Won Sin-yeon’s film tries hard to shock and frequently succeeds.  Far funnier and more inventive than most recent American thrillers, it's also occasionally too ambitious for its own good.

The set-up will be familiar to fans of several genres:  our bourgeois point-of-view characters, privileged by wealth and/or education and/or knowing how to bathe, wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time and are terrorized by the societal Other.  Think Wolf Creek, The Hills Have Eyes, Funny Games, Deliverance, or The Desperate Hours.  Less harrowing viscerally than most of these films—A Bloody Aria plants its stakes in black comedy early on, putting some distance between us and the events—Won's story goes for an emotionally wrenching sucker punch instead.  As soon as you recognize the premise, you might settle in like I did, with a sense of dread that's paradoxically comforting because you've been there so many times before:  you know you'll root for some characters to step up, that there will be a reversal or three, and that there will be sudden violence that you won't see coming even when you're looking for it.


Yet to his credit, the writer-director masterfully plays on such audience expectations in this, his sophomore feature, with the result that you never actually feel too secure.  In this sense, A Bloody Aria is like a theme park ride in which you're not allowed to strap yourself in, and so many viewers will find themselves energized just from stepping aboard.  The downside to such a strategy, though, is that Won not only undermines audience expectations but also his own storyline; in the end we're left with a highly creative but not quite compelling "drama of ideas."  Since we never really invest ourselves in the would-be protagonists' plight (Won keeps riffing too much and focusing on the secondary characters), the result is more a brutal "message movie" about bullying than the cathartic, no-holds-barred thriller this could have been.

Still, there is much to recommend about A Bloody Aria, especially to those who favor the kind of genre-experimentation that today's top Korean filmmakers are known for.

  The action scenes not only get the adrenaline pumping, but also serve as way for these mostly inarticulate characters to express themselves.  The interesting cinematography, with its intentionally bleached-out monochromism, seems to be consciously trying for an absence of style that in essence becomes its own style.  On a beach without color or feature except for a brightly lit white Mercedes (with a pitch black interior—symbolism, anyone?), Won puts his cast through their paces as though staging a Punch-and-Judy style version of Beckett or Pinter.  There's no denying that he is gifted director—Aria is filled with brilliant touches in terms of timing and unexpected visuals—but for the most part what his film has going for it is its fearless tone:  it doesn’t care whether it's an arty film that appeals to genre fans or the other way around.



For devotees of Korean cinema the cast alone may be worth the price of admission.  Although his screen time ranks barely above a cameo, Han Seok-Kyu gets top billing, which as the star of Shiri he can probably expect for the rest of his career.  So good in Tell Me Something and elsewhere, Han is used here mostly for his aura, a bit like Daniel Craig in The Golden Compass.  The performance by Oh Dal-su, effective in supporting roles in Park Chan-Wook's films, has a convincingly feral texture to it as he plays a baseball bat-brandishing semi-troglodyte.  Also from Lady Vengeance is Kim Si-hoo, who turned 20 just yesterday.  Here he seems to relish the chance to duke it out with the bad guys and escape the constraints of his cutesy teen idol looks.  Yet the standout is Lee Moon-Sik, whose range in this film is extraordinary; he dominates the screen whenever he's in the shot.

Although A Bloody Aria is a 2006 film, it's been available to date only as an R3 DVD.  However, thanks to the folks at ImaginAsian, those living in the New York and L.A. areas now have a chance to see it theatrically.  Won's follow-up, the much-hyped Seven Days, was released in Korea in 2007 and stars Lost's Kim Yunjin; let's hope that we don't have to wait so long to see that, and his future work, stateside.