Between Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the seemingly never-ending V/H/S franchise, and even Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is currently out in cinemas, anthology films are arguably having a moment. The appeal of such a project is understandable: why tell one single narrative when a director — or a series of directors — can offer a wide array of amuse-bouches, experimenting with form and storytelling conventions within the economy of a short, leaving viewers with a nice variety to enjoy. The options can certainly be enticing, but the drawback is always consistency: for every Memories, there are at least half a dozen Four Rooms, sinking proceedings entirely with misguided artistic judgment. To a reasonable degree, an anthology film is only as strong as its weakest segment, and thankfully, The Killers, a series of four shorts assembled by South Korean filmmakers Roh Deok, Kim Jong-kwan, Jang Hang-jun, and Lee Myung-se, manages its balancing act better than most. With a framework loosely adapted from the Ernest Hemingway short story of the same name — itself adapted into several features previously, most notably Robert Siodmak’s film in 1946 and Don Siegel’s in 1964 — The Killers is a sordid collection of hapless, opportunistic souls who come undone with streaks of graphic violence. It’s brutal stuff, but it also happens to be riotously entertaining, with the four filmmakers delivering one of the best pitch-black comedies of the year, offering laughs as often as winces.
The first segment of the group is “Metamorphosis,” which immediately plunges viewers into the criminal underworld and the unfortunate life of Wan-chul, whom we meet with a large hunting knife sticking out of his back. On the outs with his boss and barely escaping a violent confrontation with his life, Wan-chul seeks refuge in a bar, wherein the kindly bartender fixes him a drink. Of course, this is no ordinary bar, as the bartender and her clientele are revealed to be something much more vampiric in nature, and the fated Wan-chul appears to be next in line to join them. Shot alternately between a gorgeous monochromatic and seductively crimson color scheme, this is an appealing short to kick things off, with the only real complaint that it ends right when it feels like it’s just getting started. The second and best of the bunch is “Contractors,” an entry revolving around the world of hitmen. When a contract is placed on the life of a college professor, the job ultimately falls to the inept Kwon-su, who inadvertently kidnaps the wrong person with two of his buddies. “Contractors” is specifically The Killers most accomplished work with regard to tone, as Kwon-su’s assignment devolves into a tragicomedy of errors and mistaken identity. But there is also plenty of mordant humor to be found in the initial hiring process, as we witness the contract-killing ecosystem pass this job from one murder-for-hire to another, with the promised payday diminishing from the likes of $300,000 to $150,000 to $30,000 to $5,000 with each passing hand-off. A coda that informs us this actually occurred is icing on the cake.
Up third is “Everyone Is Waiting For The Man,” a masterful exercise in sustained tension. Two detectives stake out a bar, awaiting the arrival of a notorious criminal in order to apprehend him. Two tough-looking gangsters enter the same bar, also awaiting the same man. As the evening ticks away, the very person of interest they are seeking may already be among them, unbeknownst to all. With a visual design greatly inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, itself an inspiration from Hemingway, this is the most deliberately paced of the shorts, but it does feature a solid twist and builds to a spectacularly bloody payoff. The fourth and final segment is “The Killers,” aptly titled as it hems closest to Hemingway’s original short story, narratively speaking. And on formal terms, it’s the most dazzling of the bunch; director Lee Myung-se, arguably the most well-known of these four directors to international audiences, huffs the same fumes that made his 1999 Nowhere to Hide such a romp, gleefully tossing out every cinematic trick in the book in a single location, as a trio of intrepid diner workers are forced to endure the presence of two petulant gangsters — for some added humor, one character is named Smile but cannot physically smile, while another is named Voice but cannot physically speak. “The Killers” is also the slightest of the shorts, but undeniably the most enjoyable watch, if only to see what Lee will do next. Taken as a whole, then, The Killers is a wildly successful anthology experience that makes for a genuine hell of a ride, benefiting from being the rare instance of no bad apple in the bunch.
Published as part of NYAFF 2024.
