Blood Rain

Saw Blood Rain (thanks, Basil!) It was a Korean mystery film. Now, unfortunately, I saw it just after getting home and having dinner. The post-caffeine crash + food coma combo left me half-asleep through the middle hour of the film which is not the best state to be in when viewing anything, especially a freakin' mystery. This film tells the very knotty story of a paper-mill island-town whose Imperial tribute of paper was sabotaged by arson. Official investigators are dispatched to investigate and they discover an island-wide conspiracy of silence, cracked here and there by the priestess and a few mill-workers who always seem to wind up dead soon after. We learn a man was recently falsely accused of practicing the criminally foreign mysticism of Christianity (which is a non-twist in the movie that was quite interesting to me. My criminal ignorance of history once again causes me to be blind-sided.) It seems that that man's ghost now haunts the villagers, wrecking vengeance on his enemies. The true fun of this movie is in the central stalking detective though, so of course the supernatural explanation is not all that it seems.

I was happily surprised to find a good deal of restraint in this film (a rare thing in the Asian cinema I've seen, as I've said before.) Several scenes have no background music and are shot coolly in the middle-ground of the frame. There's no baroque little meaningless flourishes of CGI and though there are sometimes violins in the background, they mostly thoughtfully hum rather than weep or shriek. There is also a lot of paper in the film. Several characters are wearing robes made of paper and at one point a corpse is wrapped in thick sheets of paper. I loved it but don't know if it really was some artsy theme, connecting the villagers to their livelihood in an immediate and concrete way, or just historically accuracy. I'm going to assume the latter but hope the former.

I have to add that I found the film very confusing however. I don't know how much is due to my narcoleptic state (probably all of it) but in any case there's a lot going on. At one point we begin flashing back in time heavily. There's also this conspiracy of silence, faked deaths, secret loves, and a blood-borne disease which makes the sufferer feel he is possessed. Also, the supernatural explanation that isn't all it seems? It isn't completely dismissed in the end either. There's a fever-dream climax that reminded me of this scene. Yeah, the blood rains. That climax is amazing. The rest of the film, too confusing to be followed by people who are mostly asleep (and for that the film makers should feel a deep and eternal shame.)