Night in Paradise: The Melancholy Korean Gangster Film

Park Hoon-jung made his name on volume. He wrote I Saw the Devil and The Unjust, both released in 2010 and both delivered at a shout, and then he directed New World in 2013, a syndicate epic with three movie stars, a boardroom full of gangsters and an elevator sequence people still bring up at parties. It is a filmography built on escalation. Which is why Night in Paradise, made in 2020 and put out on Netflix the following April after a Venice slot the pandemic emptied of an audience, is such an odd and quietly wounding object. It has the shape of a gangster film. It has almost none of the appetite of one.

The trick is what Park does with the middle. He takes the standard revenge architecture, cuts a hole in it roughly forty minutes wide, and fills that hole with two people on an island who have nothing to do but wait to die. Everything the film is worth is in that hole.

A fortnight on an island

Park Tae-gu, played by Uhm Tae-goo, is an enforcer for the Yangsung organisation. A rival outfit wants him to come across, and he declines. Shortly afterwards his sister and his young niece are killed in a road accident that is not an accident, and Tae-gu does what men in this genre do. The retaliation is swift and it is expensive, and it makes him a liability to his own side as much as a target for the other one.

So the organisation does the sensible thing with a man who has become radioactive: it parks him. Tae-gu is sent to Jeju Island for two weeks, to sit still while arrangements are made to move him out to Vladivostok. His host is Yang Do-su, an arms dealer played by Park Ho-san with the weary competence of a man running a hardware business, and living in the house is Do-su’s niece Jae-yeon, played by Jeon Yeo-been. Jae-yeon is terminally ill. She has stopped her treatment. She handles firearms with a bored fluency and speaks to Tae-gu with an insolence that would get anyone else killed, and the reason she can is the reason the film works: she has already had the worst news available, and there is nothing left in Tae-gu’s arsenal that frightens her.

Meanwhile Ma Sang-gil, the rival boss played by Cha Seung-won with a great deal of expensive tailoring and a grin like a car grille, is working out where Tae-gu has gone. That is the plot. It is not the film.

Why it works: the film is a waiting room

Most gangster pictures treat downtime as connective tissue — the bit between the shooting where somebody explains the plan. Park inverts the ratio. The Jeju section is not a lull before the ending; it is the reason the ending is unbearable, and Park shoots it accordingly. The camera stops moving. The cutting slows to something close to real duration. Two people eat, drive, sit on a wall, look at water. For long stretches nothing happens with such deliberation that you start listening for the thing that is going to happen.

The location does an enormous amount of work here, and it is a genuinely sly choice. Jeju is Korea’s holiday island — honeymoons, tangerines, hiking, a volcanic coastline that turns up on every tourism poster. Dropping a condemned man into a postcard is an old noir move, and Park plays the contrast without ever underlining it: the sea is beautiful, the light is beautiful, and it is all completely wasted on a man who cannot see any of it. The title is doing the sarcasm so the script doesn’t have to.

The pairing is what elevates the thing. Both of these people are under sentence. Tae-gu’s will be carried out by an organisation; Jae-yeon’s by her own body. The difference — and this is the film’s one genuinely original idea — is that Jae-yeon got her news in a hospital and has had time to become funny about it, while Tae-gu is still in the early, stupid, thrashing stage of grief where violence feels like a plan. She is further along the road he has just started walking. That asymmetry generates every good scene between them, and it means their relationship never has to become romance to be devastating. It is two people comparing notes on the same appointment.

Jeon Yeo-been is the reason to watch this. She plays Jae-yeon with a flat, deadpan cruelty that keeps curdling into tenderness when she isn’t looking, and she never once asks the audience for sympathy, which is precisely why she gets it. Uhm Tae-goo has the harder and less rewarding job — Tae-gu is closed by design, a man made of held breath — and he does it by underplaying to the point of near-silence, which pays off in the last act when he finally has nothing to hold in.

Park’s other smart restraint is his refusal of the gangster film’s favourite drug: fun. There is no banter in the Jeju house. Nobody is enjoying being a criminal. The organisation is a bureaucracy that files people, and Ma Sang-gil’s swagger reads as an affectation the film is quietly contemptuous of. For a director who once staged an elevator massacre as an aria, this is a real act of discipline.

