Bedevilled

Hae-won is a middle-rank officer working in a Seoul bank. A severe, tense single woman, she is being brought down by work-related stress and the hypercompetitive, misogynistic environment she finds herself in. Desperate, she takes up an offer from a long-forgotten friend and sets off to Mundo, a desolate Southern island in which she had spent her childhood. Arriving at the island, she is warmly welcomed by Bok-nam (Seo Young-hee, The Chaser), her erstwhile best friend. The latter, however, is chained to a hideously exploitative marriage with Man-jong, a rattlesnake-like wife-beater, and being sexually abused by Cheol-jong, his cretinous brother.

Kim Ki-duk’s former assistants are doing quite well these days. Jang Hoon made the macho-swagger-intoxicated but fascinating Rough Cut, and now Jang Cheol-soo, who did second-units for Samaritan Girl and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, makes an equally impressive debut with Bedevilled. While the film makes for a fascinating comparison with Kim’s The Isle (2000), given their less-than-stable female characters residing in isolated, water-bound locations, Jang turns Kim’s usual obsessions on their heads, shifting the perspective from typical Kim Ki-duk-style (male) protagonists seeking redemption through their abject (sexual or otherwise) behavior, to those of the victimized women

It is not difficult to find in Korean literature or cinema the kind of stories in which a woman is subject to abuse, exploitation, violence and insults, sometimes culminating in the absolute denigration of her most basic right as a human being. And yet, in most of these stories, Korean women simply suffer, continue to suffer and suffer some more, especially in the oh-so-venerated works of high-class literature.

The women, no matter how awfully persecuted, must not wreak vengeance on the men, brandishing a sickle, a hoe and other agricultural implements as choice tools of vivisection. Now that would just make the whole thing into a cheap horror film, wouldn’t it? Yet in Bedevilled, that’s exactly what Bok-nam does. In this case the “cheap horror film” outcome happens to be exactly the logical response.

Viewers, regardless of their gender, are likely to experience a simultaneous sense of catharsis and repulsion: unable to judge Bok-nam as morally despicable, but horrified nonetheless by her destructive campaign. And unlike in so many Korean genre films, director Jang refuses to compromise and substitute its devastating ending and thoughtful coda with a Halloween-style, evil-never-dies cop-out denouement, or yet another round of preachy bull crap about how it is all society’s fault.

Finally, the film benefits greatly from the superb performances of not only its lead actress, Seo Young-hee as Bok-nam, but also from a variety of supporting players essaying an impressive range of hypocrisy, imbecility and sheer vileness. Seo has come to specialize in portraying vulnerable, insecure women, but Bok-nam is definitely more than typecasting. She is absolutely convincing not only as a perennial victim but as a female demon whose superego has been shredded into wood chips. You do believe that this fragile, trembling object of domestic violence can, at the next moment, wield a huge mallet and crack a grown man’s skull like a watermelon.

Among the supporting players, the super-veteran Baek Su-ryeon (also striking in The Man from Nowhere) as Bok-nam’s mother-in-law deserves a special mention. In a way, Haewon, a viewer stand-in, is the most schematic character in the movie and Ji Seong-won’s performance suffers somewhat as a result, but her restrained acting in the bookend sequences set in Seoul is quite good. It is in fact one of the notable achievements of Bedevilled that the movie plays fair to Haewon’s character and never denounces her for “neglecting” Bok-nam.