Our Twisted Hero

Park Chon-Won began his career with a dire pseudo-Marxist agit-prop movie about workers' rights. This second feature is a considerable improvement, but the director hasn't yet fully outgrown a reliance on melodramatic cliché or a tendency to hammer home elementary lessons. His subject here is a school in 1959-60 (a microcosm of the state) and the focus is on a new boy's discovery of the collusion between the class bully and the corrupt teacher.