O piseu
Director: Won-Chan Hong
Writer: Won-Chan Hong
Cast: Seong-woo Bae, Ah-sung Ko, Seong-Woong Park, Eui-sung Kim
Part of: /slash Filmfestival
Seen on: 23.9.2015
[Reviews by cornholio and Maynard.]

Plot:
Kim (Seong-woo Bae) returns home from his job, pulls out a hammer, kills his entire family and disappears. When his work colleagues hear about it, they’re understandably shocked, but none more so than Lee Mi-Rye (Ah-sung Ko), a young intern and apparently the only one who actually liked Kim. When employees start dying at the office, it looks like Kim might have returned to the office to dispatch his bulliers.

O piseu has an excellent set-up, starts to drag with the execution of said set-up and then completely unravels when it comes to resolving the situation. What a waste.

The movie starts with Kim killing his family and doing so methodically and expressionlessly, which is at odds with the slow and bloody weapon he chooses – a hammer. That scene was extremely well done and gives the movie a strong opening. Unfortunately the rest of the film doesn’t really live up to that opening sequence.

I was still hopeful when the movie turned to Mi-Rye and her attempt to find a real place in the office. The office politics were nicely done, even though I do hope that this was a particularly nasty office and not a normal one (my office experiences have been mostly friendly).

But after a bit the repetitveness of the bullying got a bit tiring and the movie started to drag. The murders were quite well done and not without tension, but there were too many stretches in between that didn’t really get going, so the movie started to feel much longer when it was.

It stops to drag when it nears the finish line, but mostly because it leaves you flabbergasted and irritated with the turns it starts taking. [SPOILERS] Suddenly we’re in a supernatural story. Mi-Rye is possessed by Kim. So far so good, but why are their bodies flickering between Mi-Rye and Kim? If it had been just a cinematic device, I wouldn’t have minded, but that the office workers being killed can see them flickering as well is just plain weird. [/SPOILERS] If they had abstained from that last twist, I think I would have liked the film better than I did. But with that ending I left the cinema rather frustrated.

Summarizing: Okay, not great.