[HanCinema's Busan International Film Festival Movie Review] "One on One"

The seven Shadows who drive all of the action in "One by One" are a diverse lot, united only by their desire to avenge a brutal, senseless murder that's mostly been covered up because the entire incident is a massive embarassment to the government that instigated it. And even this isn't a particularly unified desire. As we see more and more of their home lives, it soon becomes clear that whatever the Shadows are lashing out against, it's mostly incidental to the moral outrage they feel about a young woman being brutally murdered for no apparent reason.

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But the question yet remains. Through a fantastic team effort, a woman was murdered, and none of the people responsible for the event at any point along the chain of command have been held accountable, nor are they likely to ever be. It's an essential irony of the film, though, that it's only the higher-ups who benefit from the moral ambiguity the Shadows start to feel the longer their torture games go on. These same higher-ups are the ones least likely to be repentant for what happened, and for that matter probably did a bunch of other evil stuff that also justifies they take a turn at the opposite end of the torture table for once.

"One on One" is like one of those intellectual conversations among friends about the moral distinction between justice, revenge, good, and evil. These conversations pretty much inevitably turn out to be stupid and pedantic, and seldom convince anyone to do anything outside of just not bothering to try to solve problems anymore. If the world is really that messed up, why dirty ourselves trying to fix it?

Civilized society, and intellectual thought in particular, loves to posit the idea that it's only through reasoned discourse and insight that we make ourselves better than barbarians. The problem with this thinking is that no one who actually has the power to solve these problems ever engages in that kind of pondering. The powerful got to where they are by acting decisively and impulsively, because those are strong leadership qualities. Hence, they deserve it.

Take that in the context of the bickering between the Shadows, and their generally miserable home lives. It's against this backdrop that the continuing speeches about moral superiority ring hollow. In this way "One on One" makes an excellent argument for why society keeps recorganizing itself hierarchically. As one character put it, the downtrodden will reject solutions based on pride and morality- completely irrelevant, abstract concepts that in no way change circumstances in any meaningful way. Ah, but if there's something to lash out against...

In this sense it's all too fitting that by the end of the film the one character who's willing to really make an ethical stand is the one with the least intellectually complicated motivation. It's action that matters- not talk. Consequently, it's quite appropriate that a film with this much bad dialogue should come from Kim Ki-duk, a man who has made his career on visceral imagery rather than scripts. "One on One" is practically an argument for why he makes films the way he does- the emotions just ring so hollow when the characters spend this much time thinking about them.

Review by William Schwartz

"One on One" is directed by Kim Ki-duk and features Ma Dong-seok, Kim Young-min, Lee Yi-kyung, Cho Dong-in and Ahn Ji-hye.