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The Fake Movie Review

The Fake is a 2013 South Korean animated crime film directed by Yeon Sang-ho. It is a movie that is too depressing and nihilist for my taste.

The residents of a rural village place their hopes in an elder to find them a new home when the construction of a hydroelectric dam schedules their village for flooding. But that elder is also a hardened criminal in this movie that literally has no redeemable characters whatsoever. I found that depiction of humans overbearingly dark and misanthropic.

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I did find the central idea here interesting as the movie explores all the evils of organized religion, in particular focusing on Evangelicals in Korea. The title perfectly fits the fakeness of these supposed priests and how they exploit the residents for money.

But even if these priests would do such a thing, it was still necessary to portray at least some people of faith as positive role models to counteract all of the negativity here. But of course the director decided firmly not to do that and as a result the movie felt biased and one-sided.

It’s not an argument, it’s just bias coming from Yeon Sang-ho. I really respect and like this director, but here in his second feature, he overstepped his bounds and failed to connect emotionally with his audiences. In fact, I was frustrated by how dark and depressing the movie is and also immensely brutal. The brutality here is over-the-top and simply unnecessary.

I also despised that main character and that was the point, but still he could have been at least a bit less despicable. The others are less memorable as most of the runtime is devoted to him. The animation in the movie is pretty good, but not really necessary as the film easily could have been filmed in live-action.

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The dialogue and the editing are pretty strong and The Fake’s themes are definitely important, but again a more level-headed approach would have been better. The director simply seemed too angry to me, almost making this movie a political pamphlet in a way. I did appreciate his intense emotions as he obviously does care about this issue, but he should have still brought it down a notch or two.

The Fake deals with an important issue of organized religion’s financial exploitation, but it needed a more level-headed and less one-sided approach to telling its story. Yeon Sang-ho is a great director, but in this second feature he was too passionate, resulting in a biased, overly misanthropic and overbearingly dark excursion. The animation and dialogue are strong, but the characters are too despicable to handle.

My Rating – 3