Michael Hanake meets the Blair Witch Project in Kim Gok's Exhausted
, a vicious kick in the pants to everyone in the audience

, all in the name of "style." A man meets a mute woman
, and as any reasonable person would do in such a situation, makes her his prostitute
. But the pimping is the least of our problems
. As we get exhausted by the grainy faux-16mm camerawork, the film gets increasingly deranged
. The closest thing we get to a sympathetic character is the pimp, simply because he's got too much self-respect to fuck a mute whore . Everyone else is either a gory mess
, or a gory mess in disguise. Even the prostitute
, which even a thug like Lars von Trier would make likeable , comes off as a delirious scary woman whose shrieks strike like blows to the jugular
. Kim Gok has seemingly abandoned the Marxist critiques of his short films, going instead for mindless brutality which culminates in an endless bloody freak-show involving, among other things
, a pair of scissors going where pairs of scissors should not go . In the middle of the bloodbath, we get an extended long take of the beaten prostitute's near-dead face, but it does not elicit sympathy or pity. In fact, images of the victim only make us shy away in shock . (Indeed, the extended sequence led to continuous walk-outs during the Pusan screening.) The long take invites us to stare, but it assumes we're as sadistic as the victimizer (and the film) is. Meanwhile the sound-effects (mostly a rumbling bassline that shakes the theater) pulsates with pure wickedness. With Hanake, shock creates reflection, which asks that we be critical. Here
 , we only want to escape. I suppose Exhausted has some virtues; the shots of drilling machines and factories provide a mesmerizing phallic backdrop to the pimp and prostitute's pursuits
. But everything else hurts too much
. At least Kim Ki-duk lets us breathe
. Exhausted makes Bad Guy look like Lady and the Tramp. (asiaarts
 .ucla.edu)