Here’s proof that it’s possible for a movie to be too dark and violent even for The Movie Gourmet.
Pieta is about a 30-year-old Korean loan shark so heartless that he cripples his unpaying clients and steals their disability payoffs. Out of nowhere, a woman finds him and claims to be the mother that abandoned him as an infant. To test whether she is really his mother, he brutalizes and defiles her (in ways that I wish I had not witnessed). Nevertheless she clings to him, and a heaping portion of maternal guilt causes him to rethink his ways.
Now my taste in film runs to the violent. I revel in Killer Joe and Django Unchained and have just praised the exploitation films Outrage and Outrage Beyond. Very violent movies like End of Watch, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Sin Nombre and Gomorrah have all recently made it on to my Best of the Year lists. I particularly like the often grim and twisted offerings of contemporary Korean cinema (Memories of Murder, Mother, Oldboy, The Housemaid).
But I don’t like torture porn (which Pieta approaches) or slasher cinema. And some stories – like Pieta’s – just don’t have a payoff that makes it worthwhile to sit through the most uncomfortable screen violence. Call me a sissy.
Pieta has received some critical praise because it is well made and emotionally powerful. But that just isn’t enough to justify such sickening violence. Pieta is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from some VOD outlets.