Thursday, August 29, 2013

A WEREWOLF BOY - MIFF 2013




Sitting around the dinner table with her family, Soon-Yi receives an unexpected phone call that sees her drop everything and immediately head back to the family home where she lived almost fifty years ago.  Upon returning to the house, she is flooded with memories about her time there and particularly of an abandoned boy they found living on the property, that the family took in and made one of their own.  For the next two hours we are witness to Soon-Yi’s memories of the boy who they initially civilized, teaching him to read and write and behave in public, before Soon-Yi and the boy start to fall in love.  This love is the boy’s ultimate downfall as when Soon-Yi is threatened he unleashes the animal within him that sees the townfolk and a group of scientists attempt to hunt the boy down to either kill him or to experiment on to find out just exactly what he is.

“A Werewolf Boy” has often been called the Korean “Twilight” which is just not the case and sells the film considerably short.  While its target market is the same as the “Twilight” franchise and the film does feature a werewolf within it, that is really all it shares with the massive vampire franchise.  Actually that is not entirely true, because one other thing “A Werewolf Boy” shares is the fact that it is an enormous hit in Korea; it has become the most successful Korean melodrama of all time.  However as big a hit as it has become at home, it has barely been noticed on the international scene.  The reason for this baffles me, but I assume it is due to the fact that the film is aimed towards young teens when most of the films from Korea that do well overseas tend to be of the darker and violent variety like “Oldboy”.

Basically “A Werewolf Boy” is a love story that is full of melodramatic moments.  While it is a well made film, that is competently acted, I am clearly not the target audience for the film and as a result the film just did not soar for me.  The story was nice, and the ending was incredibly sad and beautiful all at once, but really that is it.  These types of films are not ones that I particularly enjoy, and at the end of the day, “A Werewolf Boy” is quite the cliché.  The werewolf has always been a tragic figure in cinema, and this holds true in this film, but personally I feel that nothing new was done with the story; it didn’t appear fresh, rather it had a been there done that quality to it.

The extreme mainstream quality of “A Werewolf Boy” is so prevalent that I was stunned when I found out that Jo Sung-Hee was the director behind this smash hit.  Two years earlier he directed the very dark and strange post apocalyptic thriller “End Of Animal”.  That film was extremely low budget and about as far away as what you get with “A Werewolf Boy”.  It was visually dark, mysterious, very surreal at times and every little moment was not explained, so the audience was really forced to work while watching the film.  I thought that “End Of Animal” was fantastic and assumed that Jo Sung-Hee would follow a directorial path where he would stay on the fringes of the Korean cinema mainstream.  Never in my life did I expect him to follow up his debut with a film as mainstream as “A Werewolf Boy”, not because it is beneath him, but I just didn’t think it would suit his sensibilities as a filmmaker.

That all said, Jo Sung-Hee does a fantastic job in making “A Werewolf Boy” as compelling a film as it is.  He has a bold visual style that is full of blown out lighting that is extreme in its use of contrast.  As opposed to his debut film, “A Werewolf Boy” is full of colour and sunlight and there is a complete sense of fun within the film, with the tone of the film being relatively light.  As I mentioned above the film is melodramatic, especially during its tear filled finale, which tends to be manipulative (in regards to the audiences emotions) by its nature, however Jo Sung-Hee is smart in the way he attacks these scenes, by not putting undue emphasis on certain moments, so you never feel overly manipulated.  Although the scenes that have to do with Soon-Yi’s lung ailment probably could’ve been helped with a lighter touch.

In terms of acting performances, I thought Park Bo-Yeong was great and really cute as Soon-Yi.  I liked the scenes early when they find the boy and she wants nothing to do with him, but becomes to like his company when she realizes that she has the ability to train him.  She starts the film as a very sad girl, who never smiles (due to her lung problems) but as the boy becomes more important in her life, she remembers how to have fun and importantly how to smile again, and her outlook on life completely changes for the better.  She starts to muck around again and be a kid once more, and it appears that she becomes younger as she is no longer worried about the weight on her shoulders from her health issues.  Unfortunately I felt Song Joong-Ki, who plays the wolf boy of the title, was just average in his performance because every decision he choose seemed to be the most obvious one.  The animalistic twitches, the grunts, even the look in his eyes, just didn’t really convince me of the wolf inside of him, and when he finally becomes the wolf, he is far too young looking to be scary.  Where I did think Song Joong-Ki got it right, was that he seemed to understand the tragic nature of his character perfectly, and he is really great in the poignant finale. 

Overall, “A Werewolf Boy” is a well made film but it has nothing new to say, regularly relying on cliché to tell it’s story.  While the film is well shot and quite beautiful to look at, it just didn’t connect with me much at all.  The fact that I am not the target market for the film may be the reason for this, but this crowd pleasing smash hit from South Korea turned out to be nothing more than a pleasant distraction from the real world.  For me, it is nothing more than that and I doubt I will ever revisit the film in the future.


3 Stars.

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