24FPS posted half a dozen pics from an upcoming Korean Slasher 'Bedevilled'. The film marks the debut of director Jang Cheol-soo and is part of the Fine Cut line up this year.
Bedevilled screened at Cannes last month and reception was mixed.Hae-won is a beautiful single woman in her thirties who works at a bank in the Seoul city. She leads a busy life until she becomes a witness to an attempted murder case, and at the same time, things get complicated at work. When things get out of hand she is forced to take a vacation so she heads for 'Moodo', a small undeveloped island, where she had once visited to see her grandparents. And where she had befriended a girl named Bok-nam who stills writes to Hae-won asking her to visit despite the fact that Hae-won never bothered to reply.Upon arriving at the island, Hae-won is shocked to see everyone treating Bok-nam like a slave. As practically the only young woman on the island, she is a plaything for all the men and a free laborer for the women. Sick of all the inhumane treatment, Bok-nam had tried to escape the island several times in the past but had failed each time. She begs Hae-won to help her escape the place, but Hae-won remains indifferent not wanting to be involved in complicated situations. When Bok-nam realizes that her own daughter will follow her footsteps, she tries to escape the island with her daughter. But her daughter gets killed in the process. And when she loses the only thing that had kept her going because of Hae-won's negligence, Bok-nam takes a sickle in her hand for revenge.
Variety - "Bedevilled's" violent second half finds several new uses for a sickle and is indeed gory, though never particularly inventive -- no fish hooks a la Kim's notorious "The Isle." Because Bok-nam's motivation is hard to read and all the island's other inhabitants are walking cliches, the scenes of butchery are reduced to meaningless genre killings that merely protract the pic's already long running time. Coda involving the two femme protags at a police station further adds to the confusion.THR - Not so much bedeviled as demented, the film spends half of its time describing the malevolence of the community and then the horrific and relentless revenge begins. Audiences would be cheering if the family of drooling, cretinous males and bullying old women were not such cardboard cutouts.
If anything director Jang Cheol-soo can learn from his experience. And if there is anything that he can do to the film in the meantime before any wide release he has time to do it.