Savon

The scariest scene in Savon is the opening retro-style commercial for body soap. Boxed tightly into an inset aspect ratio even shorter than 4:3 and accompanied by period-piece cinematography, things look close enough to cheap production advertisements in the 1990s until the woman holding the bar of soap proclaims, “That’s why I always use Bath.” Her last word repeats a few dozen times on rewind, each instance jumping to zoom incrementally closer to her face. The bizarre and uniquely digital discomfort is the only scare of its sort in Savon, the debut crime thriller from Korean director Lee Jun-sup.

Jae-in (Jung Yi-ju) is a familiar character: a yet-to-debut actor with big dreams working at a restaurant to pay the bills. Her night with an unsavory man turns sour after she discovers a camera with criminally damning videos. Deploying an old narrative tool, Lee cues viewers into his uncouth morals through infidelity, as if cheating and murder are somehow connected. We never see the footage she found, but, from the sounds and reactions, it burgeons from the ninth circle of hell. After killing her assailant in self-defense, she is jettisoned into a world of crime where a soap company called Great Western Fat and Oil Company cleans up the bloody messes of murderers and the bodies of their victims. The cleaners give her a free bar of soap and a Chinese restaurant delivery driver saw her face that night.

I presume the film’s title is in French, despite being a Korean film with no French in it (and only a little Russian), because transliterating the Korean word to English wouldn’t help the marketing team, and the flat “Soap” is just a laughably disheartening title; French imbues a distinguishing luxury. It’s also fitting with one of the film’s subtle themes to imagine the West as a Metropolis of capitalist murderers. Jae-in meets one of the Great Western Fat and Oil Company’s higher-ups: he is a lawyer who works in America for the company. He has no jurisdiction in Korea. The company name connects the criminal underworld to the “West” too. Her boyfriend’s name, Will Lee, is so Americanized that another woman doesn’t understand at first and calls him “Wally.”

These fast jabs at Western cultural hegemony don’t happen in a vacuum. Savon is premised around the marketization of homicide clean-up. Capitalism and the West go hand-in-hand, particularly in Korea, where the peninsular divide freezes that rhetoric in time. Her boyfriend came from an inordinately wealthy family, and the main (possible) witness is a delivery driver with a vendetta against power abusers. Jae-in’s co-worker’s sole hobby is keeping up with the Parks, a celebrity family caught in scandal and swimming in money. Another sub-plot follows another one of Jae-in’s friends from the film world; he works as a grip on film sets, holding the bounce boards to collect light while he collects demeaning looks and comments. The delivery drivers are exploited, and even the opening commercial brings the conversation back to greedier pockets. The exchange of power is Savon’s most reliable throughline in an otherwise sprawling structure. 

The opening with the commercial also begins a long thread of technological themes, particularly around the etymological trustworthiness of images. The footage Jae-in finds on the camera rattles her world and instantly kills the intimate mood; there is no rebuttal, nor does the boyfriend try to explain his way out of trouble: he knows what she sees. It’s not the only camera either: Jae-in is an actor and her context opens the door for in-world cameras to poke around. The final scene takes place between her and the director of the film, parting viewers with a scene of meta-ramifications. Jae-in, one could say, takes power over the director—putting her in a position to control the visuals and thus, truth. This is a difficult argument to justify though. The technology could just as easily be little more than a mirror held up to our screen-addicted modern world. A late-minute plot development occurs through screen-peaking—it happened much earlier in the film, and we only find out about it in the action-packed climax. The screen here seems more like an afterthought than a motivating inspiration. Savon is no Decision to Leave. Lee's bold aspirations and skillful directorial hand can only mask so many burnt-out themes.

Savon is a messy film that spreads its two hours across acting lessons, restaurant work, stalking a delivery driver, an unfinished mother-daughter relationship, and crime scenes. The different worlds pace themselves dramatically differently and the changes in pace sap the thrills out of the thriller. Sudden transitions between these narratives burn away the editing’s verisimilitude as you remember you’re watching a film. Plot developments, including a particular sacrifice, occur with a similar abruptness that one starts to wonder how much of Lee’s debut film got snipped on the cutting room floor. Like Game of Thrones’ Daenerys’s problem, the destination of the character arc itself isn’t necessarily the problem; the problem is how we get there. The sacrifice just needs one or two more scenes between the two characters involved to achieve the emotional effect desired. 

When the masked men and women show up to clean the first murder scene, I thought of a relative of mine—an American, it should be noted—who made a living cleaning up after horrifying disasters, including, lamentably, school shootings. It might be the worst job on this planet, a career that would make Mike Rowe quit in cowardice. I thought of my relative during the clean-up scenes because the truth is that our country has already turned even the obtusely vile reality of child slaughter into a market where money can be earned.