Review: Pieta (2012)
This week I've gone back to my roots of feel-bad Korean revenge movies, for the fun of it, with Kim Kiduk's Pieta. The poster is beautiful, and refers to depictions of the Virgin Mary embracing Christ's dead body, framing Pieta’s mother figure as a figure of transcendental grace—and I otherwise didn't know anything about it. So let's get it out of the way: this one's bleak, as they often are. It's mercilessly violent even while being mostly implied, and Pieta's final moments have made an impact that I wasn't ready for.
Pieta follows Kangdo (Lee Jungjin), an all-around bad guy who's hard to love, quite frankly. While working as a collector for loan sharks, dealing irreversible damage in order to collect the insurance claims of indebted victims, Kangdo is followed home by a strange woman who he tries to ignore. She continues stalking him for the next few days, even going so far as to push her way into his apartment to clean up the chicken guts from the bathroom floor, until eventually she collapses onto her knees in apology for abandoning him as a baby. Until now, Kangdo has been on his own, and he’s got a severely skewed understanding of morality—erring more on the side of genuine evil—for which this woman, Mison (Jo Minsoo), takes full responsibility. If she hadn't been selfish when he was born, he wouldn't have become the depraved monster she sees before her.
Kangdo is more than used to his lifestyle, which has given him a solitary existence, hated by the community who knows him as "the Devil who tests people with money." Despite his reluctance to speak with her and outright cruelty, Mison sticks around long enough for him to grow accustomed to her gentle presence and sorrowful gaze, and that’s enough to have him rethink his life as a whole. He enters a dramatic redemption arc, a night-and-day transformation, really, where he's ready to drop his brutal lifestyle entirely in order to reconnect with the mother he never knew.
While the premise is simple, Pieta's story is told in a way compelling enough to hold your attention without totally washing away its religious allegorical evidence. This lends itself to a feeling more like watching a play than a revenge film given its relatively artsy storytelling, such as using minimal dialogue. With much of the violence implied or offscreen, it’s one of the less jarring revenge films I’ve seen yet, but the stomach for that sort of thing is still strongly recommended.
Edited by Kelly Sipko