Good Movies Happen in South-Korea

Last night I watched The Wailing. It is a South-Korean horror movie. It was scary and good. I never knew so many good movies are made in South-Korea. I am literary in awe with South-Korean horror movies as well as their thrillers. Few days back I saw “I Saw the Devil”, “Tale of Two Sisters”, “Train to Busan”. There was another movie from S. Korea that I liked, “My Little Bride”. It is a romantic comedy and totally true to its type and a terrific tickler for ribs! So, what would be the conclusion? The conclusion is South-Korea is a good movie making country! I gave examples from each genre, horror, thriller and rom-com. But right now it feels right to give the snippets of the most recent watched one just to lure few people in into this gangnam styled country’s movie world.

The Wailing – the story takes place in a village. A cop gets the news of a murder, and a series of bizarre murders bewilderingly follow through. An undiagnosed sickness starts its round around the village. People start to talk about a Japanese stranger in the corner mountain who eats flesh. Now that aforementioned cop’s daughter gets sick. Before that the cop was portrayed as a somewhat stupid person, and not at all a brilliant investigator. But after his daughter’s sickness, he becomes a serious father trying to help his child. In some places the movie seems a bit dragged. But still I liked the movie.  The story has a quality of being a teen's or children's ghost story. I remember reading those stories in some of the monthly children’s magazines in my teens. There is a man whose eyes are red, suddenly rain starts to pour, a sudden power cut and a person is seen standing just outside the window, a disembowelled goat at the door, an exorcist. Oh my god, it is like the writer did not leave out any ingredients to cook up a tale of horror. There were certain comic elements in it, but only at the beginning of the movie, like two cops including the main protagonist hiding under the table at the police station during a power cut seeing someone standing outside the window, amorous look the cop’s wife while washing the cloths, the perpetually scared look of the simpleton village cop and so on. But the main reason I liked the movie is that the confusion it created, that whether it is a horror movie or a thriller which has nothing to do with supernatural. These types of works are always my favourite as it baffles your mind. Somewhere I read that this movie showed how unimaginative Hollywood movies are, I halfway agree. Why halfway? Because if I want to refute it by giving some Hollywood movie examples, I don’t know if it would turn out that some of those Hollywood plots are actually exported from South-Korea or Japan. I included Japan because I did not forget about Ringu and Dark Water.

I am done here, now I must leave, because I have an “Appointment with Death” in Petra, there will be Poirot too!