MovieChat Forums > Hwanghae (2011) Discussion > Things that need to be answered: SPOILER...

Things that need to be answered: SPOILERS

posted 8 years ago by scoup
2 replies | jump to latest

Has anyone seen a director's commentary on this movie (because there are major problems)?

Facts (as gathered from viewing and other IMDB posts):
- Gunam borrowed money for his wife to go away and work.
- The Mistress was banging both the Professor and the Mobster/Kim.
- Professor's wife put a hit out on her husband/Professor.
- Mobster/Kim also put a hit out on Professor.
- Gunam's wife is alive at the end and steps off the train to go home.

Problem:
So how are we to believe that the wife leaves her husband and kid (really really adorable kid) without any contact for 6 months? Huge problem. Everyone has cell phones. There are landlines. No fights before she left and it seemed like the relationship was fine. The wife gets off the train like she doesn't have a care in the world; she certainly doesn't look like a woman going back to her family that hasn't heard from her in 6 months and cheated with another man.

We never get confirmation that dismembered body is the wife. Surely the murdering fishman knows the name of the woman he was living with and killed. I have no idea about the baby picture. Are we really to believe that the wife left her husband and kid for the fishman? Think about it. He's no prize to look at and didn't seem to have money. Just a red herring to setup twist ending.

Cr@ppy writing no matter how you look at it. Am I missing something?

An idea I have which doesn't really explain too much of this mess:
Maybe the wife was really sending money back to the family and that woman who called the bank on her cell had stolen it. Maybe the wife was sending letters to her husband/kid but that same woman intercepted them.

Were there 2 women living with the fishman? The wife and the married woman he killed?

That's all I got.

You?

[–] me-Renee 8 years ago

I think Gu-nam was chasing the wrong woman. He showed the picture of his wife to many people and eventually one recognized her, but somewhere in the mix of "I know her" and "I've seen her around," his wife was switched to the fisherman's partner - like in a game of 'telephone' where the message is warbled by the time it reaches the last listener. It was just "coincidence" that the fisherman's confession could fit easily into Gu-nam's story.

That's just an answer (proposed one, anyway) to your last question. Stumped on the rest....

[–] luckz (11) 2 years ago

Who exactly the professor's wife conspires with and how, like if she sleeps with the bank guy, and why a bank guy even hires hitmen, and why she sits with the bank guy just as our lead comes to check him out – all of this seems to range between unclear and very poorly written.

We also never find out who fought with and abducted the lead's wife or made her flee from her trashed apartment for all time.

For me the biggest issue is why everybody under the sun wants to kill our lead. I don't get why Kim wants to kill him – if Kim really believes his hired driver hired another guy, then this guy wouldn't know anything about Kim, so unless it's very easy to trace contracting the driver back to Kim, I don't get the problem. He could make any number of arrangements that don't involve killing the lead, and then he even ups the ante and wants to kill Myun, before they become fast friends for a moment.

Then Myun: Myun just wants to double cross his hired assassin for the lulz? He seems fairly straight-forward with his associates, in the sense that they seem really loyal to him, not that he seemed to mind that a whole bunch of them died when Kim's goons came in for a stab-brawl to the death. What purpose was there to getting the finger if the murder is bound to be the daily news headliner anyway? (Or maybe that is just because of the police chase and manhunt?)
Does Myun just pretend to threaten the lead's family?

Considering how many of their people get killed and how many of their cars are wrecked and how much effort they otherwise spend on all this, I can't imagine any of this would have made sense for Kim or Myun financially even if one of them had ultimately won.