Night Fishing (2011)

This was definitely a film of two halves for me, and I much preferred the first. From the opening few minutes with a lively performance from a Korean hybrid of the Fab Four and the Rolling Stones we shift down to the waterside where me meet a gent (Oh Kwang-roc) setting up for some night fishing. Now I don’t know about you, but having a pee in water you’re hoping to fish from maybe isn’t the best idea, but he’s got about twenty rods and enough light to illuminate a football stadium so the chances are the fish won’t be nearby anyway! What he does catch, though, is a woman. Not the Daryl Hannah sort, just an ordinary woman with whom he becomes entertainingly entangled thanks to his fishing lines and some really quite cleverly choreographed antics in the mud. Then we have some scenes with some fish that aren't for the faint of heart. The second part moves us to a quasi-religious ceremony involving an ice cold bath and a child in a wheelchair. Now I can’t pretend to understand the Shamanic symbolism of these scenes, but I did find them quite uncomfortable to watch as I wasn't sure I liked the idea of what I was expecting to occur. The whole thing is filmed through a camera phone - augmented with a great deal of professional kit - and whilst that might have been a big deal fifteen years ago, it means that from a quality perspective this hasn’t aged especially well and some of the latter stages look amateurish and borderline home-video. I could have done with just the first fifteen minutes, but the whole thing certainly doesn’t lack for imagination.