The Trap (2015)

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The Trap (2015)

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This South Korean movie is kind of a cross between "Lolita" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice", but much weirder than either. A young writer goes to a rustic, isolated mountain resort to work on a project, but becomes very distracted by the pretty young assistant of the owner. At first, he is secretly obsessed with her, crawling on the rusty roof of a tin shack to spy on her as she bathes, but eventually she reciprocates his attentions and they enter into a full-blown sexual pas de deux, which leads to an inevitable conflict with her brutish employer (who she is also sexually involved with).

The girl at first perversely appears to be a high-school age schoolgirl, but after the protagonist follows her to "school" one day, he finds out that things aren't as they seem. The girl eventually goes from a coquettish lolita to a Lana Turner-esque femme fatale, but she does not have the venal yet rational motives of a traditional femme fatale, but seems playing a much more sinister and psychotic game. The movie is also quite surreal. It has a dearth of dialogue (which is fortunate since the version I saw had no English subs) and a lot of weird and arresting imagery like an abandoned SUV in the middle of the deep woods. The narrative is very disjointed, elliptical, and time-disoriented. It may have been a mistake by the low-budget production, but there is no attempt at continuity as far as the weather goes. Scenes go back and forth between snowy winter and what looks like late spring, so much so that's it impossible to tell how long the writer is even at the cabin. But mistake or not, this only adds to the effectively disjointed, surreal atmosphere.

The movie is also genuinely erotic. It opens with a graphic male-on-female oral sex scene, but then slowly builds up the sexual tension for about an hour before ending with a lot more sex scenes, some of which are quite perverse (the employer checks if his young mistress has been faithful to him by pulling down her pants and sniffing her–a scene very similar to one in the novel "Lolita" that, not surprisingly, was never adapted in any of the movies). It's impossible to tell whether the actress (Je In Han) is 17, as she appears at the beginning, or closer to 30, as she looks by the end, but regardless she is very attractive and has numerous tantalizing nude/sex scenes. Of course, it's not all that hard to find a hot girl to do nude sex scenes, but very few of them are able to go through such impressive acting paces or appear in a movie that is nearly this interesting. Recommended.

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The Trap (2015)

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