What makes it different from others?

From my favorite movies..

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Well shot, and equally well acted, but front to back every character in this movie is just a horrible person, and left me tired and frustrated rather than anxiously involved. Even the heroine/protagonist (I'm assuming that's what she is?) was so relentlessly neglectful and wilfully dense that when her eventual payoff comes around it didn't feel as gratifying as it perhaps should.I have plenty of time for harrowing movies, but this lacked cadence. Even just an extra character there with some semblance of positivity and emotional wherewithal to provide a little relief from the blanket of inhumanity that this thing throws over you would have sufficed.I can certainly see why people here are raving about it, but for me a movie needs more balance to be as affective as this attempts to be.

Here's one of those better Asian shockers. Actually it's quite excellent and bravado film making. But also this movie is truly unsettling for most of the part. It's the heartless if inhuman characters that make it so, void of compassion or soul. This is revenge at extremes. A young woman and her little girl are subject to cruelty over decades, mostly at the hands of the arsehole husband, where I was cheering loudly inside at his demise, which was well overdue, in light of what I saw before. The husband, a bad man, like his mates, are guilty of many things, even interfering with the little daughter. They live off the mainland on this island, where even this island itself creeped me out. This whole unsettling scene to be honest was like something out of The Wicker Man. Retreating to this island, in light of a rape on the mainland, is this young beautiful, yet very self centered woman, who I must say kind of annoyed me, but also intrigued me. She befriends the woman and child, but really doesn't really get involved with what's going on. After a physical fracas leads to a tragic incident, our long suffering soul turns rabid, and with a nearby sickle, becomes vigilante and murderess, where some quite graphic bloodshed ensues. Be ready for it. I did not feel sorry for any of her victims either. They all deserved to die, and I kind of first wanted Miss self centered to die, but then I was glad to see some emotion, compassion, and regret, attack her in the final frame. Bedevilled in it's almost two running time duration, has you hook line and sinker from the start. When the violence comes it's grand. I really wanted to see this girl send blood spilling on this island folk, her supposed family who had me pondering earlier if they were actually cursed or something, as they weren't the norm, and very bitter, and again, void of little or no compassion. Daring and disturbing films like this, are what really gives highs in movie land, though a certain audience will shun away from this heavy film of unrelenting revenge, and unstoppable violence.

Self-involved bank officer Hae-won (makes decisions about loans) witnessed an attempted rape, and does not want to identify the perpetrators for the police to support the victim's case.She gets people irritated with her at work, and her boss decides she should take a vacation. She goes to Moo-do Island, which is currently rather sparsely populated, where her old friend Bok-nam lives and also where she grew up.Oi, what a primitive island. Bok-nam's husband is a real control freak, and imports a prostitute from the mainland. He seduces Bok-nam's daughter, who is putatively his.Hae-won gets fired by e-mail. Nice touch. She's about to go home when Bok-nam tells her about the daughter. The matriarch of the island invites her directly to leave, or stay forever.Bok-nam tries to escape to Seoul with her daughter, early in the morning, before Hae-won wakes up. The husband beats her up instead, badly, and kills the daughter. Explaining this to the police officer who visited was amazing in the depth of the lying. The locals encourage the policeman to leave before Hae-won can go with him. He does.What could possibly go wrong at this point? That is basically the heart of the movie. Will Hae-won survive with these terrible people, who used to be her people? If so, what will she do when she gets back?-----Scores-------Cinematography: 10/10 No problems.Sound: 10/10 Just fine.Acting: 5/10 Yeong-hie Seo and Sung-won Ji were just terrible. The fellow who played the violent husband was even worse. The supporting players were OK.Screenplay: 5/10 Should have been a 30 or 40 minute short, part of an anthology. Stretched way too long.

I went into this expecting a supernatural horror of some sort solely based on the title. What I got instead was a terrifying, powerful movie in regards to the emotional toll its depicted mental, physical, and sexual abuse take. The movie has an amazing build up, garnering much sympathy for Bok-nam before anything commonly defined as "horror" starts, and it ends up being the scariest part of the movie.The director, Jang Cheol-soo, has worked as an assistant director for Kim Ki-duk, and the movie is reminiscent of him in many ways. It revolves around women ready to snap and evil men. One of the most obvious connections is the very ending, which is practically the ending of The Isle in reverse. A woman becomes an island, rather than an island becoming a woman.What's really scary is that anyone could do this to you if they wanted. They could knock you out, take you home, tie you up, and abuse you however they wanted with you having no way to get free. Not everyone is born on a remote island where it's easier to do so with no fear of the law, and it's interesting to think about how much the fear of the police may hamper this. It obviously doesn't for some people. Watch the news. That could be you.