I made it to the end! After years of putting off watching this, I finally sat my butt down to get through all two hours and forty-three minutes of it. And I did it. I won the film! Go me! Victory is mine!Of course, the big question is, was it worth it? Well, kind of. It’s well made; the story is good, the performances are good (shoutout to the always great Yoo Hai-jin), the aging make-up is good, the cinematography is good. But its still just too damn long for what it is. I reckon they could have cut a third of the run time, and still delivered this mystery-suspense film just as well…or actually, probably better, as it would be leaner and slightly less repetitive.Though I will say, with how it was, it still mostly kept my interest. It’s about a young man that travels to a rural village where his father recently died, only the locals are acting suspicious - watching him, being overly friendly and so on. So he tries to uncover what everyone is hiding. It’s all built up and then doled out incrementally, so it does well in keeping you wondering what is going on and why right up until it when it starts feels a little like the same thing keeps happening over and over again.We do get to sort of find out what happened by the end, only we’ve got unreliable narrators and then a coda subversion of that. And if some of that is true, the explanation for the father’s death is slightly daft considering everything we went to get there. But I was so happy at making it to the end, that I emotionally glossed over that.I’m not sure that enjoyment of a film should be measured by audience endurance, but I don’t know how else to frame this because in every other way it’s a fine Korean thriller, but there are many other shorter and better films you could watch in less time.A Blizzard of Wintery Trash 2024/2025 85. Watch a mystery.
