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There are no hard (or fast) facts in this film, and told any other way it could easily become a disorienting confused mess. To director Yoon Jong-chan's credit however, there remains a lasting sense of tight control throughout. Yoon favours a heavily stripped back shooting style, and a great deal of his work here is fairly textbook 'understatement' stuff. This basically translates to screen as long shots of…well, nothing really, but this only serves to highlight what can't be seen.
The characters in Sorum are so (potentially) independent of one another from the outset that they appear essentially inalienable and quite complete in themselves. There is no sense of temporal progression in the character arcs - the only discernable changes in the protagonists are physical, and are so subtle that by the time they make themselves obvious enough to reveal how far the characters have come, the story kicks in and destroys everything. Most of
Sorum's success is due to Yoon Jong-chan's careful manipulation of audience expectation and understanding, so that by the time the plot begins to function as expected, it becomes apparent that there has been little point to the last ninety minutes of the film and perhaps too much to the next fifteen.
Regardless, Sorum is a very effective (and stylish) piece of cinema that almost pulls off the impossible - turning the audience on themselves rather than the film. The ending is distracting enough to cover a number of the film's shortcomings (so long as you don't think about it too hard), and despite the fact tat I know deep down there are no reals answers to the questions raised by the story, I'd be interested to hear how people got their heads around this one. Drop us a line…
Rating: 8 manic laughs out of 10
Reviewed by Jonathan McCoy
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