Worth: $17.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Lee Young-ae, Yu Jae-myeong, Lee Won-geun
Intro:
…oppressively dark, but also hopeful…
Over a decade after personifying maternal will and rage in Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance, Lee Young-ae makes a feature-length return with a different kind of vengeance. The contents of Kim Seung-woo’s directorial debut may not have the same morally-grey bloodthirst of Park’s iconic trilogy, but that doesn’t make it any less bleak or crushing.
Six years after her son went missing, Jung-yeon (Lee) hears of a child in an isolated Fishing Hamlet with an uncanny resemblance to the child she lost. Lee’s performance as this mother on a mission might be one of the most tragic character portraits of the year, merging psychological anguish with emotional deadness to give a brutal depiction of someone who has gone through the worst thing a parent can bear witness to, but still carries a small flame of hope that they may be reunited.
The Fishing Hamlet itself looks like something right out of Bloodborne, both as quite chilling locale and as geographic embodiment of the sin that has been inflicted within it.
Yu Jae-myeong as Sgt. Hong is nightmarish in his misanthropy, repeatedly shouting that he’s a cop like a verbal badge of authority, his vicious will-as-law that everyone else is either too complicit or too scared to argue against.
Jung-yeon getting repeatedly dragged through the murk to reunite with her son, and gaslit by Hong and the locals, creates an instinctive, guttural revulsion. Ditto for the way that the children are treated, where the casual physical and sexual abuse is shown with a mixture of heart-breaking clarity and a refreshing lack of graphic visual detail.
As brutal as the film gets, what truly makes it remarkable is that, much like its captivating lead, it acknowledges the darkness but refuses to let it take over. Throughout all the hardship, all the lying, all the intentional run-arounds, Jung-yeon never gives up; the filmmakers never let this entropy of empathy drown our heroine. It’s oppressively dark, but also hopeful.
Bring Me Home is a masterclass in why bleak storytelling so bloody necessary: By not pulling any punches in its depiction of cruelty, it allows those who fight against it to likewise not pull any punches in combating it.
