Title: Silenced (International)
Title: The Crucible (“Dogani” in Korean)
Release year: 2011
Directed by: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Screenplay by: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Starring: Gong Yoo, Jung Yoo-mi
Based on the novel “Dogani,” by Gong Ji-young
Summary: Based on actual events, it depicts the brutal physical abuse of children at a school for the hearing impaired. One of the victims is a deaf mute boy, one is a mentally handicapped girl, and the other is a deaf girl. The movie sparked controversy and brought about a change in legislation that went through in late October 2011. Called the Dogani Bill, it changed the statute of limitations for sex crimes against minors and the disabled in South Korea.
Pick up a copy from Amazon.
The minute I read the blurb I knew this was going to be one of those movies that was going to completely wrench my emotions. I was right.
I would still watch it again.
This was such an excellent movie that it forced me to see passed its subject matter. The rape of the children was depicted in a manner that highlighted just how brutally they were treated, yet the camera angles and cutaways mean that it’s not as graphic as it seems.
Gong Yoo plays Kang In-ho, a young man that has moved to the country from Seoul to teach at the school for the deaf. He has a kind of shady past, though he belies his somewhat wastrel history with his bumbling kindness and the care he shows the children. He has been hired to teach art, his old teacher Mr Kim having recommended him for the post.
Jung Yu-mi is Seo Yoo-jin, a human rights activist that Kang In-ho meets on his way into town. She hits his car, is rude, realizes she was the one at fault, and gives him one of her business cards. She is the one that drives him to the school — his car is in the shop from an earlier problem — and it’s kind of lucky that they met considering the creepiness that ensues when he reaches the school itself.
My first glimpse of the headmaster made me think “creeper.” So it was oddly fitting that he would turn around and have an identical twin brother that also worked at the school and somehow managed to be even creepier. They were like the twins from The Shining, but balding men with unsmiling faces and soulless eyes.
In those early scenes, there’s just this sense of something being very wrong. In-ho even mentions that the way the children respond to him is strange, cringing away and escaping his company as soon as they can manage.
So when he finds one of the girls being punished in the basement laundry, he chastises the teacher involved and rushes the girl to the hospital. He is very upset by how she has been hurt and calls Yoo-jin to handle her case.
It is then that Yoo-jin finds out that the girl wasn’t just beaten, but sexually assaulted. And she wasn’t the only one.
The headmaster and some of the teachers have been using the children as their own personal playthings, banking on the fact that they’re deaf or mentally handicapped to get away with their crimes.
In-ho doesn’t want to make waves. He was very lucky to get the job at all, and even had to pay $50,000 to the school fund before he could start, which results in hardships for his mother and young daughter. So there’s a big part of him that wants to act like the people around him and pretend that nothing is going on at all.
He wants to keep his job and not make waves, except he can’t ignore the faces of the three children that step forward so bravely. They tell their stories in flashback scenes that are both beautifully filmed — with the jellyfish swimming and the endless seeming corridors — and heartrendingly tragic. I wanted to save those children from what was happening, then I wanted In-ho and Yoo-jin to save them from having it happen again.
From the school, to the trial, to the riots that followed, I was completely wrapped up in what was happening and I can see how a movie like this could result in laws being changed. This movie brought up so much emotion: dread, anger, hope, disgust, bitterness, grief, and outrage.
Beautifully filmed, this was a story that needed to be told, and Hwang Dong-hyuk did it very well.
5 stars.
Check it out on Hulu. Or right here through this Hulu screen:
