One on One (Kim ki-Duk)

The film ‘One on One’ is two hours of screeching melodrama and violence. The film by famous South Korean director Kim Ki-duk is neither a pushing one nor an exciting one.

The movie opens with a so called unmotivated murder. On May 9, a high school girl named Oh Min-ju is brutally murdered. After opening with the slaying of the young victim by a band of seven contract killers, the revenge plot is set into motion. The seven suspects are hunted down by a seven member group. The group begins abducting men they suspect of being involved in the May 9 murder randomly. How they got the information is not clear.

The mysterious gang of seven known collectively as the Shadows begins targeting the assassins one by one. Styling as a group of government authorities and led by a highly trained soldier (Don Lee) with an unspecified personal connection to the victim, the Shadows extract confessions from their prey by means of brutal torture. There is an increasing dissent between the leader and his followers on how far should they go. As the group fractures internally, released target Oh-hyun (Kim Young-min) seeks to uncover their identity.

The narrative’s hit list structure affords Kim ample scope for his favoured methods of gory scenes, with heads smashed and limbs pulled by and chain-furnished chambers similar to the ones that housed much of Pieta, one of his movies. Yet it’s a diluted exercise than much of the director’s better work. Its shocking gestures mollified with moral rhetoric. Despite the tiring torture scenes, Kim keeps things interesting by giving away titbits of information before the revenge squad arrives. At a technical level, it’s an uninspiring a film as Kim has yet made. His lensing is with flat digital textures.

The minimal development of the individual characters keeps the audience at arm’s length from proceedings: Kim leaves unanswered questions about who Oh-hyun is, why the girl was killed. For all the emotional anguish they express between them, it’s hard to understand who gets dispatched by whom.

Except one member of the Shadows, the most substantial female presence in the film is Oh Min-ju, the murder victim whose termination is never explained. It seems that female characters are Kim’s blind spot.

In 2012, Kim Ki-Duk won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival for "Pieta," a brutal story of rape and redemption. He then came with the dialogue-free "Moebius," which is perhaps one of his best works. One on One, seems mild by comparison, even though the pre-credit sequence features a schoolgirl getting abducted and killed by a group of unidentified strangers. The ensuing murder-revenge thriller is not for the faint-hearted. The director's primary ire is at the capitalist system which he sees as broken. But the message, enveloped within the conventions of a thriller, often misses its mark. Ultimately, Kim winds up being a victim of his own ambition.