Last Updated on September 28, 2020 by rob
When English teacher Hwang (Park Yong-Woo) who’s 30 years old and never had a girlfriend dates pretty neighbour Mina (Choi Gang-Hee) he’s instantly smitten. Why? Because Mina’s everything Hwang wants – cultured, well read and a talented artist planning to study abroad in Italy – or is she? Before long Mina’s violently abusive ex turns up, there’s a dead body (the first of several) cluttering up her refrigerator and bitchy flatmate Baek (Jo Eun-Ji) begins dropping hints about Mina’s fondness for stabbing things. Just what kind of girl has Hwang fallen for?
My Scary Girl is a charmingly oddball blend of love story, comedy and crime drama which riffs on the old saying about women; that you can’t live with them, but you also can’t live without them. At least, that’s what the innocent Hwang comes to realise when he believes the girl of his dreams responsible for not one, not two, but three murders! In a way this black comedy is about the somewhat mordant education of a man who regards modern women (in a very funny opening scene) as obsessed with trivia and therefore not worthy of his love, but who then struggles with the discovery that the woman he loves is both less and more than he imagines. The small ensemble cast are highly engaging. Young-Woo’s Hwang and Gang-Hee’s sensible Mina have instant chemistry as the would be lovers and Eun-Ji as Mina’s caustic flatmate Baek is so good she practically steals every scene she’s in.
The first third of the movie with the guileless Hwang stumbling through the standard dating rituals with a Mina (an exchange of mobile numbers between the two is a particularly amusing bit of business) has us rooting for the pair to get together. But just as happiness beckons it emerges that the girls are involved with a shady lawyer and awaiting a financial payout, the promise of which brings the former boyfriends of both women sniffing around for a share of the money. When Mina is forced to kill her violent ex in self-defence, she has to buy a fridge to store the body in (after insisting the salesman climb in the freezer so she knows it’s big enough) and then back at her flat nonchalantly saw a finger off the corpse when her ex’s rigid digit means she can’t get the lid down.
Poor Hwang has no idea of what’s going on behind his back – an attempt by Baek to seduce him simply underlines how much he loves Mina – and the penny only begins to drop when a dinner date with work colleagues exposes Mina’s ignorance of the literature and art she professes to love. All this has the trappings of farce but that isn’t the way director Jae-gon wants to go and he skilfully keeps the romantic, comic and crime elements grounded and believable. Moreover he keeps our interest and empathy in both characters strong because we know things aren’t as straightforward as Hwang thinks. Two of Mina’s killings are clearly cases of self-defence so we can’t really blame her. Only the first, in which Mina describes finishing off the rich old man she was married to – at the behest of a slimy lawyer who’s told her they can share out his inheritance – sounds unforgivably callous.
But as Mina tells Hwang, ” He was dying anyway. I just gave him a little push”! It’s all too much for Hwang – who by this time has had to hire a private investigator to ferret out the truth after he’s found the severed finger of Mina’s ex in the corner of the fridge. When he presents her with the digit along with the $64, 000 question, “Who are you really?” the moment takes an unexpectedly poignant turn as Mina surveys the happy couples around her and tells Hwang she’s just a girl who wants to laugh and be happy. This hits home because in Gang-hee’s performance one senses a good girl from the wrong side of the tracks doing her best to escape a rotten past and start a new life.
The irony is that Mina really does have all the qualities Hwang dreams of in a woman (she shows such grit and determination in dealing with two thugs and then hauling their bodies into the mountains to bury them she even wins the fear and respect of her flatmate) but he can’t accept that because he mistakenly assumes they’re built on her having murdered three people. For all his disillusionment we know Hwang would forgive Mina in an instant if she’d just say or do the right thing. But in an amusingly bittersweet final scene everything Hwang hopes for ends up undermined by the prosaic reality. A portrait Mina’s drawn which Hwang romantically assumes must be of him turns out to be that of a tv celebrity. And Hwang is the first to spot that an eloquent sounding speech of Mina’s is a direct quote from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Even a farewell kiss offends Hwang with its perceived casualness.
Yet despite these blows one simple fact remains; Hwang loves Mina, that’s why he never turned her in to the cops and it’s a heartbreaking moment when Mina pleads with Hwang to come to Italy with her. Of course he can’t and the film perfectly sums up Hwang’s predicament in voiceover; “When some people visit the place of their first kiss, they say they think of their past love,” opines our heartbroken lover, “Whenever that person’s song is heard, there are people who reminisce. As for me, every time I see news about the discovery of a secretly buried corpse in the mountain, I think of her.” Lol, as they say. But Jae-gon is too shrewd a filmmaker to let two characters – in both of whom we’re really quite invested – stay apart for long and a coda set in Singapore two years later has Hwang and Mina bumping into one another and offers a sliver of hope that maybe things might just work out between them. This is an impressive debut by its writer/director with the thematic obsessions shown here developed and expanded on to even greater effect in Jae-gon’s follow up, the superb Villain and Widow (2010).
