HELPLESS

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HELPLESS

Aug 13, 2019

Writer by Pierce Conran
View2664

2012 | 117 MIN | Mystery

DIRECTOR BYUN Young-joo

CAST LEE Sun-kyun, KIM Min-hee, CHO Seong-ha,

RELEASE DATE March 8, 2012

CONTACT CJ Entertainment

Tel +82-2-371-5500

Fax +82-2-371-6340

Email filmsales@cj.net

Based on Japanese crime author MIYABE Miyuki’s best-selling novel ‘All She Was Worth’, originally published in 1992, Helpless (2012) is the third work by director BYUN Young-joo and helped to established KIM Min-hee not just as a well-known face, but as a major acting talent.

Veterinarian Mun-ho (LEE Sun-kyun) and his fiancée Seon-yeong (KIM Min-hee) are on their way to visit his parents in the countryside to drop off wedding invitations. During a quick rest stop, Mun-ho grabs a snack and some coffee but when he returns, the car is empty - Seon-yeong has disappeared. Mun-ho reports her missing, but since the police are in no rush to take the case seriously he begins to do some amateur sleuthing. He first discovers that Seon-yeong is saddled with massive debts, but before long it becomes clear that his wife-to-be isn’t the same person. With the help of ex-cop cousin (CHO Seong-ha), Mun-ho tries to find out who his beloved really was, starting with her real name.

Released in March of 2012, Helpless opened at number one on the way to a strong 2.4 million admissions total (USD 15.15 million), in the middle of a three-month streak of local chart-toppers in early 2012, when the industry was beginning to bounce back from a slump through a series of well-received mid-level genre titles.

On the surface, Helpless appears to be a fairly typical Korean thriller. A woman goes missing and her fiancé begins to untangle an unexpected web of deceptions, with increasing shades of violence the deeper he gets. Yet while the lead female role spends much of the time off screen, what sets this film apart from its contemporaries is the strong female presence, both within the film through KIM’s hypnotic central performances, and from behind the scenes.

Among the first wave of women directors to emerge in the modern era of Korean cinema, along with YIM Soon-rye (Waikiki Brothers, 2001) and JEONG Jae-eun (Take Care of My Cat, 2001), Director BYUN first became known for a trio of documentaries about the tribulations of comfort women during the Japanese Colonial Era, before she debuted in commercial cinema in 2002 with Ardor, an affair with a strong women’s focus that stood apart from the many releases around the turn of the millennium.

LEE Sun-kyun, known for A Hard Day (2014) and most recently PARASITE, is a compelling lead as the devastated Mun-ho, but ingénue KIM Min-hee steals the show, even when she’s not on screen, in a role that surely paved the way for her to star in Hong Sangsoo’s Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) and PARK Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016).

The search for the woman known as Seon-yeong is a compelling one, but what really makes this psychological mystery fascinating in Helpless aren’t the reasons for her disappearance so much as the questions of whether this woman ever really loved Mun-ho and how he would feel if he ever found her again. During a mighty climax at Yongsan Station in Central Seoul, the film finally gives us an answer to these questions.

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