Director: Sang-soo Im
Talent: Yun-shik Baek, Hyo-jin Kim, Kang-woo Kim, Yoon Yeo-jeong
Release Date: October 25th 2013
Meet the Yoon clan, part of Korea’s one per cent, wealthy and powerful and as morally bankrupt as you’d expect. The environs they inhabit are so sleek and shiny that you’ll wonder how they manage to keep their footing, but The Taste of Money is unfortunately ultimately plagued by the same sort of shallowness it ostensibly seeks to expose. Banalities are delivered with Lockean grandeur, and while frequent code switching and prolific use of Americanisms seem authentic enough, the plot pointer soliloquies certainly do not. The rest of the film is similarly vapid: there’s a moment of clarity somewhere in the middle, but it very quickly comes tumbling down again thanks to a plot so poorly conceived of as to be completely unrelatable and a moral so trite as to render the whole thing cosmically uninteresting. And if it’s the erotic thriller rubric that’s got you interested, there’s plenty of porn on the internet.
Words: Eoghain Meakin
