Director – Nam Dong-hyub – 2024 – South Korea – LKFF Cert. 15 – 102m
****
A comedy of errors in horror genre clothing, features a house in which accidents keep occurring, and a demonic goat – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2024 which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th
Half-brothers Kang Jae-pil (Lee Sung-min from this year’s South Korean Oscar entry 12.12: The Day, Kim Sung-su, 2023; The Man Standing Next, Woo Min-ho, 2020), Park Sang-goo (Lee Hee-jun from The Man Standing Next; 1987: When That Day Comes, 2017) and their dog Bong-gu have come to a rural area with the intent of buying their dream home, unaware that a demon was banished to hell in its basement two generations ago by British priest Father Baker (Jamie Horan) and can only be banished back there, should it arise from the grave, by one of those present at the time of the banishment.
A group of students runs into the half-brothers in a supermarket, the former drawing all the wrong conclusions from the latter’s unkempt appearance and shopping trolley of heavy-duty carpentry kit, snap judgements somewhat thrown by the undeniable cuteness of Bong-gu the dog, sitting in the front of their trolley.
Back in their car, golf-playing college student, spoiled brat and all-round party animal Lee Seong-bin (Jang Dong-joo) and his entourage of fellow college students Jason (Kim Do-hoon), Jason’s girlfriend Bo-ra (Park Jeong-hwa) and Kang Yong-jun (Bin Chan-wook) taunt their fellow student Byeong-jo (Kang Ki-doong), as he drives the group, causing him to accidentally hit and kill a goat in the road. They stop the car. Also in the car, but not joining in the bullying, is Kim Mi-na (Gong Seung-yeon), or Mina as she is helpfully called in the English subtitles, who has unwisely fallen in with Seong-bin. Bo-ra callously takes a selfie, insisting on putting the unwilling Byeong-jo in it. The students drive off, leaving the corpse where it fell on the road.
When Jae-pil and Sang-goo come along in their truck and find the goat corpse, they remove the goat corpse to take it home and give it a decent burial. They are carrying it in an improvised body bag onto their truck when they are spotted by a police car driven by local Police Chief Choi (Park Ji-hwan from Beasts Clawing at Straws, Kim Yong-hoon, 2020) and his sidekick, Officer Nam Dong-yoon (Lee Kyu-hyung).
Choi is the type to make snap judgements based on initial appearance, and immediately clocks the brothers as lowlife criminal types, despite their helpful attitude of co-operation with the law and the fact that they are clearing roadkill off the road. Nevertheless, Choi has made up his mind.
Later, Mina overhears Seong-bin talking with Jason and realises that he simply wants to play around with her for a few days before moving on to whom- or whatever comes next. She goes to the lake to be alone with her thought and runs into the half-brothers, who she assumes are dangerous types. Misunderstanding and accident occurs, but the half-brothers are decent types and carry her back to their house. She starts out on the wrong foot, believing them to be the local serial killers or similar, but soon realises from the evidence before her eyes that they have hearts of gold.
Meanwhile, the other students believe that the half-brothers have kidnapped Mina, and resolve to rescue her. And Police Chief Choi remains convinced that there’s something odd about the two men…
You can’t judge a book by its cover, as the saying goes, and this is essentially a film about three sets of people (the half-brothers, the college students, the cops) of whom two sets do exactly that. The half-brothers are the exception, taking people at face value as they find them, and evaluating them from their behaviour, always giving them the benefit of the doubt.
This is ironic, since the other two groups judge by pre-set ideas. The students are presumed forward-looking and successful, therefore good – whereas, in fact, apart from the soon-planned-to-be-exploited Mina and the bullied Byeong-jo, the students are selfish hedonists out to please themselves. The two cops are presumed impartial agents of the law, whereas, in fact, the chief has his own set of prejudices causing him to misjudge the students as good people because they are well-to-do and the half-brothers as criminal types because he doesn’t like the look of them.
The script skilfully extends these misreadings with numerous scenarios where one person sees something and interprets it in the obvious way which is, in fact, wrong; there is an alternative, perfectly innocent explanation which happens to be the correct one. For example, if you saw a man standing by a wood chipper with half a partially-shredded body stuck in it, you would assume foul play, that the standing man had killed the other by pushing him into the chipper. In fact, there’s no such motive and the man in the chipper got there by virtue of an accident, something no-one stumbling upon the scene after the event would ever believe. To witness such a scene, followed by its aftermath, is to invite a complete reinterpretation.
Such scenes are also the stuff of comic invention. There are many of them here, and they are, without exception, brilliantly executed in terms of blocking, shot composition and timing – and, consequently, very, very funny.
The film is a remake of the Canadian horror comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig, 2010) transplanting its North American scenarios to South Korea and (apparently) dialling down the level of gore effects. Elements like backwoods people who might be serial killers, partying students or prejudiced cops don’t feel particularly Korean, imported as they are from an alien culture, but this Korean version is so enjoyable and laugh-aloud funny that it scarcely seems to matter.
Korea has produced many dramas, thriller and horror films over the years, but comedies seem less common. Or perhaps, they simply haven’t been seen abroad in the UK that much. The high-profile Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2019) might be described as a black comedy, but it’s more of a thriller or a social satire. The hilarious Extreme Job (Lee Byeong-heon, 2018), about a bungling group of cops and shown in the 2019 LKFF, is certainly first and foremost a comedy. The current entry, too, proves that South Korea can, on occasion, make extremely funny films.
Comedy is arguably the most difficult genre to pull off successfully, and is notorious for not travelling beyond its home culture. Handsome Guys proves South Korea can do both with considerable skill; it deserves to be picked up for UK release by some enterprising distributor here.
Handsome Guys plays in LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2024which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th.
Trailer:
Trailer (LKFF 2024):
Trailer (Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema):