BLUEBEARD

After the miserable failure of his ambitious project for a fancy practice in Seoul, doctor Seung-houn has to be content to be a proctologist in the countryside. On top of that, his wife has left him and the region is known for its grisly murders. Nevertheless, Seung-hoon gets through the days searching for anal abnormalities in all kinds of backsides. That is, until the owner of his new flat drops by for a consultation. Seung-hoon is not exactly looking forward to yet another hairy ass, but the ramblings of the man, no doubt under the influence of the anesthetic, sound suspiciously like a confession of murder. Add to that the fact that the owner’s family has a butcher shop on the first floor and that a freshly decapitated corpse has turned up in the river, and Seung-houn knows where he can stick his Hippocratic oath ! Korean director Soo-youn Lee certainly took her time. 13 years after we screened Uninvited at the BIFFF, she finally visits us again. But it was worth the wait. With a title reminding us of Charles Perrault’s classic fairytale, Bluebeard is one of those rare Korean excursions into a Hitchcockian universe full of perversions where nothing is as it seems. At the center of the nightmare we find Jin-woong Cho (Nameless Gangster, Roaring Currents, A Hard Day, The Handmaiden), who proves he’s part of the creme de la creme of the Korean’s actors gild.