“The Villagers” Theatrical Poster
Director: Lim Jin-soon
Cast: Ma Dong-Seok, Kim Sae-ron, Lee Sang-yeob, Jin Sun-gyu, Jang Gwang, Oh Hee-joon
Running Time: 99 min.
By Paul Bramhall
The trope of a big city character having to set up shop in a small rural town is one that’s been repeatedly visited in Korean cinema. Whether it be a cop hiding from their past in A Girl at My Door, a grieving widow looking to start over in Secret Sunshine, or even a returning son in the recent My Daughter Is a Zombie, it could arguably be a genre of its own. The contrast between the anonymity of city life, and the everyone knows everyone village environment, is one that can be used to create a tone of everything from foreboding dread to fish out of water comedy, which is likely why it gets so much mileage. In 2018’s The Villagers its Ma Dong-seok’s “former Asian Champion and former boxing coach” who finds himself starting afresh as the gym teacher at an all-girl school in a small town.
How he ended up there is revealed in an initial scene, which sees him barging into the dinner of the local amateur boxing association, where he proceeds to accuse the vice chairman of fixing matches for bribes. The result of his actions sees him lose his job as a boxing coach and ostracized from the amateur boxing community, leading to him landing the teaching role. The whole setup could well be part of a different movie altogether when looking at The Villagers as a whole, as the moment Dong-seok gets behind the wheel of his car to drive to his new home, the angry boxing coach persona disappears. In its place is the now well-worn Dong-seok persona that’s both self-effacing and slightly bumbling, the one audiences have become increasingly familiar with in the 2020’s.
Watching The Villagers with the benefit of retrospect it’s clearly a production that exists in that transitionary period when studios were still looking for the best way to make Dong-seok a bankable star, an approach that sometimes conflicted with his own views on portraying onscreen violence. While Dong-seok has been onscreen since the mid-2000’s (my first memory of him is from watching Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird at the time of its release in 2008), it was his role as the zombie bashing protective husband in 2016’s Train to Busan that struck a chord with audiences. While his pre-Train to Busan turns as a leading man in the likes of 2013’s Norigae and 2014’s The Murderer proved to be middling efforts box office wise, they did succeed at making it clear he was capable of carrying a movie on his (ridiculously broad) shoulders.
It would take 2022’s The Roundup to find the perfect balance of action and comedy that’s become Dong-seok’s trademark, but back in 2018 it felt like filmmakers were throwing everything at the wall just to see what would stick. In what remains his single busiest year, in addition to The Villagers we got Dong-seok as a U.S. adoptee arm wrestler in Champion, a debt-ridden God in Along With the Gods: The Last 49 Days, a judo instructor paired with a ghost in The Soul Mate, and a former gangster out to rescue his abducted wife in Unstoppable. For The Villagers, it marks his 2nd time to feature alongside the late Kim Sae-ron (The Man from Nowhere, Manhole), having first appeared onscreen together in the 2012 ensemble piece Neighbours.
Playing one of the students at the high school he’s been assigned to, Sae-ron is desperately looking for her friend who’s gone missing. With both the school management and the local police writing off the case as that of a runaway teenager, Dong-seok’s meek style of curiosity leads him to question why nobody has bothered looking for her, with the only clue Sae-ron has being a box of matches from a local hostess bar. After Dong-seok himself witnesses Sae-ron almost being abducted one night, an incident which, even after reporting it to the police, still results in a lack of any action from their side, he decides to take it on himself to get to the bottom of her friend’s disappearance.
The sophomore feature of director and screenwriter Lim Jin-soon, his 2012 debut Super Star remains a personal favorite, with a struggling filmmaker and actor embarking on a road trip to the Busan International Film Festival. Jin-soon and Dong-seok clearly struck up a positive working relationship during The Villagers, as they’d reunite as director and star for 2022’s comedy drama Men of Plastic, which saw Jin-soon return to the kind of comedy-centric tone that made his debut so enjoyable. However in The Villagers the wit and energy that made him such a promising prospect 6 years earlier feels like it’s lacking. A large contributor to the issue is that tonally it’s somewhat of a train wreck, with underage prostitution, paedophilia, murder, and the issue of peephole cameras in female bathrooms failing to strike a balance between scenes that portray Dong-seok’s visible delight at winning a cuddly toy in an arcade claw machine.
Jin-soon’s script is similarly guilty of recycling tropes that felt familiar even in 2018. Any Korean thriller involving a murder, with a plot that incorporates an upcoming election, is inevitably going to see the latter end up having a connection to the former, and here it’s possible to see from a mile off. Likewise, Korean cinema in the 2010’s had a habit of portraying cops as having a level of incompetence that made them come across like the last people you’d want to ask for help from. I can’t think of another production I’ve seen this trope more prevalent in than The Villagers, with almost all of the characters who are cops having lines that consist of either “Don’t worry we’re looking into it” or “I told you we’re looking into it, so don’t worry!” The blatant unhelpfulness of characters who should, by rights, be the ones who are helping the most, only serves to make the villains behind the student’s disappearance be all too obvious all too soon.
Usually in a movie that features Ma Dong-seok such narrative issues could be overlooked if he gets to break out his anvil sized fists at frequent enough intervals, however at this point in time the secret formula to make a successful Ma Dong-seok movie was still a couple of years away (best described by the name of his own production company that he founded in 2022 – Big Punch Pictures). As a result the action only hits in sporadic sprinkles, with martial arts director Jeon Jae-hyung (who notably had the same role for the previous years The Outlaws, before handing it over to Heo Myeong-haeng for the subsequent The Roundup sequels) having a relatively quiet day at the office. The main fight takes place between Dong-seok and Lee Sang-yeob (The Flu, Penny Pinchers), and offers up a brief (and that’s being kind) but decent mix of the formers boxing skills against the latter’s wild flaying, ending with an admittedly satisfying big punch.
Overall though The Villagers suffers from a potent combination of being too pedestrian in its execution and too predictable in its plotting to be anything more than a mild diversion in the filmographies of both Ma Dong-seok and Kim Sae-ron. Once Dong-seok took more creative control over the projects he appears in there’d be a much healthier balance between his onscreen persona and the plots that surrounded it. The problem here is that it too often feels like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, with his affable onscreen follies rarely gelling with the dark subject matter at hand. Sadly Kim Sae-ron would only feature in one more movie after The Villagers, with 2025’s Guitar Man released posthumously in May following her death in February of the same year, making the experience of seeing her onscreen a bittersweet one.
Fans of Korean thrillers may still get some enjoyment from The Villagers, as at no point does it do anything so wrong that it could be called a bad movie, however it also doesn’t do anything to elevate itself above its plentiful contemporaries. For Ma Dong-seok completists, and a reminder that the Korean film industry lost one of its youngest talents far too soon.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 6/10
