Review of Beasts Clawing at Straws / 지푸라기라도 잡고 싶은 짐승들, directed by Kim Yong-hoon

Korean crime movies and thrillers truly are some of my favorite kinds of movies. I don’t know why, and there’s definitely some academic and historical reason beyond what I’ve already researched, but these kinds of films just hit a lot harder than the American ones.

I’m totally not biased when I write this at all, not at all. Anyways, I was looking for a movie to watch one night and decided to stumble through my Mubi account to find something I’d never heard of. I was surprised I had never seen this film before, but saw Jeon Do-yeon was in it and decided to press play.

Lately, I’ve ben on such a kick for Jeon. She’s become my girl crush actor, as some of the roles she’s decided to play in the past couple years are straight up my alley.

I absolutely adored her character in Kill Boksoon, and although she can be a terrible mother in that movie, I wanted to be her when I grew up. So I ended up watching this film, and was surprised to see so many familiar faces. I will say, I started laughing when I saw the guy from Love Alarm. I thought that him being in this in that specific role was hilarious.

Onwards with the review!

When a Louis Vuitton bag full of cash is left at a sauna, chaos ensues.

There are three main characters in Beasts Clawing at Straws, and we get to know them pretty well. Their stories are independent from each other at the beginning of the movie, but when it comes down to the wire, all three sides of the story are smashed together brutally.

But first we are introduced to Joong-man, a worker at the sauna who opens one of the lockers and finds a massive Louis Vuitton bag stuffed inside. Its owner seems to be long gone, so he opens up the bag and is shocked to see that it is stuffed full of cash. Instead of calling the police, he decides to hide the money and stash it away for his own purposes.

That’s when we meet the other two main characters. There’s Tae-yong, a man in debt who basically sold himself to the gangs and criminals in the underworld. He basically is owned by a man named Mr. Park, and works with one of the guy’s grunts to try and run a scam operation.

He could also really use the money, but no one needs it more than Mi-ran, a prostitute for hire that has an abusive husband. When a young man becomes one of her clients, he weirdly offers her the chance to murder her husband.

She ends up leaving home because of it with the young man, who kills someone by accident, and then, when he decides he need to go to the police for his actions, she runs him over with the car. That’s when she crosses paths with Soon-ja, the third main character in this movie.

Soon-ja promises her the chance to get away from everything she knows, and even has Mi-ran get the same tattoo of a shark on her thigh as her. But when she knocks out Mi-ran, the girl wakes up on a table.

Soon-ja dismembers her with a chainsaw, and throws her body into the lake. She meets up with Tae-yong, who now has a cop accompanying him everywhere because the cop is suspicious that Tae-yong is involved with the gang. He denies it, but the officer still ends up following him.

The three of them sit around the table, chatting idly about the remains of a the young woman, which we know is Mi-ran, found at a lake, and when Tae-yong goes away briefly, Soon-ja murders the officer.

Turns out Soon-ja and Tae-yong both want that cash in the Louis Vuitton bag. Tae-yong is set up by Mr. Park’s people and is chased through the streets, and when he finally reaches a main road away from the gangsters chasing him, he is brutally run over by a truck and killed. Soon-ja is captured by Mr. Park and brought into his fold to find the cash, and they trace it all the way back to Joong-man after heading to the sauna.

They burn down his house, but before they leave, Soon-ja kills Mr. Park. This sets his underlings off, and when she tries to flee with the cash in an airport, she is killed in the stall.

Joong-man, with his ill mother and now homeless, ends up the winner here. His wife is the cleaner at the airport, and when she goes into the stall Soon-ja was killed inside of, she finds all of the cash left behind. That’s the end of the film—I assume Joong-man is finally getting all of the cash and that this chase is over.

Overall Thoughts

This is a film that’s a wild ride, and not for the faint of heart. There are some major black comedy moments scattered throughout the film, and I thought they were genuinely funny. There’s also some moments of poetic justice that end up being funny if you have the right sense of humor, like Tae-yong being hit by the truck had me laughing because he’s yelling things out, it seems like he might get away, and then that’s it. It’s a pretty solid film with great acting.

Sure, it;’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a very good debut effort from the filmmaker. Lots of loaded commentary of what one would do if they found a bag full of cash and the lengths they’d go to get out of debt.

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