[Film] The Isle (2000)

***** → *** (out of 5)

Must be my week for disturbing romance movies with sexually dysfunctional content.

The Isle is a Korean character study that slowly morphs into a thriller and then into a devastating ugly-beautiful tragic love story. It’s characterised by the almost total silence of the 2 leads – it’s refreshing to see great character development mostly unaided by words. By the time a truly shocking incident involving 5 fish-hooks occurs, we have clearly established that the romance that’s abrewing is between a very damaged pair of individuals.

This was a 5-star movie until the last 20 minutes. The reasons I turned on it (without going into spoilers) were: a character does something so ugly I couldn’t forgive it; I didn’t ‘get’ the very end and it just bled into silliness for me; and

In the same way that Trainspotting is all about the characters until the plot shows up in the form of a drug deal, here I was grooving on the film until “Things Took A Turn for the Worse”™. That stuff just throws me.

Filed in: Film