Amateur Recommendation Hour: The Fake

Today’s recommendation comes with some considerations to keep in mind, but not because it has glaring flaws, oh goodness no. It’s QUITE remarkable I think. It was clearly a passion-project created with a shoestring budget, and sure I could bemoan the quality of the animation being wildly inconsistent and the hit or miss voice acting, that’s not what makes me wary recommending this piece. It is an extremely bleak work that I think would turn A LOT of casual viewers away. If you consider yourself to have the emotional stomach for it it is definitely worth a try. 

It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, it’s fascinating to look at, important to experience, and worthy of it’s place in art, but it doesn’t particularly make you feel hopeful, and it’s not supposed to. There's something to be said about the deepest despairing works providing impactful perspectives about how we perceive our own personal ongoing stories and histories and taking into considering the important questions works like these asks of its viewers.

The Fake, directed by Yeon Sang Ho (Train To Busan director), is an extremely unsettling, raw, and harrowing story going very unpleasant places to make very strong points about the messages it is trying to convey. He is no stranger in not pulling punches when creating his works, as evidenced by his previous and controversial animation work "The King Of Pigs.” Personally speaking I find it interesting that while his aeni (Korean animation colloquial equivalent to “anime”) works are much more aggressive in tone, theming and style whereas his live action films and television dramas take from the same creative muse but with more gentle and sincere messaging. 

The residents of a rural village place their hopes in a religious elder to find them a new home when the construction of a hydroelectric dam dooms their village to flooding. An angry and seemingly irredeemable man sees through his confidence tricks and tries to convince the townsfolk of his facade. I’ve heard the film described as “an evil man who tells the truth vs. a decent man who lies” and I think that is an extremely apt description.

There are fascinatingly no characters for the viewer to positively tether themselves to. Each main player in the conflict at large is not especially redeemable to say the least. Which isn’t to say that they aren’t believable, remember, likability and believability of character are not inherently intertwined. Each character has a whisper of truth about them despite their lack of intelligence. It’s one thing to show us characters that reflect the best of us that we can connect to on a gentler level, but what about the people who show us what we don’t want to see? The pieces of ourselves that we’d rather deny a part of our whole. The darker and unsavory. Fortunately I’d wager none of us can relate with the darkest and most prominent parts of Kim Min-chul, a habitual family abuser with a drinking and gambling problem who is able to see through the facade of the minister and the lies he brings to the fellow townsfolk, creating devotion and reverence in them as he goes.

While the film is never explicitly or exclusively horror, its portrayal of its village certainly leans into that idea. Less geologically isolated and more ideologically remote from the rest of modern civilization. Being much more susceptible to indoctrination via religious reckoning than one might expect from a community not too detached from our modern ways of life. It's easy to forget that a lot of the film takes place in areas not too far removed from what we are familiar with. Transportation, modern facilities, night lights and night life are all common staples that anyone accustomed to living in a populous area would be aware of. As with a lot of Yeon's films its emotional thrust is not often immediately identifiable due to it not showing itself on a surface level. 

It’s color palette a foreboding mixture of twilight reds, greens and disorienting yellows with the occasional grey. This towns population may feel like it’s getting closer to heaven with each donation, each true believer, but the man who brings hell to everyone he crosses, everyone he knows is the only one aware enough of that darkness to see the darkness in the movement sweeping the countryside. 

It is a piece about the importance of thinking for oneself and not being impressionable to any ideology or ideologue. It is a scathing criticism of organized religion gone to the point of indoctrination, hiding behind religion as an excuse to make bad decisions that harm other people and the sliminess of the financial muscle of megachurches. At least that is my own personal interpretation of the places that this work attempts to go and many times effectively does through its unflinching and nuanced characterization as well as its believable story beats. It is not a nihilistic work of fiction. Rather it takes us to the deepest and darkest places imaginable to show us that while we are there. 

Equal parts affirming and destructive, The Fake is a fascinating artistic work that doesn’t enjoy taking us on a field trip to hell, but feels that it must in order to allow us to see what it is capable of, brought by the people who sell us harmony and utopia. And who better to take us there than a man borne of its muse? It is not an easy watch. Far from it, in fact. But it is undeniably and thunderously resonant. Not only its artistic quality, but its philosophical musings and exploration of the darkest parts of the human soul. The darkest arts deserve to exist, especially if within us, they create the potential to bring indisputably real light and hope with us where we go in the aftermath of our experience with that dark art. That has inarguable, tangible meaning.