THE BUTCHER (Korea, 2007)

INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE

75 minutes, digital projection, in Korean with English subtitles
Directed by: Kim Jin-Won
Starring: Kim Sung-Il, You Dong-Hun

It’s been a tough year for South Korea. With the screen quota system in shambles, the cost of production rising, the number of films being sold overseas crashing, and a string of costly box office flops, the entire industry seems to be in a state of crisis. So many of the Korean movies produced in 2007 and considered for the festival this year were just awful: crass attempts by producers to take money from the audiences’ pockets and stuff it into their own, made without an ounce of care, skill, originality or passion. So it was a complete shock to come across THE BUTCHER, a low-budget, digital feature by unknown director Kim Jin-Won that had previously only screened at the 2007 Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival. With only a couple of very strange short films to his name, Kim shot THE BUTCHER completely outside the studio system, and if the rest of the industry lacks passion, drive and commitment to their art, he more than makes up for it with this flick, as stomach-churningly unpleasant and unrelenting a descent into Hell as you'll ever lay eyes on – and that's if you're able to make it all the way through its grimy, gore-soaked 75 minutes!

Told entirely through two POV video cameras, THE BUTCHER throws viewers abruptly into the middle of chaos and death: a handful of people have been abducted and lie bloodied and bound on the floor of a rotting slaughterhouse. Nearby, a team of snuff film producers are discussing their gruesome handiwork: torturing their captives to death, one by one, and selling the tapes overseas to foreign audiences hungry for footage of Koreans murdering one another. Taking its cue from the recently-popular "torture porn" subgenre, THE BUTCHER is less HOSTEL than it is a twisted form of verite mockumentary, as Kim uses a distinctively non-cinematic aesthetic to directly implicate not only the viewer in the crimes and serial mayhem taking place onscreen, but the entire Korean film industry. You will not leave this movie emotionally unscathed, and despite its low budget, the film squeezes genuine tension out of its POV camerawork – all of it shot alternately from the perspective of the torturers and their victim – and it whips its cast up to new heights of hysteria as hideous acts are perpetrated on their violated bodies.

Never outstaying its welcome, and capable of being read as a straight horror film or as a passionate indictment of the Korean film industry (cast here as a bunch of pigs peddling snuff to overseas audiences), THE BUTCHER hit us like 80,000 volts of electricity to the genitals. It’s part of a wave of recent POV genre titles (REC, DIARY OF THE DEAD) cropping up at festivals within the last eight months, but you can forget about the artificial "reality" of something like CLOVERFIELD – the pure energy coming out of this movie, and its admirable commitment to rejecting every single, tired convention of Korean filmmaking, makes THE BUTCHER one of the best - and one of the rawest - films of the year to come out of Korea, or anywhere else.

Festivals/Awards
Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival 2007