[HanCinema's Film Review] "The Distributors"

Yoo-bin (played by Park Sung-hoon) is a schoolteacher who is introduced punishing some male students for taking pictures of female sudents without permission. Yoo-bin claims that he's letting them off with a warning because one of the students, Seong-min (played by Ji Min-hyuk), is the younger brother of his fiance Seon-ae (played by Kim So-eun). But before too long we're led to believe that Yoo-bin has his own personal history with private videos that he probably didn't learn the right lessons from.

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While "The Distributors" sounds like a polemic on the topic of public uploads of private videos, in practice the story plays out way more like a mystery, and one with a surprisingly unsympathetic victim. Yoo-bin is blackmailed in a really preventable way. We even hear his internal monologue going that he probably shouldn't be having drinks with women he's never met before! There's a definite sense that Yoo-bin probably doesn't deserve his fiance, even if her father, played by Ahn Suk-hwan, has relatively petty reasons for not approving of him.

But ethics are tightly woven into "The Distributors" because Yoo-bin's main problem is his general unwillingness to take responsibility for his own actions, and how this seeps into his role as a teacher. Yoo-bin refuses to acknowledge that unsanctioned digitial images are a big deal. He likewise refuses to acknowledge that covering up the extortion attempt looks worse for him than just acknowledging what happened.

The fact that Yoo-bin's best friend Sang-beom (played by Song Jin-woo) is tightly interwoven into an online community of perverts doesn't bother him anywhere near as much as it should. Then there's Ga-yeong (played by Jung Soo-ji), Sang-beom's ex-girlfriend who was so badly hurt by the (supposedly) accidental leaking of an intimate video Yoo-bin took that she's introduced to us in the present day operating an excavator, a job that doesn't require she see that many people face-to-face.

There's a neat phrase Yoo-bin uses with Ga-yeong that makes a dark reprise in the ending. Let's resolve this situation like humans. The phrase "let's handle this like civilized people" better gets across the vibe of the original Korean. The implication that wanting to be harsh to a person who does a crime like this is overly savage. And this idea betrays some fairly important values. A person can only savagely persecute you for a crime if you believe that persecution is out of proportion to the original crime.

And this consistently informs Yoo-bin's own philosophy to the crime, both in the opening scene of the movie as well as in the drama that proceeds it. He clearly believes that even the threat of negative consequences, or just shame, is enough to disincentivize a person from engaging in similar behavior in the future. Which obviously isn't true, going from his own experience. I'm not sure I find the final escalation of "The Distributors" all that convincing, mostly because certain details had to be obscured in order to better heighten the mystery. Still, as far as that mystery goes, "The Distributors" is compelling even if it's not Hitchcock.

Written by William Schwartz

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"The Distributors" is directed by Hong Seok-goo, and features Park Sung-hoon, Kim So-eun, Song Jin-woo, Park Joo-hee, Lim Na-young, Ji Min-hyuk. Release date in Korea: 2022/11/23.