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Moss - Review

 

""Moss" can broadly be cat­e­gorised as obvi­ously South Korean".

Direc­tor Kang Woo-suk takes on the fans of Yun Tae-ho's much lauded dig­i­tal comic "Moss" in a gam­ble to fit a big story with big themes into a fea­ture length film. Whether or not fans of the source mate­r­ial are sat­is­fied with the final prod­uct, Woo-seok has deliv­ered a thriller in the film noir tra­di­tion where the atmos­phere lies heavy with buried secrets threat­en­ing to resur­face.

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At Samdeok prayer house, more and more locals are com­ing to see and lis­ten to the mes­sianic Mr Yu before they lose them­selves to a life of sin. See­ing an oppor­tu­nity to use Mr Yu's strange gift for a higher pur­pose, the dubi­ous and pos­i­tively cor­rupt detec­tive Cheon Yong-deok tells Mr Yu his big idea: to give a select few real crim­i­nals a proper reha­bil­i­ta­tion that a jail sen­tence can­not pro­vide.

Fast for­ward thirty years and, in a small iso­lated vil­lage, Mr Yu is dead. Sur­pris­ing Chief Cheon Yong-Deok and his posse of elders is the arrival from Seoul of Mr Yu's son that no-one knew about, Yu Hae-kuk. Instantly rub­bing every­one up just a lit­tle bit the wrong way with his big city man­ners and ideas, it becomes clear that no-one wants him around for long.

Hae-kuk, how­ever, doesn't feel right about the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the death of his estranged father. In a set up where every­one, includ­ing the police, answer to the Chief (whose house over­looks the entire vil­lage), a store-owning woman is vis­ited indi­vid­u­ally by the elders every night and tun­nels con­nect par­tic­u­lar houses to his father's, Hae-kuk decides to stick around and do some inves­ti­gat­ing of his own. The fur­ther he delves, the grub­bier the secrets and lies become, as he is immersed in a world of greed and human weak­ness... Full review here

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