Beo-ning

A thriller film made by Lee is not quite a thriller film, even if it entails a crime, a dramatic progression of the plot, and the characteristic motivations which move a character into a rage and to act accordingly. What happens between a young man with no material privileges who wants to be a writer, a young woman whom he finds by chance and who claims to be a friend from their teenage years, and an extremely wealthy young man who summarizes contemporary Korean Capitalist subjectivity is enough to establish the needed set of tensions for a canonical thriller. However, Lee imposes his own personal perspective to convey one of his characteristic universes in which the world’s order is an unstable one, where class differences weigh heavily, and with a philosophical anxiety which permeates the whole tale. And all of this is not said, but shown. The depth-of-field shots of a luxurious apartment allows us to experience opulence; a childhood memory of a fire (or an inconspicuous oneiric sequence) allows us to experience helplessness; and the glance of a man as he watches another man before he dies allows us to experience the contingencies of all lives. This is how the material discourse of the film is built, and it makes evident the steady hand of a great master. (Roger Koza)