Bedevilled

Bedevilled (김복남 살인사건의 전말, 2010) is a South Korean crime-horror thriller directed by Jang Cheol-su — watch it online on iFILM. Hae-won, a burned-out Seoul bank clerk, takes a break on a remote island where a childhood friend named Bok-nam has been sending unanswered letters for years.

What she finds there is hard to look at. Bok-nam is the island's only young woman, and the whole community — men and women alike — treats her as unpaid labor and worse. She has tried to leave. They keep bringing her back. She asks Hae-won for help. Hae-won does nothing.

The film spends its first hour building that slow suffocation before pivoting into something rawer and harder to shake. Seo Yeong-hee's performance as Bok-nam is the kind of acting that doesn't feel like performance at all — the moment she stops enduring and starts acting is one of the most charged in Korean genre cinema of the 2010s. Stream Bedevilled (2010) online on iFILM.