You will not easily forget the old but tough hero of South Korean film “The Land of Morning Calm”, which won three awards including the Best Film Award at the New Currents section of the Busan International Film Festival a few months ago. Although he is not a nice or pleasant dude at all, he is presented as a complex human figure to observe as we get to know more about him and his nearly hopeless life environment along the story, and it is compelling to watch how bluntly but sincerely he struggles for what should be done for a few others around him.

In the beginning, the movie slowly establishes the daily life of its hero in a little seaside village located somewhere on the east coast of South Korea. For many years, Yeong-gook (Yoon Joo-sang) has earned his meager living as a local fisherman in that village just like many other guys in the town, and the movie slowly lets us gather their desperate economic status. Many of them surely need some extra help due to their age, but there are not many young people in the village, and even foreign workers are usually not available to them. At least, Yeong-gook has a local lad named Yong-soo (Park Jong-hwan), but Yong-soo is not particularly dedicated to their work, and he actually has a little scheme for getting out of his hometown village.

We soon see Yeong-gook helping Yong-soo’s plan a bit. During one early morning, they go out to the sea as usual, but only Yeong-gook returns to the port, and then he flatly reports to the local police that Yong-soo fell into the sea. Naturally, the local police and several other local fishermen quickly embark on the search for Yong-soo, and both Yong-soo’s mother and his Vietnamese wife certainly become quite panic as fearing for the worst.

The plan of Yong-soo, who is actually alive and well in his hiding place, is pretty simple. Once his death becomes official on the record after the local police fails to find his body, his wife will accordingly receive a considerable amount of insurance money, and then they will go together to somewhere in Vietnam with that money, though his wife does not know anything at all just like his mother. As a matter of fact, she is so genuinely devastated by the growing possibility of his death that she is taken to a local hospital after having an unexpected medical emergency.

Because he really wants to help both Yong-soo and his wife, Yeong-gook tries to handle the situation as much as he can, but, of course, things do not go as well as he and Yong-soo hope. While nobody suspects them at all, the insurance company is actually quite ready to give the money to Yong-soo’s wife, but the official confirmation on his death is necessary for that. In addition, it turns out later that the search for Yong-soo’s body can actually be continued a lot longer than he and Yong-soo thought at first, regardless of whether the body can be really found or not in the end.

As Yeong-gook gets more frustrated and exasperated alone by himself, the movie observes more of how life has been quite despairing for him and many others in the village. As a local guy who gets hired by Yeong-gook shortly after his unwelcomed return bitterly admits to Yeong-gook at one point later in the story, the village has already been going down and down toward the bottom for many years without much hope or future, and Yeong-gook and many other local fisherman have no choice but to try to keep going anyway despite being constantly aware of their despairing status of life.

The movie also pays some attention to Yong-soo’s wife, who becomes quite desperate due to her husband’s absence. Without him, she finds herself all the more vulnerable to the racial prejudice of many villagers, and they casually gossip a lot about that insurance money right in front of her just because of their petty jealousy. Yong-soo’s mother, who still desperately hopes to see her son alive, is certainly willing to stand by her daughter-in-law as sharing their concern, but we sense that there has always been a considerable distance between them nonetheless.

While the situation becomes melodramatic as expected around the last act, the screenplay by director/writer Park Ri-woong keeps focusing on adding more detail and depth to its main characters, and his main cast performers are all effective in their respective parts. Yoon Joo-sang, a 75-year-old veteran actor who has steadily appeared here and there in numerous South Korean movies and TV dramas for more than 30 years, is often electrifying as flawlessly embodying the complicated human qualities of an aged but strong-willed man with a fair share of flaws including his hot temper, and it is definitely one of the best South Korean movie performances of this year. While Yang Hee-kyung, who also has a long and respectable acting career just like Yoon, is equally intense as Yong-soo’s devastated mother, Park Jong-hwan and Park Won-sang are solid in their key supporting roles, and the special mention goes to Vietnamese actress Khazsak Kramer, who does more than holding her own place well among the other main cast members.

On the whole, “The Land of Morning Calm” is the impressive second feature film from Park, who previously made a notable feature film debut in “The Girl on a Bulldozer” (2021). You may not like Yeong-gook that much even in the end, but you will come to have some understanding and empathy on him after the haunting last shot of the film, and that is what a really good movie can do for us in my inconsequential opinion.