Saibi

1 sentence review: If you don't like dark stories and heavy theme, and cannot handle being frustrated while story develops, you will not like this movie.

Similar to Sangho Yeon's last movie, Dwaejiui Wang, Saibi depicts a darker part of the society, such as religious cults, swindlers, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence. Throughout the movie, the viewers are left to ponder about what is right and what is wrong, and may be very frustrated by how there is not a single character that truly acts on "justice". I will leave to to the viewers to decide what director Yeon was trying to communicate in this movie, ... but I think he did an excellent job.

The art and sound isn't outstanding, but it does not inhibit the overall presentation of the movie. Most of the animation is 3D, which some of us may not like, and there wasn't really a soundtrack that stood out. As far as I can recall, the soundtrack was quite minimalistic of it existed at all, but this actually helps in depicting the cold reality of this movie; there is no soundtrack in real life lol.

The character in combination with the plot was simply great. At least that's my opinion. If I explain why, it will be a spoiler, so I won't talk about it in two much detail. There are two main protagonists of this story. One is an alcoholic father who abuses his daughter and his wife whenever he comes home. Another is a priest who leads a rundown church in the village which is about to be filled up with water due to a dam project. There are multiple conflicts that involves those two protagonists, and they all come together and reach an unexpected conclusion.

I ran out of energy so ill just end my review here. If you're fine with dark heavy story, I recommend it.

Saibi is a movie about how horrible life can be and how horrible some people can become. It focuses heavily on the ideas of right and wrong and how far you would go to represent your opinions. Would you even destroy happiness of others to do so?

The story takes place in a poor village in South Korean. In this village is a small Christian church which a lot of the villagers visit, to pray and hope for a better afterlife. You as the audience focus the conflict between the main protagonist and this church. The main protagonist is for me the most unlikeable character ... of all. He is an aggressive alcoholic who beats up his daughter and his wife as often as he can while insulting everyone who he is speaking to. The movie sadly doesn’t go into any detail why he ends up being such an asshole, it gives you hardly any background information to any of the characters overall.

Saibi is a very depressing movie. It won’t give any happy moments or a fulfilling feeling. The characters that you root for won’t get their happy ending.

I am not the biggest fan of letting my cheers for the likeable characters getting crushed but this movie creates such a big impact because it is just like a very sad story about the real life and I guess that’s the movies biggest advantage… its proximity to reality. Of course there are some scenes where you ask yourselfe “what?”, or “how?”, but basically the movie resembles a shitty life in some poor south Korean village, as close as you can imagine it. (as a person not living there and only hearing stories)

The reason I gave this movie a 7 was because I didn’t enjoy this movie that much. It has a very slow start and the first half was for me rather boring. I first really started to like this movie after the ending, when I looked back at it and put aside all my subjective feelings about what I wanted to see and how the movie should have been.

The artstyle is probably the point why I thought this movie was boring. In such a depressing reality near movie it is very important to have an atmosphere to engage the audience to the story. The Soundtrack was fine and accomplished that, but the visuals just kept pushing you away from the atmosphere with its shitty cgi looks. I have to say that I have seen worse cgi in anime, but I just can repeat myself by saying that cgi in anime looks just terrible nearly every time.


So overall Saibi is a very depressive movie and definitely not for people who like happy endings. It has a sad atmosphere to it which sadly cannot grip you that much because of its terrible visuals. But despite all its flaws Saibi will definitely be a movie you won’t forget so quickly after finishing it.

Rate a 5
English Subtitled

Story
-Introduction was average.
- Plot was average. Nothing mind breaking was shared. If someone is throwing out lies it only makes sense that people will be effected by those lies. Where is the surprising element? Although it was a nice movie in terms of making you think. Not great but nice. Good for filling in blanks to what one could perceive as unexplained evil.
-Conclusion was realistic but not memorable.

Art
Trouble with computer graphics is something wont look right. In this case it was the cars in some scenes. Luckily that was mainly it.
...
character
-lacked in character background on some characters.
-Characters actions were suited properly with mood.

Overall: You don't need a movie to tell you what to believe. You are most likely old enough to know things can go more than one way in life. There will always be elements of good and bad in each and every one of us. What is the movie trying to teach us? That life's individual actions should always be checked regardless? Yeah, that might be true but there is no realistic way that is happening any time soon. For people care deeply on time as well as money.