A group of Caucasian priests drive frantically through nighttime Seoul. One of them is holding onto what appears to be a small, squealing animal wrapped in black cloth. But then their car is overturned in a terrible crash. Some force contained under the cloth now appears to possess a young high school girl caught up in the accident, named Young-sin (Park So-dam, The Silenced).
The Vatican urgently reaches out to the Korean Catholic church, and despite the disdain of ecclesiastical leaders, the chain-smoking, unkempt Priest Kim (Kim Yun-seok, Haemoo) is selected to handle this problem. The church also sends a novice deacon Choi (Kang Dong-won, My Brilliant Life) to be his assistant. Choi is stunned to learn that he must assist Priest Kim in performing a ritual of exorcism over Young-sin. Moreover, church leaders are suspicious that Priest Kim might have acted inappropriately with the supposedly bewitched girl, and has clandestinely asked him to procure evidence of the older priest’s misconduct.
The first thing I must point out is that The Priests is a totally straightforward Catholic horror film. It is neither a black comedy, nor a political critique disguised as a genre film. Although I do not know whether writer-director Jang Jae-hyun is a practicing Catholic, his film takes the theological problems raised throughout the film absolutely seriously. Depending on what your cultural/religious stance is, this could be a good thing or a bad thing (for me, it is a definite plus). As it turned out, The Priests blasted through the Korean box office in the fourth quarter of 2015, selling 5.4 million tickets to easily slip into the year’s box office top ten. Though admittedly, the image of Kang Dong-won decked out in cassock doubtlessly contributed to the movie’s massive popularity among the female demographic (Keanu Reeves, eat your heart out).
Director Jang, for whom The Priests is a debut feature, proves himself to be an impressive screenwriter, reining in gore and excessive dramatics to emphasize character development (centered on Choi’s guilty conscience involving his sister’s death). His direction does display some rough edges, as in the cringe-worthy “comic” montage in which elder priests zero on Choi as the aid to Priest Kim. But on the positive side, he keeps the narrative reasonably tight, and endows set-pieces with believable details (this is probably the first exorcism movie I have seen in which the priest-heroes actually sing hymns). Still, I wish he had included more slyly humorous scenes like one in which the demon possessing Young-sin electrocutes a Walkman playing Victimae Paschali Laudes, grumbling “Damn that Bach!”
As with most recent Korean genre films, the greatest strength of The Priests is the energetic performances given by its main cast. Despite his androgynous beauty, Kang Dong-won solidly anchors the film’s preposterous-to-non-believers premise, striking the right balance between earnest heroics and cute befuddlement. Likewise, Kim Yun-seok is reliably taciturn and intense, although from my (Catholic-prejudiced) viewpoint, his Priest Kim seems to be deficient in the kind of spiritual gravitas that I tend to associate with real-life clergy who “fight in the trenches.” However, the film’s biggest acting contribution is perhaps made by Park So-dam as Young-sin: she is genuinely frightening and mesmerizing as the many demons who deride, rebuff and curse the priest’s attempts in multiple languages.
Not as challengingly genre-bending and artistically ambitious as, say, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009), The Priests is nonetheless a superior example of a religious horror film, and is highly recommended to those who appreciate such films.
Kyu Hyun Kim
Jang Jae-hyun
A longtime cinephile and fan of horror films, Jang Jae-hyun graduated from Sungkyunkwan University with a degree in film, and is currently on leave from the Korea National University of Arts. He first drew attention from the film industry with a short film called The Twelfth Assistant Priest (2014), which won a Best Director award in the Short Film Competition at the 15th Jeonju International Film Festival, and the top prize in the horror category at the 13th Mise-en-scenes Genre Film Festival. Production company Zip Cinema then signed him on to develop the short film into the feature-length work The Priests. Despite being released in November, a comparatively quiet period in the box office calendar, Jang’s debut film accumulated a surprising 5.4 million admissions.
FILMOGRAFIA/FILMOGRAPHY
2015 – The Priests
Kyu Hyun Kim