I didn’t relax until the murder spree started.
Bedevilled opens with two kinds of cruelty. It’s evening on a crowded street in Seoul, and in an alleyway, a few young men are harassing a young woman (Jae Min), hitting her and trying to drag her around by the hair. She breaks away, running out into plain view. But being seen isn’t the same thing as being safe, and all the striving sophisticates around her look past her to trade looks of cool, amused indifference. Her attackers amble after her. She stumbles to a car—there’s a woman inside, almost her own age, and they say, don’t they, that the best way to short circuit the bystander effect is to appeal to one person in particular? But when she gets to the driver’s side window, the woman inside rolls it up.
The woman in the car is Hae-won (Ji Sung-won), who holds onto her upwardly mobile middle-class life—and the insulating psychic distance that comes with it—even as it breaks her fingernails. She reacts to vulnerability—especially economic distress, especially in women—like it’s a potential contagion. It’s what she came from. She doesn’t want to go back.
But she winds up going anyway, when she’s forced into a “vacation” under humiliating circumstances. She needs to get as far away from her glossy, professional life in Seoul as possible, so she heads to the tiny island of Moo-do. She can have a tourist’s sheen there. People can talk about how pale she is, how she obviously doesn’t have to work out in the hot sun.
Her grandfather used to live on Moo-do, so Hae-won spent a lot of time there as a child. Her best friend from those days, the sweet, dogged, and hauntingly desperate Bok-nam (Seo Young-hee), still lives there. Bok-nam has written her so many letters, but Hae-won never answered them—never even read them—until she needed a plausible excuse for a cheap getaway.
Bok-nam is in a living hell of abuse and exploitation. Her husband, Man-jong (Park Jeong-hak) beats her in a way that’s so routine it’s become careless; it’s like a sick parody of all the effort going out of a marriage. He won’t allow their young daughter to go to school, where she might “get ideas.” The handful of other islanders, almost all of them aging women, many of them tied to Man-jong by blood, use Bok-nam as chattel, deriding her even as they bow and scrape at the altar of her fuckwit husband.
Bok-nam is reaching a breaking point. The movie zeroes in on two particular images to evoke this—taking laundry off a clothesline has never resulted in something so skin-crawling—and what gives them their power is that they’re not empty images. There’s a history of smug complacency behind them: I don’t need to hide this from you. I don’t even need to think about it. What could you possibly do? Is she going to appeal to Hae-won? Good luck there. (Ji Sung-won brilliantly plays a moment where Hae-won clearly knows that if she believed Bok-nam’s story, she’d be obligated to help her, so she chooses not to believe.)
This is a lively, colorful movie, almost sickly exuberant at times, but it doesn’t get its horror from flash and flair. Everything involving Bok-nam’s torment is a layered pain, like pressing on a bruise. There’s history here—both personal, island-bound, character-based history and larger social and political history of misogyny and class—and it’s embedded in everything. It’s always there, but director Jang Cheol-soo wisely never unpacks it to the point of slowing things down.
But it’s there if you want it, and the realism that comes with it explains why Bok-nam’s eventual revenge feels both raw and horribly lacking in real catharsis. Jang will go for the big moments he knows he can sell, like the fuck-you payoff for Man-jong’s recurring “medical” advice, but he avoids any note of insincere wish fulfillment. This rampage is all too little, too late. It’s an easing of the unbearable misery, that’s all. That finally passes the torch back to Hae-won, who must take on the tension in her own way. There’s no closure, just cold comfort, and even that is ultimately undone.
Live with it, the movie says, or don’t.
Bedevilled is streaming on Tubi, Kanopy, Hoopla, and Plex.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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What did we watch?
Justified, Season Four, Episode Five, “Kin”
This is the point in the season where I probably won’t have anything to say until it’s over. I will say the two best moments in the episode stand in complete contradiction; firstly, Tim and Rhodes having a friendly-ish conversation taps into that cool idea of the sidekicks talking shop, but even moreso, it’s part of how this show successfully taps into the Leonardian sensibility of pleasurable small talk. This show has extreme behaviour, but it also captures what life is like on a day-to-day basis.
The other scene is Ellen May’s only true appearance, where we find Jim Beaver’s character is protecting her. This is like the reverse of a typical Justified plot turn in that, rather than being violent, it’s about keeping someone alive (Tobowlsky’s death in this episode is that exact thing).
“Stay here til I get back, and both of you keep your clothes on.” Good thing to say as you leave a room.
Biggest Laugh: Not Art, but close enough to Art’s style of humour to be an honorary Art comment: “Aren’t you too old for those?” / “Ah, maybe I was too young to be blowing the heads off o’ Taliban.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “I don’t like your plan, Raylan!” Perfect delivery as he’s getting dragged away.
Top Ownage: Raylan handcuffing Boyd. “You talkin’ ‘bout no sense of humour. This is funny! I know I’m laughin’.”
I wish small talk was as fun as Elmore Leonard writes it.
Stranger Things, “The Crawl” – More tomorrow on The Week in TV since that is a safe place for spoilers. Suffice it to say, despite all the formerly teen actors being too old for the roles now, the show is the show. If you liked it for four years, no reason to think you won’t like it for the last.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Whodunit” – More on this tomorrow as well. Some clever bits and a fun cast, but what a weird ending.
The Practice, “The Confession” – A carjacking turns fatal, a mother of a three year old is left dead, and Helen lies through her teeth to the suspect and to Jimmy. to get a confession. We watch the same thing tried twice, once in state court where Judge Kittelson throws out the confession because while federal law allows for such lies by a DA, the state law does not; and again when the suspect is brought up on federal charges but what Helen did won’t fly at the federal level either. Thankfully, this manages to be interesting both times, mainly because the lawyers are Eugene and Jimmy, which is to say the two best actors in Steve Harris and Michael Badalucco. And why is Helen so bent on getting this guy? Because with three friends just become parents, she cannot bear the idea of either of the newborns losing a parent. Helen breaking the rules is just more interesting than Bobby breaking the rules. (By the way, no mention at all of Kittelson’s resentment of Jimmy, which has thankfully been forgotten. No civil cases since week two of the season. And no mention of the idea of hiring temp lawyers while two partners are on maternity leave. Weird.)
Some Letterkenny, more on this tomorrow. I also watched a bonkers video essay about Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent book – she of Eat, Pray, Love – where she admits to a series of horrific, narcissistic decisions with her terminally ill lover, including going on a bender with her, descending into a mutually abusive relationship while nursing said lover, PLOTTING TO KILL HER, then abandoning her right before she died and justifying it with therapy speak. This once again validates my suspicion that a lot of the people who’ve shaped American culture have anti-social personality disorders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpVJI09IAno&pp=ygURZWxpemFiZXRoIGdpbGJlcnQ%3D
Adding this to my list. I just struck me while reading this that the kind of seventies vigilante crime drama always focused, as the beginning of this movie does, on eliminating outside threats to the domestic order and the avenging of wrongs done to women. The extension of this theme to the domestic melodrama, where violent retribution action is taken by the victim against those given a sense of entitlement within the family or local class structure, is practically non-existent. Where is the version of DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE that morphs into DEATH WISH? As you point out at the end, within the confines of hegemonic localism and privatism, there is no catharsis, or means of retreat back into safety. Maybe this is why the transference of aggression towards external dangers, fancifully imagined, are more popular: One can always strike out and return to a place of greater safety where the sanctity of the private sphere is socially enshrined. Rebel against that, and God help you.
Yes, beautifully put. There’s nothing here to return to, not when the concept of home has been so corrupted and weaponized.