literary storytelling that stands on the edges between despair and hope, between regret and gratitude.
A further deep dive, however, reveals three particular films from East Asia—two South Korean, one Thai—with a taste for the genre-focused and atmospheric, all of which played their part in the growing landscape of TIFF’s appetite for international cinema.
The Assassin(s)
Hur Jin-ho’s latest film, The Assassin(s), is a worthwhile entry in a mini-canon of South Korean films that find wild success in their domestic box office; films like 1987: When the Day Comes, Default, A Taxi Driver, and so on, which attempt to merge fraught periods in contemporary South Korean history with genre-adjacent entertainment value and single-mindedly anti-corruption rage. Part of the inevitable success of this film is bound to be because of its ensemble cast, which includes veteran actor and TV star Yoo Hai-jin, Decision to Leave‘s Park Hae-il returning to the big screen after four years, and actor/singer megastar Lee Min-ho all in a triad of pivotal leading roles. But the other part of that success is because of its distinct historical situation; the first attempted assassination of dictatorial president Park Chung-hee in 1974 by Moon Se-gwang, which ended in the killing of his First Lady, Yuk Young-soo. Very few people will dispute the increasingly corrupt nature of the Park regime, which instilled martial law and instituted numerous crackdowns on the freedom of speech and press—but The Assassin(s)‘ greatest point of interest is how it brings into question who exactly was involved in Yuk’s killing.
If the existence of a Se7en-homaging chase sequence midway through Hur’s film is any indication, The Assassin(s) is definitely drawing from at least some kind of Fincher inspiration; it’s not that difficult to surmise when you’ve got a film about the police and press coming together to work on a case with unexpectedly unclear conclusions. Hur starts off his latest film as a countdown to Yuk’s killing—a tensely staged setpiece where Moon Tae-kwang (Park Jeong-min) dashes towards the stage and fires several bullets, striking Yuk and then being apprehended amid a scene of profound chaos—before swiftly expanding its reach to Jungbu Police investigator Park Cheol-gu (Yoo), Dong-sung Daily editor Kim Jae-hwan (Park), and reporter Hang Young-il (Lee).
Cheol-gu is suspicious of the fact that Moon was given ready access to the conference without a pass, even with the President and First Lady present; meanwhile, the Dong-sung Daily has long been the target of the KCIA for their investigations into the government’s corruption. When the three men butt heads and discover that the number of gunshots fired—as well as the positions they were fired in—are incongruent with the conclusion that Moon was the sole shooter, they realize that this assassination attempt may have been a team effort (hence the title’s parenthetical!), and immediately launch a sprawling investigation to figure out the truth of who else was involved, and why.
The Assassin(s) is a film with immensely firm political convictions, but while that gives it an equally firm sense of narrative purpose, it also makes Hur’s film vulnerable to moments that far too clearly outline Cheol-gu’s descent into mistrust for his government’s ideals, or Jae-hwan and Young-il’s staunch adherence to the freedom of press. But those convictions are also what allows it to have a JFK-esque forward momentum, more than earning a 130-minute runtime as it moves from one investigation item and suspect to the next with breathless speed while covering as much speculative ground as it can within reason, reaching some surprising conclusions in the process. As a result, Hur’s film manages to possess the energy and verve of a conspiracy thriller, a satisfying change in pace for a South Korean veteran most known for subdued dramas like One Fine Spring Day or chamber pieces like A Normal Family. Mix that narrative combination with dynamite performances from its central ensemble of performers—as well as supporting-role appearances from Korean stars like Jung Woo-sung and Shim Eun-kyung—and you have a crowdpleaser that merges entertainment value with historical curiosity and political intrigue.
Inherit
The last we saw of Thai director Banjong Pisanthanakun, he was working with Na Hong-jin—among the many under-the-radar projects Na seemed to be doing in the 10-year gap between The Wailing and this year’s Hope—on a film called The Medium. A natural extension of Pisanthanakun’s established abilities in horror via films like 2004’s Shutter, The Medium was an ambitious and slightly unwieldy found-footage horror film drenched in brutality and despair, portraying a shaman’s fierce quest to save her niece from a demon of steadily growing danger craving to wreak vengeance on her entire bloodline. Five years later, Pisanthanakun’s penchant for utilizing Thai folklore for terrifying purposes has rather firmly recurred with Inherit, largely doing away with the oppressive bleakness and the docu-fiction of his previous film for a much more tonally various—if not significantly more unbalanced—horror experience. The end result is a film that at points seems confused on its aspirations, as Inherit strives for grand social commentary on inequality, yet funnels it through a much tonally lighter, ambiguously empowering narrative lens.
Adapted from the 1991 Thai novel Tayard Asoon, Inherit takes the shell of its premise and translates it to a contemporary premise, surrounding the return of Woranart, the elderly matriarch of a wealthy corporate dynasty. That said, however, you’d never be able to tell this character’s real age, given that she’s played by the stunning Davika Hoorne (A Useful Ghost) in zero old-age makeup. Indeed, Woranart is the host of an ancient centipede demon that’s greatly extended her lifespan, and she’s looking for the next host in the demon’s lineage. Her targets are set on young Oui (Thitiya Jirapornsilp), the adolescent daughter of the Manasvanich family, currently under harrowing public scrutiny after the factory owned by their father, Olan (Trin Settachoke), experienced a chemical leak that killed dozens of people, and is now under the grip of both intense protest and serious investigation as he attempts to cover up the damage.
