Karma

Beginning with the biblical verse on human sin and divine forgiveness—“Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more” (Hebrews 10:17)—Karma takes its title from the Sanskrit word often understood as “action” and its consequences, yet it is, at heart, a raw, rough-edged genre film. Jong-sin loses his wife to a brutal murder. The unexpected place where he encounters Mu-young, the man responsible for the murder, is a church. After his release from prison, Mu-young lives as a devout believer, as though he has already received God’s forgiveness, and for Jong-sin, even the sight of him is unbearable. As its title suggests, Karma is concerned with moral causality. Everything has a cause, and every word or action brings a consequence of its own. But is Jong-sin truly an innocent victim, and is Mu-young nothing more than a monster? Can a past that one person has forgotten remain a lasting trauma for another? The film is marked by the actors’ intense, forceful character performances.(KIM Hyung-seok)