A Dirty Carnival

Byung-doo is a low ranking gangster in Seoul, supporting his mother and two siblings, behind on rent, and ready to do whatever moving up requires. A killing puts him in his boss's favour. Around the same time he runs into Min-ho, a friend from school who has become a film director and wants to make a gangster picture that is actually true. Byung-doo starts talking. Yoo Ha directs. Jo In-sung plays Byung-doo. The idea lives in that overlap: a director turning his friend's life into material, and a gangster endangering himself by telling it. The film is both a gangster movie and a comment on the ethics of making one, and it runs the two at once. It is the middle piece of Yoo Ha's street trilogy, between Once Upon a Time in High School and Gangnam Blues. All three take the same subject at different ages: men buying their place with violence. Jo In-sung had been known for romantic roles and television. This is the film that reset how he was seen. Who it is for: followers of Korean gangster cinema, and anyone who likes a genre folded back on itself. Who it is not for: the violence is genuinely harsh and not stylised. The fights are not choreography, they are ugly and they go on.