Sitting
around the dinner table with her family, Soon-Yi receives an unexpected phone
call that sees her drop everything and immediately head back to the family home
where she lived almost fifty years ago.
Upon returning to the house, she is flooded with memories about her time
there and particularly of an abandoned boy they found living on the property,
that the family took in and made one of their own. For the next two hours we are witness to
Soon-Yi’s memories of the boy who they initially civilized, teaching him to
read and write and behave in public, before Soon-Yi and the boy start to fall
in love. This love is the boy’s ultimate
downfall as when Soon-Yi is threatened he unleashes the animal within him that
sees the townfolk and a group of scientists attempt to hunt the boy down to
either kill him or to experiment on to find out just exactly what he is.
“A
Werewolf Boy” has often been called the Korean “Twilight” which is just not the
case and sells the film considerably short.
While its target market is the same as the “Twilight” franchise and the
film does feature a werewolf within it, that is really all it shares with the
massive vampire franchise. Actually that
is not entirely true, because one other thing “A Werewolf Boy” shares is the
fact that it is an enormous hit in Korea; it has become the most successful
Korean melodrama of all time. However as
big a hit as it has become at home, it has barely been noticed on the
international scene. The reason for this
baffles me, but I assume it is due to the fact that the film is aimed towards
young teens when most of the films from Korea that do well overseas tend to be
of the darker and violent variety like “Oldboy”.
Basically
“A Werewolf Boy” is a love story that is full of melodramatic moments. While it is a well made film, that is
competently acted, I am clearly not the target audience for the film and as a
result the film just did not soar for me.
The story was nice, and the ending was incredibly sad and beautiful all
at once, but really that is it. These
types of films are not ones that I particularly enjoy, and at the end of the
day, “A Werewolf Boy” is quite the cliché.
The werewolf has always been a tragic figure in cinema, and this holds
true in this film, but personally I feel that nothing new was done with the
story; it didn’t appear fresh, rather it had a been there done that quality to
it.
The
extreme mainstream quality of “A Werewolf Boy” is so prevalent that I was
stunned when I found out that Jo Sung-Hee was the director behind this smash
hit. Two years earlier he directed the
very dark and strange post apocalyptic thriller “End Of Animal”. That film was extremely low budget and about
as far away as what you get with “A Werewolf Boy”. It was visually dark, mysterious, very
surreal at times and every little moment was not explained, so the audience was
really forced to work while watching the film.
I thought that “End Of Animal” was fantastic and assumed that Jo
Sung-Hee would follow a directorial path where he would stay on the fringes of
the Korean cinema mainstream. Never in
my life did I expect him to follow up his debut with a film as mainstream as “A
Werewolf Boy”, not because it is beneath him, but I just didn’t think it would
suit his sensibilities as a filmmaker.
That all
said, Jo Sung-Hee does a fantastic job in making “A Werewolf Boy” as compelling
a film as it is. He has a bold visual
style that is full of blown out lighting that is extreme in its use of
contrast. As opposed to his debut film,
“A Werewolf Boy” is full of colour and sunlight and there is a complete sense
of fun within the film, with the tone of the film being relatively light. As I mentioned above the film is
melodramatic, especially during its tear filled finale, which tends to be
manipulative (in regards to the audiences emotions) by its nature, however Jo
Sung-Hee is smart in the way he attacks these scenes, by not putting undue
emphasis on certain moments, so you never feel overly manipulated. Although the scenes that have to do with
Soon-Yi’s lung ailment probably could’ve been helped with a lighter touch.
In terms
of acting performances, I thought Park Bo-Yeong was great and really cute as
Soon-Yi. I liked the scenes early when
they find the boy and she wants nothing to do with him, but becomes to like his
company when she realizes that she has the ability to train him. She starts the film as a very sad girl, who
never smiles (due to her lung problems) but as the boy becomes more important
in her life, she remembers how to have fun and importantly how to smile again,
and her outlook on life completely changes for the better. She starts to muck around again and be a kid
once more, and it appears that she becomes younger as she is no longer worried
about the weight on her shoulders from her health issues. Unfortunately I felt Song Joong-Ki, who plays
the wolf boy of the title, was just average in his performance because every
decision he choose seemed to be the most obvious one. The animalistic twitches, the grunts, even
the look in his eyes, just didn’t really convince me of the wolf inside of him,
and when he finally becomes the wolf, he is far too young looking to be scary. Where I did think Song Joong-Ki got it right,
was that he seemed to understand the tragic nature of his character perfectly,
and he is really great in the poignant finale.
Overall,
“A Werewolf Boy” is a well made film but it has nothing new to say, regularly
relying on cliché to tell it’s story.
While the film is well shot and quite beautiful to look at, it just
didn’t connect with me much at all. The
fact that I am not the target market for the film may be the reason for this,
but this crowd pleasing smash hit from South Korea turned out to be nothing
more than a pleasant distraction from the real world. For me, it is nothing more than that and I
doubt I will ever revisit the film in the future.
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