Tags : Cinelogue

Filled with venomous humour, combining high violence with wildly inappropriate demonstrations of song and dance, Cut is like a playful experiment to occupy time between grander projects. Thematically it bears resemblance to some of Park’s earlier work, particularly Oldboy which, with the character of Woo-jin, also ticks along thanks to the malevolent mind of an unqualified judge.

Closing the collection, we have the biggest name of the production: Chan-wook Park. Telling us that what we’re about to see is based on a true story, we are thrown into a black-and-white world depicting a bureaucratic nightmare on a par with Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ Opening in Nepal, an off-screen voice asks a selection of women if they are Chandra Kumari Gurung. They each say no until one hesitantly acknowledges that this is indeed her name. Having seen the real person, we are sent back to Korea as the camera adopts a first-person perspective charting Chandra’s horrific ordeal at the hands of an uncaring and inefficient bureaucracy.