«The Call of God» is Kim Ki-duk's beautiful posthumous film and a reckoning with himself, likely for everything he knew he had done wrong, both emotionally and physically, in his life. The film was little seen due to the incidents surrounding him with the "#MeToo" accusations, which ended his career in South Korea. Upon relocating to Latvia, he was attempting to embark on a new phase of his career, but died unexpectedly at the age of 59 due to COVID-19.
The film undoubtedly ranks below his best-known works, which put South Korean cinema on the cinematic map for Western moviegoers, along with the films of Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. But, as Kim himself stated, his films did not reach "a middle ground" with audiences. His movies all resisted the conventional system of world cinema, which forgoes controversial edges and dramatic liberties to fill theaters. Kim voted in favor of film art. "If they were more like wood or metal, I am more like earth. They can transform into something else, but I cannot." However, for a filmmaker who never studied film, Kim handled himself effectively as a director, screenwriter, producer, and here as a cinematographer.
Even though Kim died before he had a final cut of the movie, «The Call of God» possesses the same eroticism, mysticism, machismo, misogyny, compassion, and violence as «The Isle,» «3-Iron,» «Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring,» «The Bow,» and «Samaritan Girl.» It tells the story of a woman who has a chance encounter with a man and immediately becomes entangled with him in a romantic, sexual relationship, filled with grievances and jealousy that lead them down a tortuous and delirious path, which reminded me of the portentous «The Isle,» with its equally destructive female protagonist, capable of leading to the extermination of the couple. But unlike that work, this time Kim gives us a beautiful ending, thanks to the element of "mystical fantasy" present: the introduction of the voice of a God, who calls the woman on the phone and warns her that what she has experienced is only a dream and that, if she wants it to continue, she should keep sleeping.
All the rhetoric of idealized fascination with one another, which sometimes (or often) appears in our romantic adventures and borders on sentimentality, is mixed with eroticism and lyricism, all tempered by realism, resulting in a poetic and melancholic farewell to one of the great masters of world cinema.
