#Witch part 1 subversion movie
#Witch part 1 subversion tv

The boy she meets, Gong-ja, is actually in cahoots with one Professor Baek (Cho Min-soon), the icy head of the government program that’s still hunting Ja-yoon down. Ja-yoon’s shot at stardom quickly seems to be a fatal error. The movie’s strength is in its absolutely fantastic twist Warning: Only keep reading if you’re not afraid of some very big spoilers. If she wins, she can help her ailing mom, her struggling dad, and maybe solve her own health problems. He seems a little too mysterious, a little too familiar, a little too stylish to not be connected to the well-funded team that’s hunting her down.īut Ja-yoon has her eyes on the competition. On their girls’ trip to Seoul for a show taping, Ja-yoon and Myung-hee meet Gong-ja ( Choi Woo-Shik), a boy with pop star looks who says he knows Ja-yoon.

#Witch part 1 subversion tv

She doesn’t even realize that the black-ops team that’s hunting her down could be watching the TV show, too. She approaches everything with wide-eyed optimism, and doesn’t yet have the toughness or savvy to know what to do should she win the competition. But Park is more focused on showing us Ja-yoon’s greenness in endeavors like this one. The script gets in a few jabs at the not-so-secret workings of Korean pop stardom and the facile business of churning out music acts. While Ja-yoon isn’t old enough for a full-time job, she has the voice and appeal to become a pop star, get famous and hopefully provide her family with the money it needs. Her best friend Myung-hee ( Ko Min-shi) has an antidote - for her family’s financial problems, not the headaches - which is that Ja-yoon enter a national, televised talent competition not unlike American Idol or The Voice. At the same time, she is also having some very mysterious splitting headaches. Ja-yoon feels stuck, not being old enough or skilled enough to help her family in the way they need most.

Ja-yoon’s adoptive father’s farm isn’t doing so well, and her mother is flashing signs of dementia. The family’s problems are instead depressingly mortal. Bloodied and bruised, Ja-yoon flees to a nearby farm where, in a twist of good fortune, a farmer and his elderly wife take her in and evade the dark forces that want her dead.įlash forward 10 years later, and Ja-yoon ( Kim Da-mi) and her family are living unbothered by any evil government agents. What appears to be a black-ops arm of the government is hunting her down for reasons unknown and murders everyone in their way. We first meet her as a child, running away from trouble.

The Witch, at its core, is a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Ja-yoon. At its core, The Witch is about fitting in That happens in this movie, too.īut the beauty of The Witch is the dark and sublimely satisfying place Park takes us to, once we realize our hero’s true motivation: survival. It takes an extraordinary circumstance, usually a big evil thing, to get a character like this to find themselves and their true potential. On the surface, director Park Hoon-jung is telling a Superman-adjacent story: A very special kid, thanks to deadly circumstances, becomes an orphan and grows up trying to fit into a world that can’t even begin to understand them. From its brutal and electrifying fight scenes to its icy and gritty feel and its core mystery, The Witch Part 1 is a much more exciting, unforgettable watch than its generic title may suggest.

#Witch part 1 subversion movie

Possibly there’s some nuance lost in translating it over to English from its native Korean (the movie debuted in Korea in 2018). Look past that melodramatic, even confusing name this is not a sequel to the 2016 horror movie The Witch. While the coronavirus pandemic has smashed the brakes on Marvel and Warner Bros.’s summer blockbuster slate this year, the next great superhero movie is already here, streaming on Netflix: The Witch Part 1: The Subversion. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend. One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature.