18, 120mins
“You can do a hundred things right. But one mistake can destroy everything,” says the gangland boss to his most loyal henchman in A Bittersweet Life. Nobody, not even the most hardened fan of ultra-violent Korean crime thrillers, can anticipate how bloodily prescient that warning will turn out to be. The result is a terrific, tightly plotted and vividly stylised depiction of Korean gang culture focusing on one man’s fall from grace.
Sunwoo (Lee Byung Hun) is both an immaculately presented hotel manager and a ruthless enforcer for underworld boss Kang. The robotically efficient killer is at odds with the inarticulate boy who falls hard for the boss’s sweet young girlfriend.
It’s the complexity of Sunwoo’s character — and the guilt that shadows him — that make this handsomely photographed film a cut above the rest.