In every town, there is a chilly moment at dawn, in which everything is still drowsy or on the point of awakening. It is in this half-asleep phase that Our Town begins, a sharp awakening being provoked by the discovery of the corpse of a girl who has been tortured and crucified. In the same detached manner as used in news reports, the director Jung Gil-young tells us that this is the forth victim of a serial killer who employs this modus operandi. The film then takes us into a perverse and complex game, in which three players take part: two killers and a policeman, whose lives have been closely tied since childhood. Lee Jae-shin (Seon-gyun, seen in R-Point) is the Sacho-dong police lieutenant in charge of the investigation. An orphan, he was unintentionally guilty of the deaths of the parents of his best friend Gyeong. The latter is a writer, desperately trying to research his first novel about serial killers; he tries to bring to life with the written word his own homicidal urges which, ten years earlier, led him to kill and crucify the mother of Hyoi (Ryu Deok-hwan, seen in Welcome To Dongmakgol). As a child, Hyoi witnessed the murders; now he is an introverted young man who becomes the Sacho-dong serial killer. Each, in his own way, is in charge of his own destiny and that of the other two, creating genuine blood ties.
"Their" town goes beyond its own physicality to become a psychological arena, full of memories, an emotive and temporal space shared only by the three of them, the sole "actors" in the events which unfold. Physical scenarios, which are above all psychological, oppressive and claustrophobic. These, accompanied by tonal colours which are hardly ever natural, accentuate the obsession for violence which is present throughout the film. This is Jung Gil-young's debut, but he shows a surprising ability to handle the emotional avalanche which ceaselessly inundates the spectator. Our Town is a ferocious film. You would be hard pressed to find a character in it who does not have a dark side; we are faced not with one, but with two killers and a policeman with a challenging past. The spectator has no means of escape when penetrating the dynamics of the trio, increasingly bound together to the point of suffocation. The viewer must helplessly witness the urges and the guilt of the characters without seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, or a figure than could alleviate the destructive power of the film. Even the explicit violence used in the murders assumes a highly symbolic value. As cinema often shows us, the rituals of the serial killer have deeply rooted symbolic origins, and we are often witness to authentic competitions for who can carry out the most brutal murders in the most original way (often descending into farce). Luckily, this is not the case here. Of course violence is present in large doses, although never gratuitous, and it is in keeping with the narrative structure, while never descending into mannerism. Excessive mannerism is a common problem in today's Korean cinema, but in Our Town, the coldness of the images help to create an emotional detachment which only serves to make the cruelty of the situation even more effective.
His homicidal urge becomes irrepressible for Gyeong, while it is calculated and exhausted for Hyoi. Violence is shown in an explicit manner, but detachment and stylistic precision reign supreme, making it all the less tolerable. Witnessing a murder with such disinterest creates a distance which makes the spectator helpless in the face of such violence. The corpses become a kind of voyage into the memory. It goes beyond a simple vendetta or childhood trauma; death is the historical bystander which propels both the lives of the characters and the narrative structure. The lives of the protagonists form a map drawn with the corpses and the blood of the victims. In this way, the use of flashbacks becomes significant, often inserted in such a fluid manner that it seems to be the continuity between the past and present, between cause and effect, between skeletons in the closet and crucified corpses.
Our Town is a debut work, and as such is not immune to certain defects (perhaps the finale is overdone), however it does retain a rare emotional force, following in the footsteps of some illustrious and hard to follow predecessors produced by Korean cinema. Jung Gil-young comes out of it with his head held high. In every town there are people, places and periods connected to a memory. When this is born in blood, it is often to blood that it will return.
Luca Censabella