Probably no national cinema addresses the conflicts of social class with the directness of South Korea’s. There’s something almost perverse about Korean filmmakers’ willingness to expose the soul-destroying rot of the capitalist system on its citizens. Parasite is the most obvious example, but that’s more or less an allegory-fantasy, albeit an unusually insightful one. Hur Jin-ho’s adaptation of a Dutch bestseller locates its theme of irresponsible parenting in the specific trappings of Korean privilege, distilling a kind of horror movie effect in the process, not because of its occasional scenes of violence, either physical or emotional, but because of its ability to generate disgust. Maybe that makes it an allegory-fantasy too.

The family of the somewhat misleading title consists of two adult brothers, successful corporate lawyer Jae-won (Sol Kyung-gu) and successful pediatric surgeon Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-gun), who don’t really get along. Jae-won is the more materialistic of the two, a mild-mannered epicure who insists on expensive dinners once a month with his brother and their wives in order to present some semblance of fraternal harmony, though Jae-gyu, who prides himself on his service to humanity, finds his brother’s attitude toward life mercenary and cynical. After all, it is Jae-gyu, or, more exactly, his wife, Yeon-kyung (Kim Hee-ae), who is taking care of their senile and often violent mother while they look for a suitable nursing home for her. As the movie opens the two brothers are locked in a more immediate confrontation as Jae-won has been hired by one of his rich clients to defend the client’s wayward son, who has killed a man and sent the man’s daughter into a coma after a road rage incident. As it happens, Jae-gyu is the doctor who operated on the girl. But this confrontation becomes a sideshow to a more serious incident involving Jae-won’s high school senior daughter from his first marriage and Jae-gyu’s adolescent son, who, during one of their parents’ elaborate dinners, get drunk together at a party and later beat a homeless man almost to death. While the police look for the perpetrators, Yeon-kyung sees the CCTV video of the attack, which has gone viral, and recognizes her son and his cousin. All hell breaks loose between the siblings and their spouses as they decide whether to hand their kids over to the authorities or keep a lid on it. The ensuing indecision only exacerbates their desperation, and in the process the two brothers’ initial ethical distinctions start to shift.

This particular conundrum has been tackled by movies before. In fact, it’s been tackled by Korean movies quite a few times, the most potent example being Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, in which an elderly, weak-minded woman is confronted with the crimes of her grandson, who she believes participated in the rape of a classmate. But whereas Lee’s depiction of this dilemma is centered on matters of conscience and empathy, Hur’s is stricly a class issue. Despite the fact that one of the brothers ends up doing what we would call “the right thing,” the audience still sees the people involved as being beholden to a hypocritical code of family unity that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s a tragedy that’s been manufactured to evince significant schadenfreude in the viewer, who is invariably stoked to see all these entitled monsters—their children, especially—receive their comeuppance. Had it been handled as a comedy, I probably would have liked it a lot better.

In Korean. Opens Jan. 17 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

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