Blood Rain is director Kim Daeseung's second feature, a serial killer/murder mystery set on an island in 1808 Corea. Keeping some of the director's trademarks (flashbacks and strong photography), the film tells a tale about collective guilt and vengeance while drawing you in with its sometimes gruesome flash and well told mystery.
The story starts on an island in early 19th century Corea, where an arson is suspected, drawing a group of mainland government investigators to solve the mystery. But then a murder happens and the investigator gets drawn into the mystery of what happened on that island in the living past all while trying to catch the criminal and keep the populace alive and at peace.
The story is well spun and the reveal at the end (it's a mystery after all) comes as a surprise, although I suppose if I were far more attentive, I would have caught it before the reveal, which is a great hallmark of mysteries. The nice thing is that the flashbacks are used more towards filling in character and thematic elements rather than as a "gotcha!" for the most part, so it doesn't feel too gratuitous. As a suspense/mystery, the story is engaging and entertaining. The only issue I take is with a supernatural element in the film--while it's woven much better into this film than into Shadows in the Palace--the supernatural element still feels extraneous: it's not at all necessary for the tale to work well, especially as a device to tie some other strands of the story together.
The picture is well composed and I have to say that I was quite struck by the costumes and art surrounding the period element of the film. While the film does show some rather brutal deaths, I can still say that the photography was, on the whole, still something for the eyes to see. The performances were all well rendered, the sound and music contribute and the production values are very solid. I remember watching this in the theater in Corea and while I had some problems understanding what was going on (some of the more formal dialect of Corean, I haven't yet mastered), I could say that I wasn't bored at all.
One thing that I really liked about this film is that it was really easy to understand the antagonist, while still knowing that what he was doing (murder) was wrong and how the film doesn't at all make this seem contrived. Blood Rain is a fairly solid murder mystery/suspense piece and the period setting really adds a lot to the film. If you can ingest or ignore the supernatural element of the film, you'll find a rather entertaining ride of a film here. 8/10.
