The Villagers, Starring Don Lee

Yuk Ki-chul came to the provincial town to be a P.E. teacher, but he will end up teaching the adults a few lessons in ethics, civics, and criminal justice. He is also supposed to collect past due school fees, but actually helping missing students is supposedly outside his job description. Of course, Yuk does not see it that way in director-screenwriter Lim Jin-soon’s The Villagers (a.k.a. Ordinary People), which releases today on VOD.

Yuk is a big guy, but he often feels like a small fry. His new P.E. gig was the only job he could get, after getting blackballed for publicly calling out corruption in the youth judo league—and it still required a kickback. Regardless, everyone at school is quite nasty, except maybe Kang Yoo-jin. She is earnest kid, who is trying to get the police, or anyone else, to investigate the disappearance of her friend. However, she instinctively distrusts Yuk, because he is yet another adult.

In this film, the grownups really are a bad lot. The teachers and administrators only care about school fees, the local hostess club traffics young women, with the protection of the local political bigwig, Kim Ki-tae, and the cops are all corrupt and smell of booze. Yuk hopes that doesn’t also include his old friend, Kim Dong-soo, who is still just a timid, conflict-averse patrolman, under the best-case scenario.

Obviously, Don Lee (Ma Dong-seok) is a big guy, but he is surprisingly human in this early star-vehicle (from 2018) that is only now getting an American release. This time around, he bleeds like the rest of us and needs a realistic amount of time to bash his way through doors. In fact, he even shows vulnerability as sheepish Yuk. Yet, he always shows massive screen presence.

Lee also develops a nice halting rapport with former child-thesp sensation Kim Sae-ron, who broke out in the box-office hit, The Man from Nowhere, but died under tragic circumstances this year, before her 25^th birthday. She plays the imperiled teen with a melancholy that is quite effective—and rather haunting, in light of her sad fate.

Lee Sang-yeob is also massively creepy as the suspicious art teacher, Kim Ji-sung, while Jang Gwang radiates sleaze as crooked Kim Ki-tae. Viewers will have a good general idea regarding their sins, but Lim repeatedly takes the film to darker places with a series of reasonably surprising third act revelations.

Altogether, it makes The Villagers work quite well as a gritty thriller with aspirations of social criticism. It is not a rip-off of The Substitute (even though it would be totally entertaining to see Don Lee in such a role). Arguably, it is a surprisingly mature and restrained film to come so early in his action-oriented movie-stardom, but he has the charisma and chops to carry it. Highly recommended for fans of Don Lee and Korean thrillers, The Villagers releases today (10/7) on digital VOD.