https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/screens/2010-09-26/fantastic-fest-bedevilled/

Fantastic Fest: 'Bedevilled'

By Marc Savlov, September 26, 2010, 6:40pm, Picture in Picture

Director Jang Cheol-so has fashioned an absolutely riveting horrorshow that plays like Southern gothic on the skids, Korean-style. And because the story has both feet planted firmly in the real world – as opposed to containing an element of the supernatural – Bedevilled generates true empathy in the audience: the very definition of horror.

Ji Sung-won is tense and embittered Seoul bank employee Hae-won, who is ordered by her boss to take a vacation in the wake of a decidedly inappropriate workplace outburst. Impulsively, Hae-won decides to return to Moo Do, the tiny, remote, and hyperinsular island of her birth. There she reunites with her childhood friend Bok-nam (Seo Yeong-hee in an astonishing, Oscar-caliber performance), whose prior invitations to return have been collecting dust, unopened, in Hae-won's apartment for years.

Initially, life on Moo-Do seems idyllic, if not a little dull: the picturesque landscape, the crashing of the waves on the shore, and the community's rural life as potato farmers stands in direct contrast Hae-won's bustling life in the big city. Indeed, Bok-nam's existence is the road not taken, and one that is, as Hae-won soon realizes, little more than a nightmarish rut.

Woe, like potatoes, is abundant on Moo Do: Bok-man's husband is an abusive, misogynistic monster who makes Stanley Kowalski seem like Mr. Belvedere, the island's allegedly matriarchal womenfolk are little more than apologists who aid and abet the deranged masculinity on display, and, worst of all, Hae-won's adolescent daughter may be the next generation to suffer in this ultraviolent, drug-addled, and overwhelmingly anti-feminine hellscape.

Bedevilled has echoes of female revengers like I Spit on Your Grave and Last House on the Left but Jang's direction is light years beyond that of 70s grainmasters Meir Zachi or Wes Craven; cinematographer Jang Gi-tae manages to make the lushly verdant island into a character of its own and the result is a deeply disturbing and borderline overwhelming commentary on the nature of community, social evolution (or lack thereof), and bloody awful vengeance, a dish best served with, as it turns out, bean paste.

Bedevilled screens Sunday, Sept. 26, 8:20pm and Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2:55pm at the Alamo South Lamar