Synopsis:
In the past, Yeon-Hee (Han Su-Yeon) left her hometown, leaving behind her mother. One day, Yeon-Hee hears that her mother died in a fire the previous year. Yeon-Hee then goes back to her hometown.In her hometown, Yeon-Hee meets Seok-Yi (Yeo Hyeon-Soo) who lost his father in the same fire that took the life of her mother. Yeon-Hee and Seok-Yi go to the place where their parents stayed together and helped each other cure their pains.Yeon-Hee also meets a girl, who lived in the same house where her mother resided. Yeon-Hee learns about her mother through the girl. Surprisingly, a church member (Kim Joong-Ki), who Yeon-Hee liked when she was involved in the fire.
The Strangers South Korea Movie Reviews:
The premise of The Strangers sounds tired in a world already laden with movies like Hostel and High Tension. Despite that, I wanted to give the movie a fair shake due to the cast, which features Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. Well, maybe not so much for Speedman, who continues to leave me thoroughly unimpressed. Here he barely manages to have any chemistry with his leading actress, despite being cast opposite everyone’s favorite Lord of the Rings elven princess, but that’s okay. The script actually demands the two have an awkward relationship since we join them shortly after he’s proposed… and been turned down.
If joining the uncomfortable couple is where the movie started, the story might have managed a bit more suspense. Unfortunately it’s bogged down with an introductory narration that tells the audience how the movie is inspired by real events, but that there’s no way of knowing what brutal events actually transpired the night unknown assailants broke into the home where James Hoyt (Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Tyler) were staying. By giving me that information in the first minute of the film, the rest of the movie was pretty well spoiled of any dramatic tension for me. You see, there has to be a reason why nobody truly knows what events took place. I won’t spell it out it in case you can’t piece it together on your own, but that introduction kept me from getting too invested in any of the characters.
James and Kristen spend the first third of the movie dealing with their own awkwardness, caused by Kristen rejecting James’s marriage proposal. Some may see some character development in that. I say if you’re going to have a movie about strangers breaking in and tormenting a couple, bring on the damn strangers quicker than this movie does. Instead we get a prolonged introduction that makes the movie feel like it has the plot of a short film stretched into a feature length picture. People were snoozing before the action even started – at least, those who could fall asleep through the horrible dialogue. Speedman doesn’t do wonders for his character, but listening to the lines, it’s not like he had a lot to work with in the first place. Tyler’s lines aren’t much better, but at least she makes a convincing scared person through a lot of the film. Unfortunately, even that wears off by the time the picture hits its climax.
I will commend The Strangers for two things. First, it sticks to the premise that the invaders who harass the main characters are indeed strangers; just some sickos whose only justification for their actions when pressed by Kristen are because (as the advertisements state), “you were home.” I fully expected some ridiculous rationalization tacked on just for the sake of explaining everything and it was nice not to have it. Sometimes events like this are more terrifying by underplaying them and leaving the “answers” to the audience’s imagination.
Secondly, the movie doesn’t attempt to join the all-so-popular “torture porn” subgenre. The bulk of the action in The Strangers (once it gets going) is simple cat-and-mouse style suspense with very little emphasis on any kind of gore. Unfortunately it’s done with such a distinguished pattern that anyone who has seen more than one of these kinds of movies will easily recognize and predict what’s going to happen through most of the picture. There’s a few times the story avoids the completely clichéd twists I expected through my predictions, although that would appear to be more because of a lack of creativity than anything else. The story is simple; too simple in fact, and the audience might find themselves entertained by their own plot ideas instead of what’s actually happening on the screen.Sceptics may miss the point if they focus on what is not here. The author's focus remains partial, in the sense that the poor, working- and lower middle-classes are largely accorded walk-on parts. Like Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited – a novel with whose plot it repeatedly engages and somewhat pastiches – The Stranger's Child concerns itself overwhelmingly with the glamour of noble entitlement, as well as with the sentimental appeal of the aristocracy through the post-war curtailment of its influence in mores and values.
