I Would Like to See It: Bedevilled (Patreon)

Indifference, more than anything, is what makes exploitation and abuse not just possible but commonplace. Without callous authorities interested only in doing as little as possible and upholding the status quo and a selfish, disinterested public unwilling to involve themselves in the suffering of others, how would men beat their wives and rape their children in broad daylight? Bedevilled crawls on bloody hands and knees through this antipathy for connection with the pain of others, rubbing the viewer’s face in their own complicity in everything from domestic abuse to houselessness. It begins with ruthless bank employee Hae-won (Ji Sung-won) avoiding entanglement in a case of public battery she witnessed from her car by refusing to identify the culprits, then returning to work where she callously denies aid to an elderly woman seeking housing on a fixed income before getting herself suspended over her borderline deranged reaction to a co-worker’s perceived slight.

For the remainder of the film, as focus shifts to the island where Hae-won was born and to her now grown childhood friend Bok-nam (Seo Young-hee), whose life is a gauntlet of rape and abuse at the hands of her husband Man-jong (Park Jeong-hak) and his family, the tension between Hae-won’s unwillingness to involve herself and her sexual and emotional connection to Bok-nam grows steadily more unbearable. By the time events pitch over the edge into violent mayhem, it’s agonizing to see her continued reticence and investment in the status quo. She aligns herself both passively and actively with the same men responsible for Bok-nam’s continued misery, even after being drugged and assaulted by those men herself. She refuses Bok-nam’s desperate pleas for aid, even accusing the other woman of lying when she reveals that Man-jong is sexually abusing her young daughter.

That Hae-won’s change of heart doesn’t come until the madness is well over is one of the most unflinching dramatic decisions I’ve seen in rape/revenge cinema. You want so badly for her to defend this woman, to choose anything but selfish, willfully ignorant indifference, and she never does. In fact the only woman besides Bok-nam to show solidarity to other women in the film is the cheerful prostitute Ji-su (Tak Seong-eun), who readily offers to spirit Bok-nam and her daughter off the island. Women with next to nothing and no social capital are more willing than women with means to give aid to other women, and even to allow themselves to experience empathy for those women. By the time the sickle comes out and blood starts to flow in earnest a dozen opportunities to avoid all of it have come and gone not through any fault of Bok-nam’s, but because nobody gave a damn.