Taken individually, Inherit‘s components would have worked on a more fascinating basis. Woranart’s escalating trail of blood as she attempts to claim Oui provides clumsily fascinating observations on female youth and beauty standards, as Woranart and Oui’s growing bond coalesces with the violent, possession-induced deaths of anyone who would dare threaten Oui’s safety. It helps that Hoorne absolutely steals the show here, portraying Woranart with an undeniably gleeful, unhinged charm that belies the evil crawling underneath, which virtually explodes out of her by the time she’s forced to show her hand. Meanwhile, the corruption that plagues the Manasvanich family from nearly top to bottom—from the spiritual corruption of Oui’s mother, Sudaduang’s (Sinjai Plengpanich) side of the family, to Olan’s capitalist corruption and the family’s complicity—comes under threat as a result of Woranart’s encroaching grip on Oui, which manifests in her targeting the family’s collective guilt via the form of aggressive, imagined visions.
But these individual elements can’t quite coalesce on a narrative level, leading to a strange-gaited horror film that winds down on menace the further it goes along. The most riveting moments of Inherit are its earliest kills—among them two instances of extremely graphic head trauma, each from differently unexpected sources—as tone-setters for the brutality that might, and does, ensue. But the further Woranart extends her influence on the family, and the more characters get thrown into the mix in the spiritual quest to stop her, the more Inherit loses its hold on its thematic focus, leading to a somewhat flatly questionable conclusion. Is Woranart’s violence ultimately righteous vengeance on a family rotten to its core? Which of the two are we meant to see as the greater of the film’s evils? Pisanthanakun’s film is undeniably ambitious, but it can’t quite match the breadth of its ideas about capitalistic inequality with scares of equal creativity and terror.
The World Before
Yoon Dan-bi is a filmmaker who firmly belongs in a particular class of slice-of-life independent Korean films—a sect of South Korean arthouse film spearheaded by the likes of Hong Sang-soo and Yoon Ga-eun, dedicated to the quieter parts of life that are prone to hiding real revelations. If The World Before—Yoon’s latest film, and a fascinating translation of a Korean title literally closer to The First World / 첫세계—is proof of anything in particular, it’s the fact that Yoon has a very solid eye for capturing the ennui of rural Korean teenage life. Here, she’s filtered it through the eyes of Jin (Sim Su-bin), whose nascent attraction to her best friend, Du-jae (Kim Eo-jin), is a source of adolescent curiosity and tragedy rolled in one.
Contained in the confines of a small island town, Yoon Dan-bi’s film initially feels scant on narrative detail—whatever we do learn about the characters within it are shown in passing glances and small conversational mentions. The first thing we see within the film is teen girl Jin stopping by and resting at Du-jae’s grandmother’s home some time before she passes away, which serves to show both Jin’s close bond with another family, and also a kind of alienation from her own. When the funeral eventually happens, Du-jae returns from Seoul to this village, notably without his mother, who outright doesn’t attend the funeral and seems to have a fraught history with the people in the village.
Du-jae’s return prompts a quick friendship with Jin, who steadily develops a romantic interest in him—which develops the tension of when she might wind up confessing her feelings. The World Before is an indulgently patient film in its pacing, willing to get perhaps a little too absorbed in the scenery and the silence of its narrative conceit in order to sell a vision of rural Korea as both expansive and limiting in how it instills solitude on the teens growing up in it. The film often strikes redundancy as a result of its more languid progression, but certain details in its characterization still stand out. Kim Eo-jin’s performance is worth special consideration here; Du-jae is purposefully difficult to parse as a character, toeing the line between reclusive introversion and profound repression from what we eventually find is a surprisingly fraught background manifesting through an unusual dedication to silence. In return, Sim Su-bin’s performance gets to really stand out in the film’s final 20 minutes as Jin’s romantic interest slowly turns into cautious action, which silently drops the other shoe and cements the sadness central to The World Before‘s tale of adolescent limerence.
It’s easy to imagine even viewers who’ve developed a tolerance for slower films losing their patience with the events, or perhaps even relative lack thereof, of The World Before. But Yoon’s film does eventually find its way, retroactively clicking into place the loneliness and redundant routine inherent to its construction, even despite some narrative areas in need of a fresher thematic angle. Its duo of teenage performances are a major part of the intrigue that Yoon’s film sustains throughout, and both prove crucial to its ultimate impact. Without their ability to plausibly sell both Jin’s nascent teenage sexuality, as well as Du-jae’s emotional unreadability, The World Before would very well have fallen flat on its face, caught too eagerly in the mood of its setting without any real forward momentum. The end result is a tale likely to sneak up on, then firmly resonate with anyone who’s been through episodes of teenage heartbreak, unrequited love, the loneliness of isolating rural settings, and so on—all while tapping into a specifically Korean flavor of how these feelings manifest in distant, mundane island life.
