09/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: South Korean master Kim Ki-duk’s posthumous film possesses some great pathos, but its potential is undermined by its visual patchiness and nebulous writing

Late master Kim Ki-duk’s posthumous film Call of God has been presented out of competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The South Korean filmmaker, who passed away in Riga in December 2020 after contracting COVID-19, attempts to craft a story about the elusive relationship between reality, love and dreams.

Set in Kyrgyzstan, the plot centres on the turbulent, tragic love story between a young girl (played by Zhanel Sergazina) and a writer (Abylai Maratov), who casually meet at a crossroads. As the man is asking the girl where the “Dream Café” is, a thief snatches her bag. The writer chases him and manages to recover it, subsequently asking her out for dinner. The girl hesitantly accepts, and that is the beginning of a sick, terrifying love story between the two. In particular, the writer hesitates to break up with Lina (Nazbiike Aidarova) and one of his ex-girlfriends (Aygerim Akkanat), triggering a series of tragic vicissitudes along with a spiral of physical and psychological violence.

We then realise that the whole sequence depicting the pair’s first encounter has just been a dream. The girl wakes up in her bed and receives a phone call. The mysterious individual talking to her tells her that she can decide to go to sleep and see what happens next – and everything she dreams of will later happen in the real world – or to stop sleeping, in which case she will only go through what she has just dreamt, thus facing an uncertain future.

Such a narrative mechanism, however, doesn’t quite hit the mark and reflects the film’s overall nebulous writing. In fact, it gets harder and harder to understand what is being dreamt and experienced for real by the girl, and the clunky editing by Audrius Juzėnas and Karolis Labutis doesn’t help viewers make up their minds. More generally, the technical side of things – including the voice-over work done on some of the characters – feels a bit too amateurish and rushed.

In any case, it’s fair to highlight the fact that the production was finished off by the master’s late friends and colleagues, thus we don’t really know to what extent the entire project has been affected – and compromised – by the work carried out after his demise.

On a more positive note, we can still see some decent character development and a good dose of pathos, which will manage to keep the viewer hooked throughout. Even though the writing is patchy and confusing, it does boast sufficient depth, since it explores how jealousy and possessiveness can trigger a man and a woman’s darkest intents.

While heavily limited by the aforementioned flaws, the movie is still a generous act of love and an important homage to the career and vision of Kim-ki Duk, who was taken from us too soon.

Call of God was staged by Estonia’s Estofilm, South Korea’s Kim Ki-duk Films and Lithuania’s AVAKA. Estonian outfit MTU Otaku is in charge of its world sales.