Beyond evil movie#
Beyond evil serial#
Beyond evil series#
Beyond evil tv#

Lee Dong-sik, the twin brother of the missing woman-at the time briefly a suspect, now a middle-aged policeman-is present at the scene with his new younger partner from Seoul, Han Joo-won, who has been temporarily exiled to the boondocks for some transgression. The discovery of a woman’s body in such a field opens old wounds from the murder and disappearance of two young women twenty years earlier.

There’s a metaphoric thrust to these lovely dry windblown grasses, their beauty masking a terrible unseen truth we’ve now learned to anticipate. The haunting fields of grasses of that film and his later film Mother have achieved almost meme status, one that is generously perpetuated in this new series, where people both alive and dead keep surfacing from among them. Bong Joon Ho’s 2011 film, Memories of Murder was based on a famous case that had gripped the nation decades earlier and was solved only last year when the killer confessed.

Beyond evil serial#

Serial killers in South Korea linger in the dark corners of the collective imagination. Whodunnit and why will eventually become oddly secondary to conflagrations involving ego, history, prevarication, power and failure. It’s difficult to imagine a serial murder case that veers further from ritual expectations than this one. On the contrary, time seems to be standing still in this forgotten cold case of a town, leaving the inhabitants in a suspended state where everyone is suspect and therefore no one is. Time plays a role in the new K-drama Beyond Evil, about murders and disappearances that have occurred in the backwater town of Manyang over a twenty-year period.

Beyond evil series#

Series provide more than enough time to travel quite far. Time regulates the speed limit of a story, as well as the distance it travels.

Beyond evil movie#

But isn’t that also the fundamental difference between a short story and a novel? There are subtle levels to be plumbed in a work that takes its time to unfold over multiple episodes (like chapters in a novel), in a cinematic vessel loaded with conflicts and denouements as well as relevant diversions no movie would make time for. The more accustomed we become to series, the more movies seem like wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am versions of a tale, what Schrader prefers to call “concise stories which land like a punch in the face,” hinting that a distilled narrative is better than free-flowing dramaturgy.

Beyond evil tv#

Now that streaming services have liberated TV series from their weekly viewing slots and the concomitant agony of cliffhanging suspense, interest in them has exploded. One has only to think of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat (1983) or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) to realize just how compelling this format could be. But in other parts of the world, especially South Korea, a writer generally works alone, even if she (very often it’s a she) has to deliver 16 episodes.Īs artistic endeavors TV series have been hiding in plain sight. Screenwriting by committee may indeed be a fact of life in Hollywood, which has always tended toward a system of multiple credits for both movies and television.

Where movies used to define-and confine-our consumption of a narrative, series now populate the streaming platforms, becoming increasingly dominant in the menu listings and more sophisticated in their dramaturgy.Ī filmmaker I admire, Paul Schrader, in a recent New Yorker interview, maintains the view of movies as the only valid artistic format, one that he sees threatened by the “writers’-room” output he supposes TV series to be. Novels still require the same amount of time to read as they always have, but audiobooks actually slow down the storytelling process: Where eyes once flew over the page, a human voice now dictates the pace at which we enjoy the authorial content as we keep our eyes on the road and our hands on the wheel.Īll this leads to the question of just how our grasp of time or time-passing has been altered aesthetically by the convergence of that motherlode of time, the pandemic, with the rising popularity of elongated storytelling formats like TV series-those time-indulgent, episodic ways to weave a tale, unhurried by a two-hour time limit. Bezos has, he has no more hours in his day than I do. It’s even been called a currency (time is money), but the reverse was never true. It used to be a commodity in short supply. This is why time is no longer quite as valuable as it was before we were suddenly assaulted with too much of it. The pandemic has altered our perception of it. Time is a double-jointed trickster, bending this way and that to elude the tempi of one’s needs.