1925, Korea, Jirisan Mountain: Chon Man-deok (Choi Min-sik,
Oldboy) is an old game hunter, now semi-retired and living with his sixteen-year-old son Seogi (Seong Yu-bin,
Hide and Seek).
He was once known as Korea’s best tiger hunter, but after losing his wife to Jirisan’s last great tiger, nicknamed Mountain Lord, he has renounced the musket and made do as an herb salesman. Meanwhile a Japanese military official Maezono (Osugi Ren, Hana-Bi, Exte: Hair Extensions), covetous of precious animal felt, mobilizes soldiers when a group of them hunting anti-Japanese guerrillas are massacred by the great beast.
When Hunter Do (Jeong Man-sik, The Unjust), hideously scarred due to a previous skirmish with the tiger, decides to provoke the beast in a quest for revenge, a chain of events are set in motion that will force Man-deok to take up his old musket for one last time.
The Tiger was highly anticipated as ace-screenwriter-turned-director Park Hoon-jung’s follow-up to New World (2013), with Choi Min-sik in the lead once again, expected to provide a stirring, Grand Bell Prize-worthy performance.
What The Tiger turns out to be is a somewhat unruly allegory about Korea’s forced, traumatic transition into modernity, with Man-deok and the big tiger presented as a set of metaphorical Siamese twins.
The film’s first half, featuring the gradual introduction of Man-deok’s hunting skills, his love for Seogi, and the seasonal depictions of the ecology of the Jirisan Mountain, is quite well done and occasionally even moving.
Choi Min-sik’s impressively physical performance as Man-deok makes him utterly believable as a simple man of nature, with zero social ambition or material greed, overflowing with an uncomplicated love for his son, yet capable of viciously precise self-control when pinning down his prey with a bullet. Seong Yu-bin is likewise excellent as his son, tragically too intelligent to be satisfied with his lot.
On the other hand, like most recent Korean films set in the colonial past, Japanese (and Korean collaborator) characters in the film are mostly cyphers. After having invited someone as seasoned as Osugi Ren to play a Japanese villain, Park disappointingly fails to give him a juicy enough role.
The film’s technical achievement is not exactly magical but neither is it something to sneeze at.
The CGI-rendered tigers (supervised by the 4th Creative Party) are impressive in their bodily details, “facial expressions,” and sound designs, although in certain shots they still don’t quite look like real animals. DPs Lee Mo-gae (A Tale of Two Sisters, I Saw the Devil) and Kim Woo-hyung (The Front Line) mix harsh vistas of the snowbound mountain-scape with the sheer resplendence of golden and crimson foliage, doing their best to lend credence to the film’s overtly magical-realist moments.
Unfortunately, at about the two-thirds point Park loses his grip on the narrative and allows its allegorical aspects to dominate.
Most damningly, the Mountain Lord loses its earlier, fleeting impression of a near-supernatural, mysterious presence and begins to behave a bit like a Disney animal.
The Tiger is clearly closer to Park Hoon-jung’s heart than some of his other films. To be sure, it still contains within it the hot core of a grandiose yet mournful epic.
What the film required was a director with a cool, restrained vision that could have quenched, molded and expanded this molten core into an efficiently constructed yet emotionally resonant masterwork. In that sense, Park may still have some distance to travel as a director to catch up with his own considerable talent as a screenwriter.