The case against

It is not a clean film. The first act is perfunctory — the family’s death is a plot mechanism delivered so briskly that it never accrues the weight the rest of the picture wants to draw on, and Park is relying on genre shorthand to make us feel something he hasn’t earned yet. Cha Seung-won’s villain belongs to a different, louder movie; he is enjoyably vile, and every time he appears the film’s temperature and its style change, as though someone has cut in footage from a V.I.P. outtake. And the ending, which I will not touch above the line, resolves the tonal argument by simply picking the loud side, which is either a betrayal of the middle or the point of the middle depending on how generous you are feeling at the time. I have gone both ways on separate viewings.

There is also a structural honesty problem the film never quite faces. Tae-gu is a man who has done, on the organisation’s behalf, exactly the sort of thing that has now been done to him. The film knows this and mostly declines to press on it, preferring melancholy to moral accounting. A Bittersweet Life has the same evasion; it is a house style of the Korean gangster picture rather than a failure unique to Park.

The real ancestor

Every review reached for Melville, and Melville is in there — the tailoring, the fatalism, the professional who is already a ghost. But the true parent of Night in Paradise is Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine from 1993, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Kitano’s film also sends gangsters to an island to wait out a war, also discovers that the middle is where the movie is, also fills that middle with beach games and boredom and a stillness that reads as peace and is actually anaesthesia, and also collects on all of it in a final act of shocking brevity. Park has taken Kitano’s structure — violence, long exhale, violence — and swapped Okinawa for Jeju and Kitano’s dry absurdism for something wetter and sadder. Watch them together and Night in Paradise looks less like a Netflix gangster film and more like a cover version played in a minor key by someone who loves the original.

The closer Korean relatives are A Bittersweet Life, which is the lacquered, immaculate version of this same man-cast-out story and the film Park is most obviously measuring himself against, and Le Samouraï, which invented the vocabulary both of them are speaking. If you want the maximalist Park Hoon-jung instead, New World is the other half of the diptych and it is fascinating to run them back to back: same director, same industry, same syndicate furniture, opposite pulse rates. For a broader map of the territory, the essentials are in Korean genre cinema: ten to start with.

The verdict

Night in Paradise is a compromised film with a great one inside it, and the great one is roughly the middle hour. Park Hoon-jung has made bigger and better-liked pictures, and he has never made anything as strange as this: a revenge thriller that loses interest in revenge, hands the film to a dying woman with a filthy sense of humour, and sits on a volcanic coastline watching two condemned people fail to say what they mean. The bookends are genre; the middle is grief, filmed patiently and without music telling you how to feel about it. It streams on Netflix, where it has quietly become the film people recommend when someone says they have run out of Korean crime films, and that is the right way to find it — late, alone, with no expectation that a gangster picture is about to break your heart in a kitchen.

Spoilers below

The ending is where the film’s two temperatures finally collide, and Park settles the argument with a bloodbath.

Jae-yeon’s illness is not the thing that kills her. Ma Sang-gil’s people find the Jeju house while Tae-gu is out; Do-su and Jae-yeon are killed, and Tae-gu returns to the aftermath. The cruelty of the construction is precise: Jae-yeon spent the entire middle of the film insisting she was already dead, treating her diagnosis as a fact she had absorbed and made peace with, and the film takes even that away from her. She does not get the death she had negotiated with. She gets his.

What follows is Tae-gu walking into Ma’s building and killing everyone in it, and it is deliberately not exhilarating. Park stages it with the same flat, unhurried camera he used on the island — no glamour, no whip-pans, no elevator aria. The man is not avenging anyone. There is nobody left to avenge; his sister, his niece, Do-su and Jae-yeon are all gone, and the killing is what a body does when the person inside it has finished. He does not survive it, and the film never suggests he should want to.

The detail that makes it stick is the gun. Jae-yeon spent the middle of the film handling her uncle’s stock with that bored expertise, cleaning and loading weapons for men she plainly despised, and the arsenal she treated as household chores is what Tae-gu carries into the last reel. Her competence becomes his ending. That is the film’s real closing argument, delivered without a line of dialogue: the only thing anyone in this world leaves behind is the means for the next person to do the same thing again.