Since Saw 3D reared its ugly head and brought the franchise to an un-climatic climax, western cinema hasn’t really seen much of the revered yet popularly viewed torture-porn subgenre. It would seem that for western cinema the series that started the phenomenon off has also brought it to a finish. This isn’t the case with Asian cinema though. Latecomers to the torture-porn craze, Asian cinema has dominated the subgenre in recent years. Although they haven’t all reached as large an audience over here as their western counter parts, the Asian contributions to the subgenre have featured many scenes that rank on par, or in many cases even more unsettling than the likes of the Saw and Hostel series.
Next in line for this craze is Korean film Missing from director Kim Sung-Hong. Missing follows the exploits of an elderly man as he kidnaps young girls and goes on to torture them until they are weak enough for him to rape them. Pleasant stuff. The film includes a number of rape scenes that, however brief, are still very unsettling to watch. Kim Sung-Hong only films expressions at these points, but this doesn’t make it any easier to watch. The funny thing is, for a film that is most definitely going to get lobbed into the ever-expanding torture-porn subgenre, apart from these very unnerving scenes the “torture” is pretty few and far between.
Even though there are only a few scenes of this nature, it drags the film down to a very low, hard to watch level. This is a shame, because apart from this the film is actually pretty decent. Aesthetically the film looks great; there is a constant dirty look that gives the film a great horror quality. Performances are also very good. There are some exaggerated performances from some of the cast, but this is typical of a Korean film. The victims especially do a good job, making the agony they are put through very believable.
OVERALL SUMMARY
The scenes featuring rape make this film a lot harder to watch than most torture-porn films, but these aside it’s not too bad a flick. The use of gore isn’t excessive or underused, instead falling comfortably in the middle which is a hard target to hit for these types of films. Because of the number of similar films that have come out before it though, in the end Missing just feels like we’re treading over old ground.
