[FANTASIA 2019] ‘IDOL’ Review

[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ2XUkh0G90″ hd=”1″]

Idol is not, as The Hollywood Reporter labeled it, a “political thriller.” It is more aptly described as unrelentingly grim…joyless…vicious…dazzlingly complex…unexpected. If you think you know where the movie is headed from 15 minutes in, by minute 20 you are wrong. The revelations and twists, spinning you in so many circles; it’s the kind of story that crawls into your brain and stays there in a permanent residence. Things like just how well do you think you know someone? How far would you go for your career, your children, or for vengeance? Then you find yourself digging in further the more you think about the depth of character, their motivations, the choices made, and just how evil and vile someone can be. True corruption here; not just character flaw, or lack of empathy, or bad judgment — to the very core. Idol is emotional brutality.

[AdSense-A]

The movie is about a handful of people who become intertwined from a single incident. On one side is a powerful man Myung-hui Koo (Suk-kyu Han) in business, now a politician as well and running for governor. He returns home after a business trip to discover his wife in the garage, in the dark, next to a man’s body covered in a plastic tarp. A dent in the front and a cracked windshield paint a picture of what has happened: his son hit a man in the street. Due to his son’s poor judgment, he brought the man home rather than take him to the hospital. For the sake of his career, he decides to take the body back to the scene of the crime and have his son turn himself in. On the other side of this is the mentally handicapped victim’s father Joong-sik Yoo (Kyung-gu Sol), a desperate, unstable man traveling through the stages of grief as poorly as possible. He hires a private investigator to uncover the truth and find his son’s wife Ryun-hwa (Woo-hee Chun), who hasn’t been seen since the night of the accident.