Namyeong-dong 1985

National Security is unfortunately based on true events. South Koreans have a dark past behind them, and they are terribly good at making movies that leaves traces. National Security is one of those movies.

Most of the action takes place in a room where an innocent man is being tortured. The year is 1984, South Korea is a military regime and the man being tortured is accused of being a communist who tries starting a riot in South Korea. He denies it, and then starts the torture.

Water Torture is never the same again after you've seen what they do to the innocent man in National Security. You get really tired after 1 hour, but the film runs on only more torture. You have got to not leave traces, so for the torture they used are water and electricity. It feels very realistic, where we see a naked man getting a proper water belly.

As with so many other splendid South Korean movies are there, National Security is an important film that thankfully shows progress for the country that will always have a dark shadow hanging over it. This is probably a great film, it is almost not wrong to call National Security a great film, but it is a quality film that is shocking, frightening, very well played and well made. The creeps well below the skin and you will not forget the movie soon.

This profound film not only bravely dares to graphically delve into the psyche of the countless victims of unspeakable torture during the protracted ruthless thirty-year military dictatorship in South Korea, but soberingly, if not with some degree of ambivalence, skillfully asks if the perpetrators of such monstrously inhumane and unforgivable acts were, in fact, not monsters but rather merely depraved and rabidly ideological human beings. Understandably to even suggest such a controversial assertion, the natural reaction for so many who suffered at the hands of those depicted in this account would be to cry out with righteous indignation and horror, but I suspect the filmmakers perhaps take into consideration that a tendency to recognize perpetrators of such heinous acts as more than mere examples of gross human indecency and thus elevating them to some exceptional and ephemeral status, may serve an even greater detriment toward the future in addressing, or even preventing such unassuming "banality of evil" from going undetected.