Korean filmmaker Jung Byunggil doesn’t waste time. In the first few minutes of The Villainess, his protagonist, Sookhee, does away with dozens of heavies in a kamikaze-like frenzy. It looks like a video game: we see the action through her eyes, see her hands pick up one weapon after another to carry out the bloodbath.
Sookhee is forced to join a secret team of hired killers in spite of just having given birth. In flashbacks, we see how she witnessed her father being murdered; since then, she has been out for revenge. It is the action scenes that particularly stand out in this story, thanks to dizzying camerawork and very clever editing. Fights and chase sequences never seem to be interrupted. Shots zoom through open windows, make deep plunging dives and pass beneath moving motorcycles. Marvelously intense.
Programme
Rotterdam goes hardcore genre with an eclectic mix of films that brashly bend, blend or respect conventions each in their own distinctive way.
Read more about this programmeBaking in the sun with a cocktail, a splash in the pool and the occasional chunk of human flesh. The stinking-rich Gilda and Octavio have a gruesome and kooky hobby. The Cannibal Club is a delightful dark-comic blow-up of the Brazilian super-rich and their ivory towers.
81'
Brazil
IFFR 2018
The nurse Clara gets a job as nanny for the rich and pregnant Ana, who suffers from insomnia. Her delivery at full moon ends fatally and, against her better judgement, Clara decides to care for the child. Sweet, sublimely styled horror film about unconditional love, with an occasional musical intermezzo.
135'
Brazil
IFFR 2018
Scorching sun, art, bullets and a suitcase full of gold create an explosive mix. A Mediterranean paradise becomes a brutal, stylised battlefield where two artists clash with a gang, greed with betrayal and jealousy with eroticism. Hallucinatory police thriller ode to Giallo film, the perfect Italian pulps from the 1960s.
90'
Belgium
IFFR 2018