Hwayi: A Monster Boy

Hwayi grows up with five men and calls all of them father. The men are a criminal outfit: one teaches him to shoot, one to drive, one to fight. At sixteen he is taken on his first job and asked to kill a man. Then he learns his own history. Jang Joon-hwan builds it as a crime story, but the real matter is what the boy will do with five separate moralities taken from five separate men. Yeo Jin-goo plays Hwayi and Kim Yoon-seok the leader, Seok-tae. The violence is hard and direct. The last section does not present revenge as deliverance; the more the boy wins the more he resembles them. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean crime thrillers and father-and-son stories. Who it is not for: anyone avoiding heavy violence.