Killing Romance — Irene Bakola

킬링 로맨스

Yeore is passed on from advertisement to plastic surgery, and from audition to award show. After 11 years of mentoring and public display, she is passed onto failure. A meta-narrative of an industry that produces hundreds of trainees every year (with an age range that averages 18), within a film featuring a lead actor who suffered a very public death 8 months after its release. A brutal digitalisation of celebrity constantly broadcasted on interviews, lives, and social media posts.

But Killing Romance narrates a crisis on a domestic as much as on a public level. Familial and dating violence had been, until recently, a largely unaddressed and concealed social issue for South Korea. A 2018 survey, conducted in light of the #MeToo awakening, indicated that 46.1% of film industry professionals had suffered sexual violence, out of which, 61.5% were women. Earlier, in 2016, a Korea Women’s Hotline study had found that 62% of female participants had experienced some kind of intimate-partner violence, while in a 2015 study of 2,000 men, nearly 80% admitted to behaving in abusive ways toward a partner. Lee Won-suk’s tale emerges as a feat of skill and nuance, never compromising on these facts but refusing to exploit their triggers. There is no hope here to aestheticise or revel in misery. There is also no attempt to abbreviate the pendulum of codependency and skewed perceptions of reality that an abused partner experiences.

Settling on a single definition of magical realism on screen is nearly impossible, but for me, there is one defining mark that identifies the genre: intervention. This is a story of abuse, and as any honest reckoning of its kind, it is one seeking intervention. Fairytales are not loci of crises. A circular route is followed, during which a narrative oasis is challenged by malignant forces that are in due time overcome—with order established once again. Fantastic as it may be, the fairytale world is still homogenous since its inhabitants experience a single layer of reality. Magical realism on the other hand, disrupts an ontological stalemate. And by doing so, it produces an existential oxymoron; the inability of realism and the ability of magic. But more importantly, magical realism is the site of a crisis demanding intervention. On such autonomous terms, the magical is accepted as the viable mediation of everyday reality. This is why Killing Romance is not ruined by the fantastical elements that would wreck the credibility of any other film. Lee’s story bends just enough but never breaks the narrative structures of its commercial expectations. Perhaps this is why something that is so close to magical realism reverts to self-identifying as a fairytale. Perhaps it is precisely because it hopes to operate on a single layer of reality; hopefully ours one day.

Tenderly and with a genuine exuberance for life and freedom, Killing Romance is the story of Hwang Yeore; the girl who drank 1.2 liters of LallaTen in 4.32 seconds and one day managed to sing her own happy song.

Last Update: September 2024