Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
CHO Jin-woong, LEE Sung-min, KIM Moo-yul
Intro:
… a compelling bit of dirty political drama …
Conventional Western wisdom considers Korea to be made up of the authoritarian North and the more democratic South, although this isn’t necessarily the case. By the time of the Sixth Republic, which goes from 1987 to the present day, presidential elections in South Korea had been reinstated after the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan, but the shadow of that legacy still lingered. Even with the reinstatement, the 1988 election went to one of Doo-hwan’s buddy-buds Roh Tae-woo. The democratic election process was ingrained enough in the collective consciousness to be the favourable option compared to the authoritarian side of things, yet fresh enough that the legitimacy of such a process was still ambiguous.
It is in this fallout, specifically in Busan during the election year of 1992, that we get the backdrop for writer/director LEE Won-tae’s [The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil] latest look into the seedy underbelly of the nation. He follows Jeon Hae-woong (CHO Jin-woong), a politician running for the National Assembly, whose slippery slope begins when he is overturned as the Democratic candidate. The man who did the overturning, Kwon Soon-tae (LEE Sung-min), has such a sway over the tides of the area that, in shadowy phone calls to the higher-ups, he introduces himself as Busan.
Undercut by KIM Sung-an’s moody cinematography and CHO Young-wuk’s clandestine soundtrack, The Devil’s Deal shows Hae-woong and Soon-tae playing chess with the populace, following each other’s underhanded attempts to get back theirs with force. As a depiction of where the underworld meets the throne room, it’s quite compelling stuff with intrigue to spare. It never tries to go too hard into actively pulling one over on the audience, and instead layers on the duelling allegiances between political office, the media, and local gangsters to get the same job done without the potential lack of coherency. The lack of ‘he knows that I know that he knows’ overthink is refreshing.
It helps that the people doing the double-triple-quadruple crossing here can pull their weight. Sung-min carries himself with a lot of quiet “do not fuck with me” energy that sells his place as the puppet master, while Jin-woong as the naïve idealist getting bloodied for the first time does well at balancing the good that he ostensibly wants to accomplish with the depths that he has to reach to make it happen. KIM Moo-yul as gangster Kim Pil-do brings swagger to the proceedings, and PARK Se-jin as journalist Song Dan-ah makes an immediately solid impression – visibly unimpressed with the amount of BS she gets fed while on the job.
The Devil’s Deal is a compelling bit of dirty political drama, cutting through the pretences of governing for the people by showing how cutthroat (both literally and figuratively) the job can get. Its low-key aesthetics help sell the realism of the story, while the performers ground the knotty plotting in tangible logic. Some of its understanding of the democratic process can come across as a foregone conclusion, but it still makes a firm statement on when the titular Deal is struck: Not with criminal dealings or acts of sabotage, but from the moment you start playing.
