Oh damn… Every once in a while I’ll get a movie that I’m just really not sure how to address. Samaritan Girl is one of those movies, so I’ll ask that you please be patient with me as I try to work through my feelings.

One thing I can, of course, address with little trouble is the plot: Samaritan Girl introduces us to two girls, Jae-Young, a prostitute, and Yeo-Jin, her best friend who “manages” her liaisons: finding her clients, arranging meetings, ect. Every day after school, Jae-Young prostitutes herself while Yeo-Jin keeps an eye out for her; the girls are trying to amass enough money to buy two plane tickets to Europe.

However, one day, when a police raid interrupts Jae-Young in “the act,” she chooses to kill herself rather than go with the police. Having jumped out the window of the hotel room she was in, Jae-Young, clinging to life, is taken to a hospital by Yeo-Jin. As she is dying, she asks to see her favorite of the men she’s slept with. Yeo-Jin, feeling that it’s her duty to fulfill her friend’s wish, tracks the man down and eventually convinces him to come see Jae-Young, at the price of Yeo-Jin’s virginity; however, the two arrive just minutes too late: Jae-Young is dead.

Understandably upset, Yeo-Jin decides to burn the money the two amassed; but, on a sudden impulse, she changes her mind and instead resolves to return the money to the men Jae-Young sold herself to. Why she feels she should sleep with them, too, I’m not quite sure (some kind of penance?), but that she does.

One day, after Yeo-Jin has finished with another man in a hotel room, her father, a police investigator, happens to look across the street from the hotel where he is investigating a murder and sees his daughter with a john. This turn of events, of course, plunges him into a rather grave state of angry consternation; and he deals with these feelings in the most sensible way possible: he allows her to keep doing it, and simply follows her around secretly, intimidating her clientele with escalating viciousness. As the stress the two are (unknowingly) putting on their relationship increases, the father makes a desperate attempt to reconnect with his daughter by taking her to her mother’s grave in the mountains.

Well, let’s start with the good, which is plentiful. The film’s first half is extremely involving, and the touching relationship between the two girls seemed particularly well-handled to me: I really grew to care about these characters, particularly ever-effervescent Jae-Young, who, with her constant smile and unflappable loyalty, was a character I was sad to see go. Following her death, the film’s exploration of the father’s painful reaction to his daughter’s “lifestyle,” was also interesting and, up to a point, well-handled. Direction was skillful, particularly in its crafty use of handheld footage in many segments; and the film does have an air about it of being tightly under control, which seems to indicate the practiced hand of a natural cinematic artisan.

Of course, all of the above only makes it feel like a greater shame that I didn’t like the film more than I did, but a few uncomfortable choices just completely threw it off for me. Probably my biggest complaint is in how the film deals with Yeo-Jin’s father’s feelings. While, at first, having him not confront his daughter seems an interesting directorial decision, there comes a point where frustration begins to build: I mean, if this girl’s father is so upset that she’s whoring herself out after school every day, why doesn’t he just ask her to stop? What starts off as an interesting premise grows rather wearisome after 15 minutes, at least to me, though I must admit that I have a perhaps uncommon aversion to characters who prolong their suffering needlessly.

(While not a spoiler per se, the following paragraph mentions details that happen about 45 minutes into the movie. If you like to go into things really fresh, you may wish to skip it.)

Compounding this frustration are the actions of the father. While at first a sympathetic character, the gravity of the father’s actions increases as the film progresses, until eventually he goads a man into suicide and finally murders another. It was at the point of the suicide that I really began to feel alienated, as the father’s actions lead to a man with a wife and kids killing himself. While this clearly isn’t intrinsically a bad plot element, the film treats it disturbingly glibly, like it’s simply another stop in an escalating series of revenges that don’t matter as much in relation to the plot as they should, anyway. The murder is similarly treated like a throw-away occurrence: after it happens, neither the father nor the film thinks any more of it. This, too, rung false to me: the father is portrayed as too much of a caring individual earlier for me to believe he would suffer no remorse after committing a crime this brutal. What’s most unsettling, though, is that the film seems startlingly ambiguous as to whether these actions make the father an unsympathetic character, whereas I immediately lost all sympathy for him. This, coupled with what seemed to me the completely arbitrary and dramatically-questionable nature of the suicide, served to really sour the film for me, which was particularly jarring considering all the tenderness and pathos it had shown in its opening half.

Structure also seemed to be lacking, in my opinion, which is my final complaint against the film. As the plot synopsis hopefully communicates, Samaritan Girl seems to kind of leap around with regards to tone and structure: it moves from a tender and haunting portrait of two friends and the effects of prostitution to a mournful examination of a father’s and daughter’s pain to a rather (as far as I could tell) morally-depraved revenge piece to a tragic examination of a father-daughter relationship all the in space of a scant 94 (sans credits) minutes. As can be imagined, this leaves the film lacking in a few areas: the father’s characterization prior to Jae-Young’s death, for instance, is extremely limited, and his discovery of his daughter’s prostituting of herself by looking out the window at a crime scene is one of many events that distract from the flow of the story because of their implausibility. Still, it’s the rather unorthodox structure of the film itself that does it the most damage. It’s clear from analysis that there’s a lot going on here: the film seems like it’s trying to address conflicts between fathers and daughters, though its point is never really made perfectly clear (at least, as far as I can tell); in the end, the film’s over-focusing on its message and symbolism leads to its dramatic weaknesses. Of course, I won’t immediately discount a film for focusing more on message than storytelling, but if it is to ignore what is really the outward reason for telling a story, it had better have a damn important message to tell us. Samaritan Girl, I think, underachieves in this respect; and, while it clearly shows many signs of being a good movie, I feel it just has too many dramatic inconsistencies to give it a recommendation, which is a pity, considering the amazing start that was its first half.

Nevertheless, I can at least say that Tartan has done a fine job presenting the film: the disk’s transfer, presented at 1.85:1 with anamorphic enhancement, looks nice, if a touch soft, with the brighter scenes in the city and the grayer tones of the Korean countryside both accurately represented.

Extras are extremely limited, and comprise only a rather unnecessary photo gallery and a trio of trailers for other Tartan Asia Extreme releases (Heroic Duo, Oldboy, and Memento Mori).

While Samaritan Girl gets off to a really nice start (almost along the lines of Blue Spring, which I absolutely loved), it seemed to me that it really missteps about halfway through: it seems to completely forget poor little Jae-Young and loses track of its story and characters amidst deluges of heavy-handed symbolism and metaphor. Still, the first half of the film was good enough, I suppose, to make for a decent rental; and who knows, perhaps you’ll like things more than I did…