Synopsis
Raised to be a killer.
After being kidnapped as a small child and raised by the five men who abducted him, a teenage boy is now forced to join their life in crime.
Hwayi: A Monster Boy
2013 ‘화이: 괴물을 삼킨 아이’ Directed by Jang Joon-hwan
Cast
Kim Yoon-seok Yeo Jin-goo Cho Jin-woong Jang Hyun-sung Kim Sung-kyun Park Hae-jun Im Ji-eun Park Yong-woo Kim Young-min Seo Young-hwa Yoo Yeon-seok Nam Ji-hyun Lee Kyung-young Moon Sung-keun Han Joo-wan Lee You-mi Park Jin-woo Han Chul-woo Min Young Min Bok-gi Kim Lok-kyoung Park Kyung-hye Park Myung-shin Son Jong-hak Park Seong-jun Woo Jung-kook Son Kang-gook
Director
Producer
Executive Producers
Writer
Original Writer
Editors
Cinematography
Additional Photography
Production Design
Set Decoration
Visual Effects
Stunts
Composer
Sound
Costume Design
Makeup
Studios
Country
Language
Alternative Titles
Hwai: The Child That Swallowed A Monster, Hwa-yi: The Boy Who Swallowed A Monster, Hwayi: Gwimuleul samkin ahyi, 화이-괴물을 삼킨 아이, ファイ あくまにそだてられたしょうねん
Popular reviews
More-
After a failed ransom attempt, 5 criminals decide to raise the boy they kidnapped as their own and name him Hwayi. While growing up and learning all the tricks of the trade from his 'fathers', he also sees a frightening phantom monster chasing him from time to time.
So I rewatched this in response to a YouTube video requesting feedback. Hadn't seen it since April 2019 and never had the desire to return.
The concept was great, the characters felt real and I didn't mind the high school romance side story. It's an entertaining ride, until a particular scene inside a warehouse pulls the rug out from everything that was built up and spills this into disposable Korean thriller territory.…
-
"You have to become the monster to make the monster go away"
Unfassbar. Ich bin sprachlos. Mir fällt es sowieso schon immer schwer, einen für mich perfekten Film zu beschreiben. Alles was ich grade sagen kann: Der Film strahlt eine (für mich wohltuende) Kälte aus, wie ich sie zum Beispiel auch bei I Saw the Devil verspüre. Quasi der Grund, warum ich vor vielen Jahren überhaupt angefangen habe, mich dem koreanischen Kino zu widmen. Der Film ist kalt und hart wie ein Eisblock. Traurig, brutal, erbarmungslos, spannend. Warum die meisten Reviews hier bei Letterboxd eher mäßig sind, kann ich mir beim besten Willen nicht erklären. Die einen mögen die erste Hälfte, aber die zweite nicht. Bei den anderen ist es genau…
-
The premise is similar to Coin Locker Girl, but luckily this is by far the superior film. Both my problems with CLG are addressed: the crime family are a lot more sympathetic and they feel dangerous this time around. I also like that the motive for Yeo Jin-goo’s revenge feels extremely personal, and the film has some really fun action scenes.
The third act didn’t go the way I assumed it was going to go which was an exciting surprise.
-
-
Nature vs nurture has been debated by scientists and philosophers for thousands of years with little consensus, but is seems like whenever the topic is broached in popular media or literature, it always seems to come down to nature—perhaps for dramatic reasons. The actual balance in reality is contextual and unclear, but in books and in movies the answer is always straightforward: your genes did it. I'm not sure why it has to be this way, and I'd like to see some form of media that gives us some nuance. Hwayi doesn't do that, and in fact subjects the viewer to an unnecessary finale where the topic is discussed in an annoyingly simplistic and dumb way. Leading up to the end, there was a very effective movie, and it's possible to see an alternate movie that ended earlier in a much more satisfying way, where the questions the movie asked were left unanswered.
-
Poco me parece en lo que se convierte este pobre chiquillo. Una película muy chula.
-
A brutal, grim, and tragic melodrama. It's got a promising premise, that while it may play out like a typical violent melodrama, it packs a lot of punch to make it satisfying. I loved the grim tone and the deathly, yet beautiful rural cinematography. Acting is top notch and it more than a couple times makes a few unexpected turns.
-
Es geht um ne kleine Gangsterbande, das Besondere eines Tages entführen Sie ein Kind, eigentlich für eine Lösegeldforderung. Doch es ging schief und Sie behielten das Kind. Das Interessante dabei alle ziehen ihn auf und so hat er mehrere Väter, die natürlich nicht die besten Vorbilder sind. Aber noch spannender ist wie die Väter unterschiedlich agieren, manche sehr nett andere hart zu Ihm.
Was echt unerwartet war, waren die Humoreinschübe, die echt gelungen waren.
Hwayi muss aber unfreiwillig in die Fußstapfen seiner Väter treten und ebenfalls zum Killer werden.
Wird auch noch sehr dramatisch, denn sein erster "Job" lässt Verbindungen zu seinem alten Leben vor seiner Entführung aufkommen. Und die Dramatik funktioniert echt, gerade wie die Konstellation zueinander miteinspielt.
Wie… -
A different take on the revenge thriller with a serious amount of daddy issues, abusive behaviour, heavy-handed "I wanked to Nietzsche once" metaphors, some great acting and some over the top stuff. Definitely worth a watch and intriguing though and whoever drew the pictures for that end credits scene is a talented person for sure!
-
Be careful what you teach your kids or else it might come back to bite you in the ass or, in this case, snipe you in your face 😅
It’s a pretty grim story we have here, starting with a kidnapped kid where the ransom went wrong but instead of killing him the 5 kidnappers decide to raise him as their own. They’re a pretty funny ragtag bunch of crooks to be honest. There’s Seok-tae - the cold but charismatic leader played disturbingly well by Kim Yoon-seok, Ki-tae - the driving expert with a stammer played with an endearing innocence by Cho Jin-wong, Jin-seong - the job planner played by the charismatic Jang Hyun-sung, Beom-soo - the unhinged gun expert…
-
Being a huge fan of SAVE THE GREEN PLANET, I had very high hopes for Joon Hwan-Jang making a worthy followup feature. Maybe my rating is a little too harsh, being more reflective of disappointment than anything else. HWAYI is your usual sadistic Korean melodrama bandying about Psych 101 Freud concepts to give meaning to the grim procession of cold-blooded murders, torture, and histrionics. Its ultraviolent tale of an adopted teen lashing out against his biological crime family would be ripe for a bit of irreverent piss-taking, or at the very least the same kind of extreme tonal shifts from GREEN PLANET. But no, HWAYI becomes a relentless slog that's about as funny as the Bataan Death March. A very fine, chilling performance from Kim Yun-Seok is one of the few redeeming points of this monotonous and brutally depressing story.
-
A teenager raised by a family of criminals. They do hits, kidnapping, they're a criminal enterprise. Theres a contract out to kill an entire family and the kid can't follow in the steps of the family business. Korea is the only country that can pull out stories like this one and make them into great thrillers. Extremely brutal, well done, you know if you're a fan of Korean films. Also the ending is pure bloody mayhem. Amen.