South Korean crime drama ‘Revelations’ tackles vigilante justice

The opening scene is intriguing, but a harbinger of how overstuffed and scattered the film becomes. During a downpour, a young pastor welcomes his congregation into his tiny, local church. Among them is a teenage girl, who’s been followed to the service by a mysterious older man with a scar across his face—who’s in turn tailed by a conspicuous, short-haired woman waiting for him outside. This coincidental crisscrossing of characters eventually comes together, but at first, it paves the path for several stories playing out in parallel for much of the two-hour runtime.

As the older man, Yang-rae (Shin Min-jae), leaves to follow the girl after the service, he’s stopped by the eager pastor, Min-chan (Ryu Jun-yeol), who hopes to sign him up as a new member of the church. However, upon spotting Yang-rae’s ankle monitor, Min-chan begins looking upon him with immediate suspicion. This drives him to follow Yang-rae later that night, when the godman’s young son coincidentally—a key word you’ll find repeated throughout this review—goes missing. He turns out to be safe, but in the interim, Min-chan’s doubts and his prejudice lead to a violent confrontation, after which the pastor sees (or thinks he sees) the face of Christ in a nearby lightning strike.

It's not exactly clear what this means to Min-chan until he and an injured Yang-rae happen to—another term to keep an eye on—cross paths a few days later, during which it finally becomes clear that the pastor has taken this perceived miracle as a signal to deal with the convicted criminal himself (it just so happens that he did, in fact, kidnap the aforementioned teenager at some point, off screen).

During the interim between the two men’s meetings, numerous other subplots arise, including Min-chan hiring a private eye to expose his wife’s affair, the establishment of a new megachurch, which Min-chan hopes to head, and the introduction of the short-haired woman from the opening scene, the grizzled detective Yeon-hee (Shin Hyun-been). The latter’s sister was once kidnapped and assaulted by Yang-rae, and she now believes that he was let off too easily, on the grounds of mental instability. Yang-rae’s encounter with Min-chan sends the veteran cop on a chase, during which she crosses paths with not only the pastor, but the pastor’s wife, who—stick with me here—she remembers spotting in the movie’s opening scene, which in turns leads her to put further information together.

With all these pieces in play about half way through the film, it ought to become easier to track just what sort of story Revelations is telling. From a distance, it’s a tale of obsession, between Min-chan’s religious visions driving him to vigilantism, the waking nightmares that seem to inform Yang-rae’s violent crimes, and occasional apparitions of Yeon-hee’s sister driving her to follow every thread. However, director Yeon becomes so concerned with swerving away from anything mystical or genre-centric that he ends up spending several extraneous scenes on explaining—in mental health terms—each character’s motives and beliefs, rather than letting them meaningfully clash.

It’s a film whose mysticism is immediately flattened in service of prescriptive storytelling about fixation and zealotry, without affording the characters the requisite room to breathe, or the plot as a whole the space it deserves to follow its own ideas to their emotional conclusions. Yeon imbues a few moments of chimera with the appropriate aesthetic delirium—the frame wobbles, zooms, and shakes in noticeable ways—but this flourish merely emphasizes the disconnect between each illusion and reality. Revelations never dares to tip over into presenting its images as the characters might see them. In the process, it pushes us out of their perspective, preventing us from feeling and fully understanding their compulsions.

This is also part of why the film’s numerous coincidences read as contrived. They are, on one hand, a key part of why Min-chan becomes convinced he’s on a holy mission (one that, mind you, never actually extends beyond the confines of Yang-rae). However, the more these happenstances pile up, the more they stretch credulity, especially when they begin applying to how the plot unfolds for other characters, like Yeon-hee. Beyond a point, the question of who exactly is where, and why they take any given action, becomes an entirely fluid prospect. Every detail and decision exists as if retroactively, in order to aid the movie’s plot, rather than emanating from the characters.

In theory, Revelations is a crime movie where the ethereal power of belief drives people to violent means and ends. However, Yeon’s literal-minded approach tends to kneecap the movie’s most potentially exciting and enticing scenes, resulting in an experience that feels distantly observed, rather than intimately felt.