Park Hoon-jung’s first installment of a proposed
action/thriller trilogy, The Witch: Part I, The Subversion (‘Manyeo’, 2018)
opens on the aftermath of a bloody massacre, inside a supposedly top-secret
government building. An eight-year old kid’s escape scheme is hinted to have
left the trail of mangled bodies. However, the facility’s matriarch Dr. Baek
(Jo Min-soo) navigates the blood-splattered stone corridors with the enthusiasm
and zeal of a mad scientist. To her security chief’s (Park Hee-soon) dismay, Dr.
Baek feels she has been proven right about the girl’s supreme powers. At the
same time, the mad doctor assures the little girl can’t survive on her own. A
boy who also has escaped amidst the chaos is recaptured and since the opening
credits display some images from real-life experiments on children, we can
easily understand the purpose of the facility and nature of the
‘children/monsters’.
Thwarting Dr. Baek’s expectations, the gravely injured
8-year old girl Ja-yoon is found by a bereaved middle-aged couple (Choi
Jeong-woo and Oh Mi-hee) in their farm. Ja-yoon grows up as an innocent, farm
girl and maintains that she has no knowledge of her previous life. Ten years
later, the high-schooler Ja-yoon (Kim Da-mi) is seen helping her father with
his financial setbacks and takes care of the frail ma, who is facing early onset of
Alzheimers. Ja-yoon is smart and shy, and spends most of her time with her
chatty and greagrious friend, Do Myung-hee (Go Min-si), the local sheriff’s
daughter. In order to tackle the family’s financial conflicts and to acquire
money for ma’s treatment, Ja-yoon tries her chances at a televised singing
contest. Apart from presenting her winsome voice, Ja-yoon makes the audiences
go wow by doing some ‘magic tricks’.
Ja-yoon’s TV appearance naturally triggers a reaction from
Dr. Baek. She sends her own posse of young, hyper-stylish, and super-evil
masterminds, spearheaded by the same boy (Choi Woo-shik) who gets recaptured in
the opening scene. While Ja-yoon accompanied by Myung-hee takes a train trip to
Seoul in order to attend the contest’s next round, the boy quietly threatens
the girl and even calls her a ‘witch’ (and when enraged he makes it rhyme with
‘bitch’). After winning the quarter-finals, Ja-yoon almost gets kidnapped by
guys wearing black-suits. Two factions seem to be after Ja-yoon: one is group
of supernatually gifted youngsters; the other is lead by scarred security chief who just
wants to kill the escaped monster. When the situation escalates to a point that
puts Ja-yoon’s family and friend in harm’s way, she reacts in the only way she
is trained to; within a matter of seconds men sporting guns lie under pool of
their own blood. Subsequently, Ja-yoon reluctantly agrees to meet her maker and
sort things out.
There’s nothing truly surprising or original about ‘The
Witch’. Twists, emotional highs, and bursts of explosive action are all
packaged in a way that could be easily predicted by seasoned movie buffs.
Transhumanism, telekinesis, psychic power have been turned into pop-corn
entertainment many decades before, the fight for mutant rights in Marvel’s
(1960s) X-Men comic series served as a parallel to the American civil-right
struggles of the 1960s. From Stephen King novels, manga series, X-Men movies to
TV projects like Legion, The Gifted, Stranger Things, the genetically-modified superhuman
ferocity was unleashed for our entertainment in many different ways. The Witch
is pretty much an origin story that’s derived from all these sources and many
more. At times, the movie gives off a vibe of watching the pilot episode of a multi-season
TV series; the characters are cool enough to hold our attention but their actions
don’t make any sense. Yet for all its familarities and flaws, The Witch works
to an extent because of Park Hoon-jung’s well-paced direction and Kim Da-mi’s
mercurial, star-making central performance.
Writer/director Hoon-jung commenced his movie career by
writing the screenplay for Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (2010). Among
his four directorial efforts before The Witch, New World (2013) and The
Tiger (2015) were decent entertainers, comprising of superb ensemble cast.
Hoon-jung’s strength lays in concocting melodrama of the darkest variety which
he does pretty well in the first-half. The slow dramatic build-up pays off
wonderfully with the whirlwind of literally wall-breaking action in the
second-half, set mostly inside a claustrophobic underground bunker. And the
final revelation has all the perfect makings of sequel bait. The very Korean
on-screen idiosyncrasies (casually brutal bad guys, bigmouthed sidekick, etc;
and let’s not forget ‘boiled eggs with 7-Up’) add up to the narrative’s charm.
Kim Da-mi is good throughout different display of moods. She is especially fun
to watch when she dispenses minions, high-level thugs and bosses with
unmatchable suave. Overall, The Witch: Part I, The Subversion (125 minutes) is
derivative yet delightfully crazy.
Trailer
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