The century is spanned in five sections, with individual lives and storylines playfully abandoned and resumed. There is much unwritten space between each, and often key aspects of a situation, or consequences from it, are only clarified some hundreds of pages or decades later. Given this selectivity, Hollinghurst's focus on the poet Cecil Valance's literary reputation following his death in combat is inspired. His reputation is shown to have no innate, dependable currency, just as characters' recollections and inherited impressions of one another shift and ebb.
This novel, sleek, seductive and a little sly, appears on first sight to address a bankable, but by now surely rather threadbare, theme: the stately homes, and homos, of England. Cecil Valance – poetaster, mountaineer, Apostle – is set to inherit Corley Court, an impressively hideous neo-Gothic pile in Berkshire, until a German sniper intervenes at Maricourt in 1916. His posthumous literary reputation, and the nature and extent of his emotional attachments, keep interested parties guessing for the rest of the century; meanwhile, for those left behind, life goes on.
The Stranger’s Child doesn’t trouble itself to map out these ongoing lives in much detail. Its action takes place at a series of points which are not so much pivotal as liminal: folds in time, as Gilles Deleuze described the Baroque. There are several parties, or at least house parties, in the good Waugh/Lampedusa aristo-elegiac style. But elegy is somehow not quite what Alan Hollinghurst is up to here.
That is not to say he is insensitive to the mesmeric allure of the upper classes. Several members of the bourgeoisie find themselves vacuumed up into the Valances’ slipstream: siblings George and Daphne Sawle, both enamoured of Cecil, or “Sizzle”, as we eventually discover (but have all along suspected) his name is voiced; the “impossible” Revel Ralph, Daphne's second husband after a brief stint as Corley’s châtelaine ends, inevitably, in marital breakdown.
On the night of Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) return to a remote summer vacation home owned by James's parents after attending a friend's wedding reception. He had just proposed to her there, but she refused. Shortly after arriving in the middle of the night, a young blonde woman (Gemma Ward), whose face is obscured by low lighting, knocks on the front door asking for Tamara, but leaves after James and Kristen tell her she is at the wrong house.
A short while later, James leaves to get Kristen a pack of cigarettes, and the woman returns and begins to pound harshly on the front door. Kristen refuses to open up, locks all the doors, and tries to call James on her cell phone, when she discovers its dead. She plugs it into the wall to charge near the fireplace and calls James on the house phone briefly before the line goes dead. She returns to the fireplace to retrieve her cell phone, but it has disappeared. Kristen then hears a noise coming from the back door. She grabs a large kitchen knife and opens the curtains, seeing a man wearing a sack mask over his head. Kristen screams and trips over a record player, and it begins to skip repeatedly. The front door then opens slightly, and Kristen peeks outside, only to see the blonde woman in a Dollface mask. She slams and locks the door before going to hide in the bedroom. After yelling "go away," the noises eventually stop, at which point she hears footsteps coming from the hallway, which turn out to be from James. As she explains what happened while he was gone, he tries to calm her down.
She frantically explains to James that she saw a man in a mask, and heard loud banging noises. James is not worried about the incidents, thinking that they were caused by some teenagers fooling around. He goes outside to his car, whose tires have been slashed and its windshield smashed in. As he searches the car, someone touches his back, but runs away before he is able to turn around and see who it was. Once he turns back to the car, he looks up and sees Dollface, and asks her to leave. After she runs off, James persuades Kristen that they need to escape in their car.
Movie Cast :
Han Su-Yeon - Yeon-Hee
Yeo Hyeon-Soo - Seok-Yi
Kim Joong-Ki
Movie Crew:
Movie: The Strangers
Revised romanization: Yibangindeul
Hangul: 이방인들
Director: Choi Yong-Suk
Cinematographer: Kim Bo-Rang
Release Date: May 10, 2012
Runtime: 127 min.
