On Hulu I watched The Villainess and Eve’s Bayou, two films I had been meaning to watch for a long time, and really liked them both.
The Villainess is a 2017 Korean action film directed by Jung Byung-gil about a female assassin (Kim Ok-bin) working as a government agent. She’s set up with a new identity in an apartment with her toddler daughter, with a cover as a theatre actress, and the agency is giving her assignments, promising her freedom after ten years of service, as well as having an agent pose as a sweet widowed neighbor to gain her love and keep tabs on her. She also wants to avenge the death of her father, who she saw murdered by a crime boss when she was a child, and it gets more complicated when she realizes who this boss really is.
I liked how it felt like a mix of a stylish Park Chan-Wook action film, like his Vengeance series, mixed in with Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, and that the film was trying to show a more humanized depiction of a female assassin than just a fantasy of a hot chick with guns and swords. It was really well-crafted, with really sick and intensely choreographed fight sequences using fish-eye lens and hidden cuts in seemingly long takes, and was messy and bloody.
Eve’s Bayou is a 1997 film by Kasi Lemmons that is a Southern Gothic tale of an affluent Black family living in a little bayou town in the 1960s named after an enslaved woman named Eve, whose descendants live there and whom the 10-year old protagonist (Jurnee Smollet) is named after. This was a really intense and heavy family drama that had a slow, dreamlike pace mixed with horror, the shakiness of memories, and Creole culture. Eve witnesses her doctor father (Samuel L. Jackson) cheating on her mother, and is devastated by her idolized father breaking her loving image of him, and is frequently shut down by the adults around her when she tries to tell people what she saw.
It was a really haunting and beautiful film, and I could feel the weight of it when it ended. I’m happy this film got added to the Library of Congress in 2018 as a culturally significant film, it was well deserving for posterity.
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