Pieta

The traditional portrait of mother and child suggested by the title here is radically altered in Kim ki-duk's grim but compelling Pieta, the story of a brutal gangster and a woman (Cho Min-soo) who suddenly appears in his life, claiming to be the mother who abandoned him at birth. Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin), an enforcer for a loan shark in a Seoul neighborhood full of small machine workshops, requires borrowers to take out disability insurance. If they fail to pay, Kang-do maims them in “accidents” and collects from the policies. Kang-do's success depends on a lack of emotional connection, but his growing feelings for his mother encourage clients whose lives were ruined by his tactics to single her out as a target. A sharp twist turns Pieta into a grisly revenge fantasy in which Kang-do's old misdeeds come back to haunt him as he goes about obsessively searching for the men he's crippled, finding them to be mere shadows of their former selves (or gone underground). Telling a lurid but undeniably powerful story, this is recommended. (F. Swietek)