
I could say the guy’s about look and feel, not form; I have yet to see a particularly interesting structure from him. Dream doesn’t break the pattern. It’s as if A Nightmare on Elm Street met the old body-switch movies of that era met an especially bleak Hanks-Ryan rom-com. When Jin, the male lead, falls asleep, Ran, the female lead involuntarily acts out his dreams. (One semi-fascinating point about these two is that Ran speaks only Korean and Jin speaks only Japanese, which are definitely not mutually intelligible languages, yet they communicate with seeming fluency to one another.) The first time this happens, Jin dreams about crashing a car. Soon, the cops are knocking on Ran’s door, and she sleepily protests that of course she wasn’t just driving around — while her wrecked car sits parked right below.
Jin and Ran figure they can sleep in shifts, but for some reason this doesn’t work out. There are a few truly ugly sequences when Jin desperately resorts to just keeping himself awake by any means necessarily: taping his eyelids open, slashing himself with a razor blade, etc. Here is a situation that cannot end well. Kim does execute it reasonably well, but ultimately I call it a minor entry in his body of 15 (!) films. It’s pretty much all about the aesthetics this time around, and while some of the choices there work — I liked the dissonant Takemitsu-style score — most feel strangely restrained.

But it’s a big jumble of individually effective horrific moments. Don’t even bother getting the throughline straight; even if it does untangle, that isn’t the point. This, I’ll declare from my limited research, is the “K-horror” modus operandi. It’s still far, far superior to what even the finest scary movies North America are doing right now, which seems to have devolved into a game of budget torture one-upsmanship. I’d sooner sit through even the dopiest, messiest, most melodramatic Korean shriekfest (which Epitaph really isn’t) than any one of the Saw sequels.

As in Dong-hun Choi’s The Big Swindle, the outlaw characters’ best laid plans are complicated and ultimately ruined by the outlaw’s inherent untrustworthiness. A well-dressed but impoverished 29-year-old thug named Byung-du is at the center of this, trying to climb the greasy pole steadily enough to support his kid sister and sick mom. This involves killing a troublesome accountant, participating in truly epic street battles, acting as a gangsterism consultant on an elementary school buddy’s Tarantinoesque movie project, spilling a few too many beans to said buddy, becoming a target of one’s own brethren, having to decide whether to slay friends or “family” just to stay alive himself, etc.
I’ve read that Yu began his career as a poet, only later turning to film. This strikes me as unusual enough that I’m now thinking back and trying to identify the possibly “poetic” qualities of A Dirty Carnival. This is a doomed exercise, but I do think you find most of the picture’s value where it deviates from the norms of gangster filmmaking. It strikes a surprisingly adept balance between the glorification of gangsters and the self-conscious, excessive de-glorification of same. Byung-du tries his best to be slick and noble, but his awkward edges remain on display. He’s got a few decidedly ass-kicking moves, but the fights he gets involved in are filthy, chaotic scrums. This gets more impressive the more you think about how many movies get it (at the very least) not quite right.
As in almost every Korean film I’ve seen, there’s humor alongside the heightened drama. It ends with perhaps the finest single example of simultaneous sadness, optimism, nihilism, and laugh-out-loud ridiculousness I’ve seen, with the boss at the top of the gang’s org chart singing the Alan Parsons Project’s “Old and Wise” at the karaoke bar.
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