CRUEL WINTER BLUES (Korea, 2006)
Directed by: Lee Jeong-Beom
Starring: Sol Kyoung-Gu, Na Moon-Hee, Jo Han-Seon

Sometimes Korean cinema feels like a long, unbroken string of interchangeable gangster movies, rushing at the audience with a snarl on their lips and a baseball bat in their hands. But occasionally one of these movies holds back, playing its cards close to its chest, and forcing the audience to come to it, and that’s the MO of CRUEL WINTER BLUES, a dramatic smackdown between three powerhouse actors who take this low-key, unconventional script in hand and tear it up.

Sol Kyong-Gu, easily one of Korea’s most talented actors (Peppermint Candy, Oasis, Public Enemy), plays middle-aged gangster, Jae-Moon, who wants to kill a man. Specifically, he wants to kill Dae-Shik, the guy who knifed his life-long buddy. He’s too rabid for anyone in the gang to stand in his way and so he grabs newbie gang boy, Chi-Juk (Jo Han-Seon), and heads down to Dae-Shik’s hometown to stake out his mother’s house and wait for his chance to sink a sashimi knife into his unsuspecting enemy’s guts. Dae-Shik’s hometown is a misbegotten concrete scab without even a bar and Jae-Moon and Chi-Juk spend their time hanging around Dae-Shik’s mother’s restaurant trying to kill the days that crawl by without going crazy. As they fall more and more into the patterns of an average person’s daily life, the loyalties and commitments, the crazed blood-lust and the sense of revenge that drive a gangster becomes more and more alien to them, and the job they were sent to do winds up coming barreling down their psychic highway to crash head-on into their new-found normalcy. Uncompromising in its emotional intensity, CRUEL WINTER BLUES sets up three people in a tragic orbit and waits for them to smash into each other. It doesn’t explain, it doesn’t excuse, it doesn’t justify. It just stands back and watches as ordinary human beings self-destruct.