[HanCinema's Film Review] "The Inside Story"

Gi-cheol (played by Kim Gwang-seok) is a police officer whose only real significant characterization is that he's introduced to the viewer as someone who has trouble getting to work at time and has to sneak in. It's not...great characterization, although it's perfectly functional for the kind of story that "The Inside Story" is. Which is to say that this is an erotic film, borderline pornographic really, mostly convincingly disguised as a mediocre mystery thriller.

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In that context, Soo-yeon (played by Ji Eun-seo) is a woman with a surprisingly compelling story about how she had to murder her husband Joo-hyeok (played by Woo Jin-yeong). Apparently he would do stuff like take a perfectly natural and enjoyable morning erotic encounter only to abruptly introduce choking and degradation for his own titillation. Woo Jin-yeong is, incidentally, good enough looking it's certainly plausible that Soo-yeon could tolerate this sexual assault grey area until finally, one day, he simply went too far.

I can't really get into any more detail without spoiling plot twists, although the extent to which this matters in an English language review is dubious. As far as I know, noone has ever translated this movie into English, and I only watched it out of idle curiousity because it was trending on HanCinema yesterday. Theatrical distribution was minimal- 177 admissions in all of South Korea, which isn't surprising given that erotic films like this don't make their money via the box office.

Still, the early depiction of how a sexual encounter can abruptly turn from consensual to non-consensual is oddly compelling. It also helps that despite these being fairly simple whodunits/pornographic roles, Ji Eun-seo and Woo Jin-yeong excel in both capacities. Neither of these two actors ascended to named roles, and they both appear to have given up on acting in general in recent years. It's a bit of a shame, really- they just quite get the lucky break they needed.

As for writer/director Jo Il-joon, his screenplay is certainly functional, even economical, although it suffers from the fact that there's only one twist that makes any sense, and only so much he can do to distract from that twist. Still, with a runtime under ninety minutes, "The Inside Story" doesn't waste as much time as it could have. There's actually not as much sex as I was expecting, really, once I realized just how explicit the script was going to get.

All of this is faint praise, I know, but "The Inside Story" is the rare project where the sheer simplicity of everything that's going on rather works to the story's benefit. I'm not sure a basically pornographic film pitch could have really handled a serious emotional exploration of what was going on with Soo-yeon's sister Ji-yeon (played by Lee Jang-mi), and honestly, as interesting as the initial sex scene's interpretation of consent was, there's not really anywhere the story can go from that point. If the plot was as simple as it looked, the movie would only be half an hour long.

Written by William Schwartz