It’s that time of the year again, when the London Korean Film Festival brings out its teaser films for this year’s event. After a year with minimal in-person screenings these previews have been a long time coming. We’ve got three this time around:
First up is Deliver Us from Evil (2020), an action film about hitman In-nam (Hwang Jung-min) whose retirement plans are thrown into chaos when gets linked to a kidnapping case in Thailand and hunted down by a man (Lee Jung-jae) whose brother was killed by In-nam in the past.
Director Hong Won-chan doesn’t have a lot of credits to his name, with the only other film he’s directed being Office. I didn’t like the story for that one, but thankfully that wasn’t his work. He did however write the screenplays for the critically successful The Yellow Sea and The Chaser, and Deliver us from Evil looks to provide just the sort of cat and mouse thrills I expect from Korean crime cinema. You can catch it at the Genesis Cinema on Thursday 24th June.
Next is Voice of Silence (2020), an indie crime drama film from Hong Eui-jeong. This will be her first feature-length film after having written and directed a number of shorts, including the award-winning Better than Tomorrow. Voice of Silence deals with two men who work as the clean-up crew for a crime syndicate. They find also themselves embroiled in a kidnapping, but unlike Deliver us from Evil above, Tae-in (Yoo Ah-in) and Chang-bok (Yoo Jae-myung) find themselves looking after an 11-year old girl (Moon Seung-ah).
One of my favourite films from last year’s LKFF was the unimaginably sweet Pawn, so if Voice of Silence is anywhere near as affecting, it’ll be a sure-fire win. If you’re not in London (and I mean way not in London), you can check it out July 1st at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, or in London it’ll be playing on the 3rd of July at the Curzon Soho.
Lastly there’s Samjin Company English Class (2020), a comedy-drama set in 1995 about young women who take English classes together in order to get a promotion at the titular Samjin Company. While doing so, they discover corruption within the company, and team up to expose it. Writer-director Lee Jong-pil has a couple of other films to his name – the musical comedy Born to Sing and the historical drama The Sound of a Flower – and they both seem so wildly different to one another. It’s honestly impossible to tell what direction this one will go in, but it’s won a number of awards, including Best Film at the Baeksang Arts Awards. If you want to watch it it’s playing July 8th at the Everyman Screen on the Green.
The London Korean Film Festival will be back in full swing later this year. Follow them here, or check back in here for any new updates.
The Asian Cinema Critic 