Gifted, the latest film from South Korean writer/director Jai-Hong Juhn, is an emotionally complex tale of desperation and madness in which a man’s murderous desires become harder and harder to fight.
Minsoo (Beom-June Kim) is sacked unceremoniously after eight years with his business firm, can’t find a new job, and is left by his fiancé. Struggling to make ends meet, he starts carjacking with his fiancé’s younger brother but the pressures of his newfound criminality spiral out of control, leading him down a dark, vengeful, path.
Jai-Hong’s innate compassion for his central characters makes this far more complex than simple black comedy barbarity. Jai-Hong has a reputation now for emotionally complex films and evocative approaches to macabre concepts, Gifted is no different. It would have been easy to construct a thrilling stream of murder/robberies, and there are parts of the film which operate close to black comedy with murderous montages, but it never gets there. The writing is way more focused on the emotional ramifications of murder and its effects on a person’s psyche.
One of his major talents is in playing with context. The film opens on a black screen, a man’s desperate panting evokes the idea of a chase, danger, but the reveal is tongue-in-cheek: he’s masturbating on piles of scattered cash. There are a good few set-ups like that before anything actually turns murderous. Expectations of horror frequently alienate the viewer from the realities of Gifted‘s world, often to cutting effect. Jai-Hong seems reluctant to give in to the film’s macabre side, but in the end, it means his film is a very dark, though tender, glimpse at the effects of ambition and love on a man’s soul. The final scene arguably indulges in blaming Minsoo’s wife for his desperation for money.
At its heart, Gifted is less of an American Psycho-style capitalist narrative, and more of a Falling Down type film. The stresses are huge and crime, at least theft, is presented as a victimless crime. The real issues start when those pressures, which have mounted since scene one, result in an exacerbated and depressing murder. From there, Jai-Hong doesn’t perhaps quite settle on a concrete message. Especially when some of the films best scenes are brutal murders.
In some ways it’s a film condemning capitalism at large, in others it seems to point a heavy finger towards expectant women as the catalyst for crime, which is kinda gross. All together though it can at least be earmarked as a surprisingly nihilistic dissemination of South Korean values. It’s not the sort of film you could love, but its one which could stay with you well past the credits.
GIFTED / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: JAI-HONG JUHN / STARRING; BEOM-JUN KIM, JUNGHWA BAE, YUL JEON / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
