‘The Villainess’: how a brutal Korean revenge thriller earned a standing ovation at Cannes
Violent revenge thrillers aren’t the usual Cannes Film Festival fodder, but co-writer and director Jung Byung-gil’s The Villainess was well worthy of the four-minute standing ovation it received after being screened to an audience who’d just had their minds blown by the instant Korean classic.
It’s becoming harder with each passing year to stake out new ground in the action genre, especially when the narrative is one driven by retribution and a lifelong desire to right the wrongs of the past. These are all tropes and archetypes that have been done to death a thousand times over, and while The Villainess didn’t reinvent the wheel from a storytelling perspective, Byung-gil knew he had to do something to stand out from the pack.
The filmmaker openly admitted that Luc Besson’s influential actioner La Femme Nikita was a huge touchstone, and it’s easy to see why. Kim Ok-vin stars as Sook-hee, an elite assassin trained since childhood to become a fearsome killer. As often tends to be the case, the people in charge not only have ulterior motives, but they’re holding back on vital information tied to the protagonist’s past that will invariably end up being resolved through bloodshed and violence.
There’s absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about the setup, or even the payoff when a couple of the late-stage revelations are signposted with various degrees of subtlety, but The Villainess thrives because Byung-gil decided that the best way to overcome a fairly by-the-numbers story was to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix and hope that a demented genre-bending melting pot would paper over the cracks.
Suffice to say, he was right on the money, and the introductory action sequence wastes no time conditioning the audience to expect the unexpected. Shot from a first-person perspective and dousing the frame with liberal amounts of blood by way of much stabbing and throat-slashing, it’s an intentionally dizzying and disorienting maelstrom of madness. When it finally resorts to a more conventional frame, it’s merely a breather for even more insanity to come.
What follows is a deliriously unrestrained revenge thriller that pinballs from genre to genre – often in the space of the same scene – but it never comes across as jarring when Byung-Gil makes it clear from the very first second that all bets are off. Anything can happen, and while the risk of becoming overindulgent and overstuffed is constantly looming, The Villainess never crosses the line from wrath into gluttony.
It’s a no-holds-barred action extravaganza, a claret-soaked grindhouse spectacular, a semi-satirical deconstruction of the very genre it occupies, and there’s even lashings of melodrama thrown in for good measure when the handsome and charming love interest enters the fray. It shouldn’t realistically work as well as it does, but thanks to the director’s embrace of the absurd, it’s 129 minutes of propulsive mania.
The standout set piece by far – not to mention one of the most jaw-dropping action beats in recent memory – is the motorcycle chase that finds Byung-gil’s camera pivoting around with reckless abandon, which doubles as a swordfight on two wheels. It’s all the more impressive because the CGI was kept to an intentional bare minimum; it’s a masterclass in camera movement, editing, composition, and urgency.
To accomplish it, the filmmaker used cameras that had only recently hit the market and wouldn’t have existed had he shot The Villainess the previous year. Mounted to the bodies of the stunt performers, various parts of speeding motorcycles, remote tracks underneath the vehicles, drone mounts, and handhelds being operated by a team tracking the many cogs in the machine, thinking about the mechanics of how it was put together is every bit as mind-blowing as the finished article.
That solitary sequence has been cited as an influence on everything from the John Wick franchise to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but not even the rapturous applause at Cannes was enough to leave Byung-gil satisfied. In fact, he thinks The Villainess may have gotten an even longer ovation if the crowd had seen his preferred version of the film.
He felt the deadline-dependent cut he assembled for the purpose of the festival was “a little lesser” than his locked cut “quality-wise.” An ovation is an ovation at the end of the day, and anyone to have seen The Villainnes knows it was fully deserved.