Genre: Drama
Language: Korean
Country: South Korea
In the past, Yeon-Hee (Han Su-Yeon) left her hometown, leaving behind her mother. One day, Yeon-Hee hears that her mother died in a fire the previous year. Yeon-Hee then goes back to her hometown.In her hometown, Yeon-Hee meets Seok-Yi (Yeo Hyeon-Soo) who lost his father in the same fire that took the life of her mother. Yeon-Hee and Seok-Yi go to the place where their parents stayed together and helped each other cure their pains.Yeon-Hee also meets a girl, who lived in the same house where her mother resided. Yeon-Hee learns about her mother through the girl. Surprisingly, a church member (Kim Joong-Ki), who Yeon-Hee liked when she was involved in the fire.
The Strangers South Korea Movie Reviews:
The premise of The Strangers sounds tired in a world already laden with movies like Hostel and High Tension. Despite that, I wanted to give the movie a fair shake due to the cast, which features Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. Well, maybe not so much for Speedman, who continues to leave me thoroughly unimpressed. Here he barely manages to have any chemistry with his leading actress, despite being cast opposite everyone’s favorite Lord of the Rings elven princess, but that’s okay. The script actually demands the two have an awkward relationship since we join them shortly after he’s proposed… and been turned down.
If joining the uncomfortable couple is where the movie started, the story might have managed a bit more suspense. Unfortunately it’s bogged down with an introductory narration that tells the audience how the movie is inspired by real events, but that there’s no way of knowing what brutal events actually transpired the night unknown assailants broke into the home where James Hoyt (Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Tyler) were staying. By giving me that information in the first minute of the film, the rest of the movie was pretty well spoiled of any dramatic tension for me. You see, there has to be a reason why nobody truly knows what events took place. I won’t spell it out it in case you can’t piece it together on your own, but that introduction kept me from getting too invested in any of the characters.
James and Kristen spend the first third of the movie dealing with their own awkwardness, caused by Kristen rejecting James’s marriage proposal. Some may see some character development in that. I say if you’re going to have a movie about strangers breaking in and tormenting a couple, bring on the damn strangers quicker than this movie does. Instead we get a prolonged introduction that makes the movie feel like it has the plot of a short film stretched into a feature length picture. People were snoozing before the action even started – at least, those who could fall asleep through the horrible dialogue. Speedman doesn’t do wonders for his character, but listening to the lines, it’s not like he had a lot to work with in the first place. Tyler’s lines aren’t much better, but at least she makes a convincing scared person through a lot of the film. Unfortunately, even that wears off by the time the picture hits its climax.
I will commend The Strangers for two things. First, it sticks to the premise that the invaders who harass the main characters are indeed strangers; just some sickos whose only justification for their actions when pressed by Kristen are because (as the advertisements state), “you were home.” I fully expected some ridiculous rationalization tacked on just for the sake of explaining everything and it was nice not to have it. Sometimes events like this are more terrifying by underplaying them and leaving the “answers” to the audience’s imagination.
Secondly, the movie doesn’t attempt to join the all-so-popular “torture porn” subgenre. The bulk of the action in The Strangers (once it gets going) is simple cat-and-mouse style suspense with very little emphasis on any kind of gore. Unfortunately it’s done with such a distinguished pattern that anyone who has seen more than one of these kinds of movies will easily recognize and predict what’s going to happen through most of the picture. There’s a few times the story avoids the completely clichéd twists I expected through my predictions, although that would appear to be more because of a lack of creativity than anything else. The story is simple; too simple in fact, and the audience might find themselves entertained by their own plot ideas instead of what’s actually happening on the screen.Sceptics may miss the point if they focus on what is not here. The author's focus remains partial, in the sense that the poor, working- and lower middle-classes are largely accorded walk-on parts. Like Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited – a novel with whose plot it repeatedly engages and somewhat pastiches – The Stranger's Child concerns itself overwhelmingly with the glamour of noble entitlement, as well as with the sentimental appeal of the aristocracy through the post-war curtailment of its influence in mores and values.
