Chul-soo
is either Korea’s Kaspar Hauser or its Teen Wolf. He is old enough to be a war-era orphan, but
even for a wild child he seems a little odd.
Yet, a sickly teen-aged girl forms a deep connection with him in Jo
Sung-hee’s A Werewolf Boy (trailer here), which screens this
Tuesday night as part of the Korean Cultural Service’s ongoing free Korean
Movie Nights in New York.
Soon-yi,
her mother, and her younger sister Soon-ja have moved to the countryside in
hopes the clean air will improve her health.
Unfortunately, the big move was facilitated by Ji-tae, the entitled son
of her late father’s business partner, who now feels at liberty to pop over
whenever he feels like it. He assumes
Soon-yi will eventually marry him for the sake of his wealth and social
status. However, Soon-yi is not
impressed.
She
does not think much of the feral Chul-soo either when she and her mother first
find him snarling in the garden. With
the relevant social welfare agencies passing the buck, Soon-yi’s mother reluctantly
takes him in. Slowly, he starts to grow
on the family, once they clean him up and curtail his rougher instincts. Soon-yi even starts teaching him to read with
the help of a dog training manual.
However, a rich jerk like Ji-tae cannot help making trouble, especially
when his ego is bruised.
Chul-soo’s
true nature is quite strange and uncanny, but Jo de-emphasizes the genre
aspects of his story to focus on his young tragic love for Soon-yi. Told in media res as the decades older woman
returns to the fateful country house, Werewolf
Boy has all the elements of a good weeper, so it is not surprising it was a
monster hit at the Korean box office.
In
truth, the film is at its strongest when portraying the innocent ardor of
Chul-soo’s relationship with Soon-yi. In
contrast, the ridiculously vile Ji-tae is little more than a clumsy class
warfare tool that quickly grows tiresome.
When the shoot-first military finally arrives on the scene, they at
least have the virtue of being considerably less cartoony and more fully
dimensional than the silver spoon villain.
Still,
Song Joong-ki and Park Bo-young develop rather touching chemistry as Chul-soo
and Soon-yi, respectively. The former
shows both tremendous physicality and sensitivity as the young wolf-man, in an
almost entirely nonverbal performance.
Likewise, Park is radiantly expressive as Soon-yi. Jang Yeong-nam is also memorably charismatic
yet down-to-earth as her mother.
Unfortunately, as Ji-tae, Yoo Yeon-seok is stuck with a flimsy character
and takes it embarrassingly over the top in every scene.
