This 2010 Korean film stars Ji Sung-won as a young woman working in a bank who heads to a remote island where she once visited her grandmother for vacation. There she meets her childhood friend (Seo Young-hee) who is one of the only young women on the island and is treated as a second-class citizen and slave by everyone else.
It’s really a terrible situation, involving brutal rapes and lots of violence. That’s the part I wasn’t looking forward to. It’s not easy to watch, that’s for sure.
If you make it past the slow opening and the brutal middle passage, you’ll eventually get to the part where Seo Young-hee seeks her bloody revenge. Again, it’s hard to watch – very graphic, very violent – but at least now the tables have turned.
Probably the best part of this film and its main redeeming quality is the performance from Seo Young-hee. It must not have been easy to play out a lot of the more intense, ugly scenes, and the role could have been thankless if it had been handled differently. But, Seo Young-hee is able to get a lot of range out of it and show a lot of emotions that you don’t often get to see in movies. This is a real three dimensional character, even if she is at the center of degradation.
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