The century is spanned in five sections, with individual lives and storylines playfully abandoned and resumed. There is much unwritten space between each, and often key aspects of a situation, or consequences from it, are only clarified some hundreds of pages or decades later. Given this selectivity, Hollinghurst's focus on the poet Cecil Valance's literary reputation following his death in combat is inspired. His reputation is shown to have no innate, dependable currency, just as characters' recollections and inherited impressions of one another shift and ebb.
This novel, sleek, seductive and a little sly, appears on first sight to address a bankable, but by now surely rather threadbare, theme: the stately homes, and homos, of England. Cecil Valance – poetaster, mountaineer, Apostle – is set to inherit Corley Court, an impressively hideous neo-Gothic pile in Berkshire, until a German sniper intervenes at Maricourt in 1916. His posthumous literary reputation, and the nature and extent of his emotional attachments, keep interested parties guessing for the rest of the century; meanwhile, for those left behind, life goes on.
The Stranger’s Child doesn’t trouble itself to map out these ongoing lives in much detail. Its action takes place at a series of points which are not so much pivotal as liminal: folds in time, as Gilles Deleuze described the Baroque. There are several parties, or at least house parties, in the good Waugh/Lampedusa aristo-elegiac style. But elegy is somehow not quite what Alan Hollinghurst is up to here.
That is not to say he is insensitive to the mesmeric allure of the upper classes. Several members of the bourgeoisie find themselves vacuumed up into the Valances’ slipstream: siblings George and Daphne Sawle, both enamoured of Cecil, or “Sizzle”, as we eventually discover (but have all along suspected) his name is voiced; the “impossible” Revel Ralph, Daphne's second husband after a brief stint as Corley’s châtelaine ends, inevitably, in marital breakdown.
On the night of Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) return to a remote summer vacation home owned by James's parents after attending a friend's wedding reception. He had just proposed to her there, but she refused. Shortly after arriving in the middle of the night, a young blonde woman (Gemma Ward), whose face is obscured by low lighting, knocks on the front door asking for Tamara, but leaves after James and Kristen tell her she is at the wrong house.
A short while later, James leaves to get Kristen a pack of cigarettes, and the woman returns and begins to pound harshly on the front door. Kristen refuses to open up, locks all the doors, and tries to call James on her cell phone, when she discovers its dead. She plugs it into the wall to charge near the fireplace and calls James on the house phone briefly before the line goes dead. She returns to the fireplace to retrieve her cell phone, but it has disappeared. Kristen then hears a noise coming from the back door. She grabs a large kitchen knife and opens the curtains, seeing a man wearing a sack mask over his head. Kristen screams and trips over a record player, and it begins to skip repeatedly. The front door then opens slightly, and Kristen peeks outside, only to see the blonde woman in a Dollface mask. She slams and locks the door before going to hide in the bedroom. After yelling "go away," the noises eventually stop, at which point she hears footsteps coming from the hallway, which turn out to be from James. As she explains what happened while he was gone, he tries to calm her down.
She frantically explains to James that she saw a man in a mask, and heard loud banging noises. James is not worried about the incidents, thinking that they were caused by some teenagers fooling around. He goes outside to his car, whose tires have been slashed and its windshield smashed in. As he searches the car, someone touches his back, but runs away before he is able to turn around and see who it was. Once he turns back to the car, he looks up and sees Dollface, and asks her to leave. After she runs off, James persuades Kristen that they need to escape in their car.
Movie Cast :
Han Su-Yeon - Yeon-Hee
Yeo Hyeon-Soo - Seok-Yi
Kim Joong-Ki
Movie Crew:
Movie: The Strangers
Revised romanization: Yibangindeul
Hangul: 이방인들
Director: Choi Yong-Suk
Cinematographer: Kim Bo-Rang
Release Date: May 10, 2012
Runtime: 127 min.
Genre: Drama
Language: Korean
Country: South Korea