Hoon-jung Park’s ‘The Witch: Subversion’ Brings Visceral Twist to a Superpowered Tale [VOD Picks]
If the umpteenth delay of The New Mutants bums you out, or you’re just plain in the mood for something new on VOD, there’s an easy recommendation that scratches that itch for a genre-twist to superpowered origin stories – The Witch: Subversion. Now out on both Blu-ray and VOD, this thriller hailing from South Korea offers mystery, suspense, visceral action, and an insane amount of bloodshed. In other words, if you like your superhero stories entertaining and chock full of violence, this one delivers the goods.
The cold open shows mysterious remnants of a massacre at an unknown facility, and it’s followed by the suspenseful pursuit of a young girl, Ja-yoon. She escapes and eventually collapses at the edges of a farm owned by a lonely, older couple. Cut to ten years later. Ja-yoon has since been adopted by the couple, with no memory at all of her former life. She’s grown into a well-adjusted teenager that excels at everything she pursues, so when the teen nails an audition for a reality TV singing show, it attracts dangerous people from her forgotten past. Her ordinary life turns upside-down, and everything she holds dear hangs in the balance.
First and foremost, the one thing to know going in is that this was written and directed by Hoon-jung Park, the screenwriter behind the excellent and disturbing I Saw the Devil. While The Witch: Subversion is nowhere near as bleak, it does have a biting edge of darkness to it. The facility that Ja-yoon fled from as a child has been searching for her ever since. They have zero qualms about killing or torturing anyone to reclaim her. Many of those after Ja-yoon are gleefully sadistic about hunting their prey. Bone-crunching, bloody violence ensues.
Unlocking Ja-yoon’s past is the driving mystery of the story, but it mainly keeps to familiar plot beats. Ja-yoon is powerfully telekinetic, a result of whatever experimentation the facility performed on her as a child. There’s plenty of information given, especially for those well versed in this type of origin tale, to fill in the blanks before the narrative unveils them. Even still, The Witch: Subversion is heavily stylized with slick production value and well-executed brawls. It’s how the story unfolds that makes this so much fun to watch, especially in the Grand Guignol-style finale.
The film’s subtitle does eventually come into play, in a pleasantly surprising sort of way, and leaves with a tease for a continuation – this is only a “Part 1,” it must be noted. Usually, dangling a kind of loose thread cliffhanger to set up the next entry would be a detriment; focus on doing a self-contained story first. That’s precisely what Hoon-jung Park does, however. The Witch: Subversion is robust enough to stand on its own as a stand-alone story, but there’s still plenty of lingering mystery and a rooting interest in Ja-yoon to make you want to immediately sign up to see where her story goes next. Da-mi Kim‘s performance as Ja-yoon goes a long way, as well, easily engendering audience sympathy for the character’s increasingly complex layers.
Who knows when we’ll finally be able to see The New Mutants, a genre twist that sees young mutants grappling with their powers while held against their will in a facility. But The Witch: Subversion fits that bill pretty closely. Ja-yoon’s struggle to uncover her past and the extent of her powers presents a familiar superhero origin story, but with a South Korean action-thriller twist. From the mind behind I Saw the Devil, no less. Meaning a highly entertaining film that brings savage action sequences and the kind of splatter-filled violence you don’t usually see in the teen superhero fare we get in American cinemas.
The best part is that this one’s available to watch right now.
