Review for The Villainess

Introduction

Korean revenge movies are like Spaghetti Westerns for me. I always recall the Man With No Name trilogy primarily, and I often forget the other, myriad Spaghetti Westerns out there that offer so much more in the way of variety and invention. With Korean revenge thrillers, it’s Park Chan-Wook’s Vengeance trilogy that springs to mind. After all, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance have become icons of the genre, and define it in many ways. After all who can forget that awesome corridor hammer fight sequence in Oldboy? After watching the Villainess, you might well forget, as this has a corridor fight sequence that makes Oldboy’s look like a girly cat-fight.


The Intelligence Agency knows talent when it sees it, and when Sook-Hee’s scythed through a drugs lab, slaughtered a corridor full of henchmen, and wiped out the gang behind it all, in the name of avenging her murdered father, she’s the perfect raw material for a government assassin. They just have to polish off the rough edges first, which in her case means lessons in deportment, giving her the tools to fit in undercover as well as being a lethal killing machine. It means giving her a new identity, a new life, and they’ll recruit her whether she wants to or not. The promise of getting her life back after ten years of service is her one chance at freedom, but then one day she gets a mission to kill a dead man.

Picture

The Villainess gets a 2.40:1 widescreen transfer on this disc, and as befits a digitally shot film, it’s hard to pick nits with the quality of the image. It’s clear and sharp throughout with strong, consistent colours, and it brings out the film’s jaw-dropping cinematography to great effect. The Villainess is a triumph of frenetic camera-work and razor sharp editing, and that shows from the first frame to the last, whether it’s in the epic action sequences or in the dramatic moments. There is one problem with the disc though, and I can’t tell if it’s the transfer or the original source material, but some of the pans and scrolls are unexpectedly jerky. If it was a transfer issue it would happen consistently through the movie, but as it only happens in certain scenes, I suspect that it’s a problem with the source.

The images in this review were kindly supplied by the distributor.

Sound

The sole audio track on this disc is the DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround Korean, which is pretty neat, making the most of the action, while keeping the dialogue clear throughout. The subtitles are timed accurately and are free of typos, although some of the word choices might raise a few eyebrows; ‘wiped off’ instead of ‘wiped out’ being one example.

Extras

The disc boots to an animated menu, where you’ll find the trailer, and a lively audio commentary from Arrow Podcast hosts Dan Martin and Sam Ashurst. It’s an entertaining track aimed at film fans.

Apparently the first run release of The Villainess comes with a collector’s booklet. I only had the check disc to review from.

Conclusion

There’s something poetic, operatic, Shakespearean about Park Chan-Wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, and if you’re expecting more of the same from The Villainess, you’re looking in the wrong place. That’s not to say that The Villainess isn’t good at what it does, it’s downright brilliant at times. It’s just that this film is much more of an action experience, and its mish-mash of genres is less of a blending than it is a collision.

It is a revenge movie, even though it fools you into thinking that the revenge is over after the opening sequence, once Sook-Hee has apparently avenged her murdered father. But things are a lot more complicated than that, and The Villainess uses the tried and trusted means of fracturing the narrative to add complexity and make the experience even richer. Her actions at the start of the film, might serve as a job interview for the agency that train her as an assassin, but as the film unfolds, we learn that this isn’t the first time that she’s been trained to kill.


Working for the government at least offers her the chance of a comparatively normal life, and even a family, with the promise that once her time is served, she’ll be given her freedom. There’s a subplot about an obsessive handler who becomes her next door neighbour in an apartment block, at which point The Villainess threatens to become a romantic comedy, but then an assassination mission unexpectedly reawakens the past, a past that she thought had died the night that she was recruited.

What makes the story in The Villainess so gripping is that it plays its cards close to its chest. You’re never really quite sure who is on the level, and who has more than one agenda, not even the film’s protagonist, and it keeps you guessing right until the climax. That’s a risky path to take, with the chance of alienating the audience by keeping character motivations clouded, but the disjointed narrative helps hold the attention, as do the film’s riotous action sequences.


It’s for those action sequences that you’ll have bought this film, and The Villainess doesn’t disappoint, bookended by two of the most thrilling action set pieces I have seen, inspired heavily by first person video games, and with unlikely, if not wholly impossible camerawork in live action. You have to remember that the Korean film industry doesn’t have the Hollywood money to burn on creating realistic CGI action, so this must have been done for real. You’ll be flummoxed trying to figure out how though.

It’s a case of grabbing on and holding on for dear life, although you might suspect that the writers had the same experience, as its seems the plot comes close to being derailed once or twice with a couple of odd genre switches. And I do get the feeling that they put the action cards on the table with the insane opening sequence, came close to repeating that intensity in the finale and everything in between never quite matched up, not even the crazy motorbike chase. The Villainess really is a thrill ride action movie that pulls no punches though, and you won’t regret buying this one.