Goongnyeo

The English title of this movie is "Shadows in the Palace". An historic piece--part murder mystery, part horror--in the time of the Josean dynasty in Korea, the setting is at the palace nunnery where all the women have sworn chastity in service of the king. Not all are inclined to remain chaste, and we begin to see a world inhabited by ruthless ambition and abject cruelty in the competition among the king's wives to have a son declared heir to the throne. A murder occurs and a single, brave women pursues the truth, even as more murders follow, and a malevolent spirit seems to be afoot in and about the palace. Good acting, costumes and sets energize the story. Some of the violence in the film is not for the squeamish.

An absolutely beautiful looking film. Cinematographer Lee Hyung-Deok's use of lighting really is something that creates a certain darkness to the overall picture. Actors are usually half lit and some lovely backlighting to shape the face. Lee Hyung Deok's use of hard light also is very daring and something that many cinematographers would hesitate to do. His work in this film is a primary example of how handsome hard light can look if used properly. The sets themselves are not evenly lit, Lee Hyung-Deok's use of flags and gels help shape the light and create a moody atmosphere. It is surprising that he has not worked on many other films other than Hanyo (2010), A Company Man, Sunny and Finding Mr. Destiny. Shadows in the Palace currently only has a DVD release, the cinematography and sound design screams for this film to be released on Blu ray.

The original term of this movie called "Gungnyeo" refers to women waiting on the king and other royalty in traditional Korean society. A "gungjung yeogwan" is therefor a lady officer in the royal court, serving the royalty. "Shadows In The Palace" portrays the everyday life at the royal court during the time of the Joseon dynasty. The movie has a lot of documentary elements and focuses on the role of women at the court. The women were sworn into secrecy, submission and celibacy and devoted their whole lives to the well-being of the royal family. By showing the negative sides of this society filled with abuse, intrigues, murder, rivalry and treason, this movie is above all an almost documentary criticism of Korean's traditional society. It's also a very dedicated movie about the fate of women during that period, an aspect many historical movies and scientific books remain silent about. The movie convinces with authentic characters, detailed settings and beautiful traditional costumes. It teaches a lot about Korean history and if you're not into this kind of topic, you should simply avoid this movie. You might find it has many lengths if you only want to watch a crime flick.

Underneath these intentions lies a rather complicated story about a murder that is arranged as a suicide and nobody wants to speak about. Despite several menaces and warnings, the royal medic wants to discover the truth and has to suffer a lot before she discovers the main intrigue at the court. The final solution to the murder may not come as a surprise by the end of the film but you still discover a couple of elements about the different characters that add some in depth development to the movie.

It's quite for Western audiences hard to distinguish who's who and who did what and what are the reasons behind this. This epic historical flick contains a lot of different characters that all have diversified intentions and the story is not always easy to follow even if the ending returns to a certain kind of simplicity. That's why it's somewhat hard and for some even frustrating to sit through this movie that requests a lot of attention in my humble opinion. You may only discover some elements at a second sight and this film might request multiple views.

The whole things isn't helped by some fantastic horror elements that begin to appear towards the second half of the film. In my opinion, the flick didn't need these elements and eventually loses a lot of credibility. The strange ghost story simply leads the viewers on a wrong path as they might imagine that a vengeful ghost is the main reason behind the initial murder and the dramatic turn of events that follows. This simply doesn't fit to the quite accurate historical portrait of the movie and must be seen a s a big flaw.

In the end, I liked this movie from a cultural, historical and social point of view. From the point of view of someone that expects a crime movie, this flick is rather complicated but still worth a watch. For those who are looking for supernatural elements or horror influences, this movie is a rather silly deception. The movie simply contains too many unnecessary elements of different genres to be more than just a quite good film. This flick should have been more focused on its two main elements which are the historical portrait and the crime elements or it should have been divided into two full movies with more scenes giving additional informations and the viewers some time to digest the whole thing.

It's up to each one of you to decide if he or she takes the desperately needed time to get into this complex flick.

An interesting show, the setting and roles are familiar if anyone has seen the Dae-Jang Geum series (did they use the same set?). A palace maid, is found hanging from the neck and dead, dead, dead. A smart medical maid discovers during an autopsy (!) that there's a mystery. Now we see the palace maid corps and what a creative group these women are with sewing needles. A slight problem is figuring out who's who and what the heck is going on, but the who-done-it is done well. A supernatural twist is a neat spooky addition. Kind of a chick-flick with the almost all woman cast but a lot more blood, squirm factor and dark presence than the usual romantic melodramas.

Shadows in the Palace is a mighty interesting film. First of all, it's a women's film. And I don't mean that in the sense that Lifetime is a "women's network", but more in the fact that the vast majority of the key creative positions in the film were filled by women. Second, the film is interestingly a sort of detective mystery/thriller with some horror elements put in the film, set in the Chosen era of Corean history. Although the film suffers from having too much going on, its wonderfully shot and costumed and the story has so much going for it, despite its weaknesses, that it certainly kept me interested.

The visuals in the film are absolutely striking. Although I'm uncertain that the costumes are necessarily historically accurate, they are absolutely beautiful to look at and the film is well photographed. The acting is mostly superb as well, having a primarily female cast, I especially enjoyed watching the more mature actors really get into their rather complex characters.

Another thing about the film I found fascinating was the exploration of court dynamics. While the court maids were bound to serve the royal family (and similarly bound to chastity, among other rules), there's a lot of hinting that power plays were happening behind the scenes on the highest levels of power and these activities had a trickle down effect on the court maids. It's also interesting to see just how much power the women in this story wielded and how they are internally self-policing and self-sustaining.

The story begins, however, with a corpse and one court medic's search for what really happened. Her search causes us to cross paths with one of the king's concubines, who bore the only male heir to the thrown and who is also embroiled in a political power struggle to retain her place in the court, being pressured by the house of the queen. We run into a number of the house's administrators, most of whom seem eager to quell the medic's investigation and a number of additional characters, who are in turn suspects and further victims both. Finally, some even more mysterious occurrences begin happening as well. And all these steps are actually quite interesting to watch.

Part of the problem is that there's more going on than is necessary. First of the all, I find the medic's story to be the hardest to empathize with, and while it all plays out, I don't find it convincing. In addition, there's a bit of a horror element to the film as well and I feel it adds an unnecessary layer to the film--I think it would've been better served being more grounded--the story could've been told easily without those elements (many of which risk being a little stale). Then there are multiple red herrings and actual stories going on and while I could follow each story, without a strong grasp of the language and the ability to keep track of who's who and what's what (my advice: pay attention to the costumes--they actually help you keep tabs on the non-central characters), it might certainly be confusing to the less attentive viewer.

But seeing the machinations of the court play out and, even more interestingly, how they affect the next layer down in the level of the court maid was quite fascinating. With great visuals, a well-paced who/what-dunit, and a set of interesting plot lines, I ended up finding myself pretty fond of this film. Granted, it's no masterpiece and some of its excesses, especially the horror elements, probably limited the film's impact. Also, even though the film was essentially created by women, this is definitely not the kind of stuff you'd find on an American women's television network. There is blood, gore, a few jump frights and some creepy imagery to spare. But in the end, this is a sometimes fascinating piece held up well by the twisting plot, the well propelled story and a whole lot of interesting things for the eyes to see. 8/10.