The story is starts with a deaf youth, Ryu, who has a world of trouble. His sister needs a kidney and he gets laid off from his day job at the local factory. The doctors tell him he is not a match to his sister so he can't give his own kidney to save her life. So he hires an underground group who for 10,000,000 wons (Korean money) and one of his kidneys promise to give him a kidney his sister can use. He undergoes a gruesome procedure and lives to see the black market thugs do not meet their end of the deal. To add even more grief, the hospital soon after informs him that they had found a matching kidney but would cost him the money the thugs stole from him.
He and a close friend of his, Yeoung-mi (who is connected with an activist leftist group), come up with a plan to kidnap the daughter of the owner of the factory he is laid off from. They prudently decide that doing this to his former employer would only throw suspicion on Ryu, so they change their plans to instead kidnap the daughter of another factory owner, Dong-jin, who is close friends to his former employer. Ryu executes his plan. He leaves the girl with his sister while he recovers the ransom money. To cover his tracks he sends the girl's distraught father on a wild goose chase and gets him to drop the ransom money in an easily recoverable spot.
When he returns to his sister's apartment he is too late to realize his sister who had found out his mad scheme had taken her life not wanting to be a burden to him. Heart broken, Ryu sadly takes his sister's body (with his prisoner in tow) to their favourite spot when they were young and buries her beside a river in the country. Things, however, get even worse for Ryu from there. The girl he had kidnapped had accidentally slipped into the river and drowned. Ryu deaf to her screams for help was too late to save her.
Dong-jin is brought the sad news of his daughter's death and we are treated to 15 minutes of eerie footage of his maddening grief. He swears to her ghost that he would not stop till her death had been avenged. In the meanwhile Ryu has taken Yeoung-mi as his lover now that he is no longer innocent to the world. They use the money to start over the best they can but Ryu still is not satisfied with his sister's demise. He and Yeoung-mi come up with a plan to get even with the thugs who stole his 10 000 000 wons and his kidney. Their plans once again work but too well and Ryu ends up killing the thugs only to leave more trails that would lead back to Ryu and Yeoung-mi.
Dong-jin has become obsessed with hunting down his daughter's killers. His tenacity eventually leads to Yeoung-mi who he tortures to death and only gets from her a warning that her activist connections would avenge her death. Ryu return to her apartment to only get a glimpse of her body being taken away by the cops. Distraught, he now seeks to avenge her death. He waits long hours outside the Dong-jin's apartment who oddly enough is doing the same thing at his apartment. Ryu returns home after a long wait for his lover's killer only to fall victim to Dong-jin's booby trap.
Dong-jin takes Ryu out to the river where his daughter was found. He tells Ryu that he understands that Ryu is a good man but he must kill him to be at peace. He slices Ryu's heels and drowns him in the river. Dong-jin then dismembers Ryu's body but before he can bury the remains he is approached by Yeoung-mi's activist connections and is brutally stabbed and left to die by his car and Ryu's body.
The movie was definitely an intense story and left me quite disturbed for days after watching. The movie is not for the faint of heart and has very dark and very graphic scenes of violence and torture. As I mentioned I compare this movie to Reservoir Dogs which shares with it the intensity of violence and the fact that they are both the story of a crime gone horribly wrong. If you did enjoy the drama of Reservoir Dogs and can get past the notch up of violence and the subtitles definitely give this one a watch.
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