DIRECTOR RYOO SEUNG-WAN IN PERSON TO INTRODUCE ‘THE UNJUST’

“Arguably Korea’s most masculine action director, who excelled in shooting boxing, gang fights and martial arts, Ryoo turns The Unjust into his vehicle for a most scathing rebuke of machismo.” (Hollywood Reporter)

Longtime Fantasia favourite Ryoo Seung-wan (Die Bad, City of Violence, No Blood No Tears , Crying Fist)  returns to the gritty pulp-crime genre with The Unjust (whose Korean title translates more directly as “Unfair Dealings” ) after a minor detour with the retro stylings of 2008’s Dachimawa Lee. This densely-plotted crime thriller – reuniting him with his brother, actor Ryoo Seung-beom  for the first time since 2006’s City of Violence – depicts a modern-day Soeul marred by a police crisis and corporate corruption, with all authority figures depicted as despicable criminals female viagra next day delivery ready to blame and frame anyone lower on the totem pole than themselves.

When the police fail to make any headway on a series of brutal schoolgirl killings due to compromised evidence and botched investigatory tactics, public lowest-price propecia costs us outcry is bolstered by an official statement from the President reprimanding the police force for their sloppy work. Choi Cheol-gi (Hwang Jeong-min of Black House and Blades of Blood) is a reticent, hard-edged cop who, while considered a brilliant investigator by his superiors, keeps getting passed over for promotion because he doesn’t play nice with the right people. Also working against him is the fact that he and his team aren’t Academy graduates –coming from the lower social and economic classes (who in South Korea can pass a standard exam to gain entry to the police force), they work alongside the condescending Academy alumni who always have a political advantage.

His one chance for mobility is to neatly ‘wrap up’ the case by finding a killer and parading him before the press so that the force can save face.  But a vicious rivalry heating up between Choi and the ambitious (and equally corrupt) public prosecutor Ju Yang (Ryoo Seung-beom) serves to pile conspiracy on top of conspiracy, with shady backroom deals, private dinners and blackmail threatening to topple the entire establishment – unless one of the two ends up being a sacrificial pawn.

The inner-office conflict between the Academy alumni and the standard-issue cops is played out in the criminal world as well: blue-blooded white collar criminals scoff at the new money players: “tattooed thugs who only recently traded in the knife for a suit.” Everyone is looking for their opportunity to trample and humiliate those beneath them – and they take these opportunities, oblivious to the fact that it may be their turn next.

There are fierce performances all around, including a captivating turn by character face Yu Hae-jin (of Woochi and The King and the Clown) as the opportunistic construction biz gangster that Choi thinks he has in his pocket (never a good bet in a crime film – a criminal ally always becomes a liability). With stunning widescreen cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon (Oldboy, Thirst) that pans across epic skyscrapers and mirrors the grandiose delusions of its ‘protagonists’ (if you can call them that), Ryoo’s film is a scathing indictment of bureaucratic corruption, inspired by recent real-life scandals in South Korean government (which probably contributed to its nearly $19million in local box office).

The Unjust is an explosive drama of delicate egos and deadly games of one-upmanship; games that ultimately obscure the reason this battle of wits started in the first place: to find a child-murderer. Instead, the killings are tossed to the periphery as self-serving officials buying generic cialis mexico rx all strive to cover their own asses.  Every fool gets to be king for a day, and as one character quips: “you can only trip on your way up, never on your way down.”

– Kier-La Janisse

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RYOO SEUNG-WAN appears in person at the Fantasia Film Festival to introduce THE UNJUST on July 16 at 6:15pm in the Hall Theatre – More details on the film page HERE.

Ryoo will also host a masterclass called ‘Die Bad on Screen’ on July 16 from 3pm-5pm at Reggie’s Bar on the mezzanine level of Concordia’s Hall theatre building. More details on the masterclass HERE.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, founder of Spectacular Optical Publications and The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (1999-2005) in Vancouver, was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012) and contributed to Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (PS Press, 2017). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published the anthology books KID POWER! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (forthcoming), and is currently co-authoring (with Amy Searles) the book ‘Unhealthy and Aberrant’: Depictions of Horror Fandom in Film and Television and co-curating (with Clint Enns) an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr., as well as writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: the Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s and Sean Hogan’s We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from Severin Films in 2020.