MFAH’S KOREAN FILM DAYS.
Everything is neat and orderly on the surface in Kim Yong-hoon’s supremely satisfying and suspenseful South Korean thriller “Beasts Clawing at Straws” — playing as part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s online Korean Film Days series starting Dec. 4 — but it’s a twisted mess of ambition, greed and desperation underneath.
These worlds start to collide thanks to a Louis Vuitton carry-on that has been abandoned in a locker at the small sauna and hotel where Joong-man (Bae Sung-woo) works behind the desk and helps to tidy up. It’s while he’s getting everything in order that he comes across the bag and discovers it contains a life-changing amount of money.
And, boy, does his life need changing. He lives in a quiet but grim little house in the city of Pyeongtaek with a wife who works as a cleaner and a demanding, humorless mother who thinks the wife is trying to kill her.
But there are others for whom the bag might be essential, too. There’s Yeon-hee (Jeon Do-yeon), a no-nonsense brothel owner who used to date seemingly straight-arrow but corrupt customs official Tae-young (Jung Woo-sung). She has disappeared, leaving him holding a metaphorical bag that isn’t stuffed with money but debts owed to mobster Park Doo-man (Jung Mansik), who also just happens to have a bloodthirsty employee who loves nothing better than turning humans into prosciutto. Tae-young’s meager salary as a government worker certainly is not going to be nearly enough to cover what’s owed.
There’s the broke bar hostess Mi-ran (Shin Hyun-been), who is married to a prototypical, upwardly mobile salaryman corporate drone — who, behind closed doors, also just happens to ceaselessly abuse her emotionally and physically. So when a paramour on the run from some dealings in China, Jin-tae (Jung Ga-Ram), hatches the idea of killing the guy and running away with Mi-ran, she’s not opposed to the idea.
All the while, there’s a detective trying to make sense of it all.
How these stories intersect is not obvious at first but Yonghoon, working from his screenplay based on the novel by Japanese writer Keisuke Sone, manages to keep all the plot plates artfully spinning until they do. Shot through with a deeply dark sense of humor, “Beasts Clawing at Straws” is obvious in its influences — a little Coen brothers here, a little Tarantino there, all seasoned with a sprinkling of Hitchcock paranoia and the critique of Korean society glimpsed in “Parasite” — but Yong-hoon manages to give them his own twist. (And, like “Parasite,” “Claws” really takes off in its second half.)
The characters are all sharply drawn, with Sung-woo summoning the right amount of resolve and determination that had been ground out of his character by life and Do-yeon nearly stealing the film as a woman who doesn’t suffer fools, or just about anyone else, gladly or without consequence.
If nothing else, “Beasts Clawing at Straws” might make you, after stumbling across a big bag of unclaimed cash, think, “You know what? I’m good, thanks,” and keep on walking.