Review Korean Movie "B Cut" 2022

Apr 18, 2022

Seung-hyeon (played by Kim Dong-wan) is a friendly neighborhood cell phone data recovery specialist. For a hundred bucks, he'll get you the data off of your trashed phone. For a thousand bucks, he'll get rid of personal files you'd thought you'd already deleted. After Seung-hyeon does this hustle with a normal customer, "B Cut" then has celebrity Min-yeong (played by Jeon Se-hyun) show up in the middle of the night with a trashed phone of her own.

The story proceeds simply enough. Seung-hyeon decides that he wants to be helpful, releasing certain photos online that show how Min-yeong has some fairly nasty looking slash marks on her back. The only apparent culprit for this crime is her husband Tae-san (played by Kim Byung-ok), a powerful politician who's in the midst of an election campaign. Tae-san is a genuinely gross and evil guy.

Tae-san's not really unstoppable so much as he is just generally abusive. A lot of "B Cut" feels like that, the title remarkably apt even though, as Seung-hyeon explains in the first scene, in this context the phrase has the technical meaning of photos you don't want other people to see, rather than photos that aren't considered first tier. The presentation is that of a thoroughly average action crime thriller.

The most interesting bits are the moments where Min-yeong has to evade surveillance by Tae-san's goons to swap information with Seung-hyeon. There's also a romantic subplot between Seung-hyeon and Min-yeong, although this is communicated better through the chemistry of the actors rather than the actual script. The real cute element at play is how Seung-hyeon is a fan of Min-yeong, despite the fact that she hasn't appeared on TV or movies in quite some time.

Seung-hyeon has to keep his cool from admiring Min-yeong too much. The contrast between that and the scenes where Tae-san whips Min-yeong out of some grotesque patriarchal power fantasy are noteworthy. Although frankly speaking both forms of sex scene are probably intended to be equally titillating. In an early massage room moment Director Kim Jin-young deliberately includes shots angled in such a way as to be unsubtly looking up the skirt of a masseuse.

"B Cut" doesn't exactly need to be subtle about its more lurid elements, given that this is a movie which features full-on nudity. Not a whole lot if though. For the most part the screentime is taken up by Seung-hyeon and Min-yeong running around trying to figure out a way to expose Tae-san- a task that's made difficult not by Tae-san being especially competent as it is the apathy of the world around them.

While this isn't exactly a bad metaphor for the difficulty in speaking truth to power to public officials, such scripting does not necessarily make for an exciting film. By the time we get to the climax and there's a whole of guns at play as Tae-san needlessly escalates the situation while his goons start to wonder if they're really being paid enough for this. Or at least, that's what I was wondering.

"B Cut" is directed by Kim Jin-young, and features Kim Dong-wan, Jeon Se-hyun, Kim Byung-ok, Choi Jae-hwan, Jo Seo-hoo, Dong Bang-woo. Release date in Korea: 2022/03/30.