Cruel Winter Blues

Jae-mun is a gangster. He is after the man who killed his friend years ago, who has gone to ground in a small town in the south. Jae-mun goes there with a young protégé and settles in to wait. Where they stay is a small restaurant, and the elderly woman who runs it is the mother of the man they are looking for. She does not know that. She feeds Jae-mun, fusses over him, and tells him how she misses her own son. He sits there day after day and becomes less and less able to do what he came to do. Lee Jeong-beom directs this Korean film of a hundred and eighteen minutes, with Sul Kyung-gu as Jae-mun and Na Moon-hee as the mother. It begins in the shape of a crime film and is about the waiting before the violence rather than the violence itself.