Ryoo Seung-wan, born in 1973, is slightly younger than the cohort of filmmakers that ushered in what we now recognise as New Korean Cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a wave popularised by directors like Hong Sang-soo, Lee Chang-dong, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Jee-woon. Born in the city of Asan, Chungcheong Province, Ryoo started out working as an assistant director for other filmmakers, including Park Chan-wook. Eventually he scraped together enough leftover 16mm film stock from a studio project to write, direct and act in an ultra-low budget (less than $50,000 in total expenditures) independent film Die Bad (2000). Starring his brother, Ryoo Seung-beom, as a juvenile delinquent, the film had an unusual portmanteau narrative structure (in part necessitated by the lack of budget).
Die Bad shocked many critics and viewers on its release, reminding some of gritty and powerful masterworks of New American Cinema like Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar. In the prestigious Cine 21 magazine’s annual best-of list for 2000, chosen by critics and journalists, Die Bad was ranked in fourth place, while the reader’s poll placed it in third position, even though initially the film was shown in only one theatre.
Since this auspicious debut, Ryoo has consistently displayed a willingness and ability to creatively engage with existing cinematic genres, mutating them beyond their hoary clichés and addressing the real-life desires and concerns of the South Korean people. The astonishing innovations he brought to various Korean film genres include putting top actresses Jeon Do-yeon and Lee Hye-young in the starring roles of No Blood No Tears (2002), recognised by many as a bold experiment in the (until then) notoriously male-dominated crime caper genre. Jeon later won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her devastating performance in Secret Sunshine (2007).
Ryoo also fused Hong Kong-style martial arts and the Hollywood-style effects-centered superhero blockbuster into a hybrid form in Arahan (2004); reworked classic film noir tropes in the form of a boxing drama in The Crying Fist (2005); and made the harrowing Walter Hill-like urban action thriller City of Violence (2006), which is also a searing critique of the ways in which gentrification and gigantomania have overwhelmed South Korean provincial cities. Throughout these films Ryoo has constructed a vernacular film style that merges native Korean generic idioms with the influences of 1970s New American Cinema, like the films of Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Walter Hill and Brian De Palma.
With the taut and brilliantly realised espionage thriller Berlin File’s (2013) commendable box-office success (7.17 million theater tickets sold), Ryoo’s filmmaking skills, hitherto mainly appreciated by cinephiles and critics, found widespread public appreciation. Politically mature and complex, Berlin File takes the usual clichés of a Cold War spy thriller in which North and South Korean agents play cat-and-mouse games against one another, and cannily updates them to foreground the moral dilemmas and desperation of its North Korean protagonists, who are caught up in a ruthless system that treats them as nothing more than pawns on a chessboard.
This led to his next film Veteran (2015), a crowd-pleasing police action thriller that pits a bull-headed cop (played by the great Hwang Jung-min) against the evil successor of a powerful conglomerate (impressively essayed by a young star Yoo Ah-in), who believes himself to be above the law. In this vastly entertaining thriller, Ryoo combines all the filmmaking acumen of a Marvel Studios tent-pole film with a galvanizing social consciousness, indicting the super-rich, the corrupt media, and the legal system which is so easily greased by bribes and favouritism. The film managed to tap into the zeitgeist of the South Korean middle class, especially the latter’s massive, simmering resentment against the corrupt and irrational behaviour of the government and major business conglomerates that in 2017 erupted into the Candlelight Demonstrations, and ultimately resulted in the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Veteran went on to become the fourth biggest box office success in Korean history, selling 13.4 million tickets in theaters alone. As a comparison, the top grossing foreign film in Korean cinematic history as of 2017 is Avatar, which is ranked fifth behind Veteran, cumulatively having sold 13.3 million tickets.
Unfortunately, Ryoo’s last film, The Battleship Island (2017), even though based on painstaking historical research about the Korean coal miners who worked in Hashima during the Pacific War, a notoriously barren island off the coast of Southwestern Japan, was met with widespread controversy in the media, some of it entirely unwarranted. The film ambitiously mixes together several genres – a second world war espionage thriller, a prison escape film, a gritty, realistic exploration of the struggles of colonised Koreans, and even a musical comedy – and features some astounding action sequences and wonderful performances by Hwang Jung-min, Lee Jung-hyun and the child actress Kim Soo-an. While one could point to the film’s simplistic characterisation of the Japanese as irredeemable villains, its arguably excessive indulgence in gore and violence and other problems, The Battleship Island again received support from the South Korean viewers, raking in approximately 6.6 million tickets to become the fifth-ranked biggest box office success of 2017.
Ryoo Seung-wan, as of 2018, remains one of the most popular South Korean filmmakers, but if the past is any indication, his innovative and experimental spirit (both as a true cineaste and an entertainer eager to please the masses) will continue to push him in new and interesting directions, rather than simply recycle the formulae for the successes he has already attained. This is why Korean cinema specialists always await his next project with eager anticipation.
Kyu Hyun Kim