[Dispatch=Reporter Tae Yun Jung] (※ This article contains spoilers for the film 'A Trip to Gyeongju'.)

The film 'A Trip to Gyeongju' (directed by Kim Mi-jo) wears two faces from its very title. 'Gyeongju' is both the name of the deceased youngest daughter and the name of the place where her death began.

'A trip' carries the meaning of both travel (紀行) and peculiar behavior (奇行). This film advances from beginning to end by grafting together two different meanings.

The opening scene of the film is no different. Four family members in a van discuss how to deal with the murderer who killed the youngest. Then they break into laughter over a single flying insect that enters the vehicle.

They plot murder, yet are startled by a mere insect. This gap leads to the question: "Is killing a person really so easy?"

The four family members visit tourist attractions with CCTV to establish an alibi, leaving photographs taken with a disposable camera. The photographs capture both murderous intent and family harmony.

These photographs are both an alibi and a record of their first real journey together since the family lost its function long ago.

The kidnapped offender does not show his face until the middle of the film. His appearance bouncing and fleeing with a plastic bag over his head is even comical.

The audience wavers for a moment. Could the offender truly be repenting? But the moment his face is revealed, the entire genre flips.

Murderer Baek Sang-hyun (played by Byun Yo-han) instantly pulls out a viciously cruel face. The possibility of remorse and the deprivation of that possibility. The film hands both to the audience side by side, then takes them away.

The face of mother Ok-sil (played by Lee Jung-eun) is also two-sided. Her early face is haggard and worn, yet she cannot hide the anger that intermittently surges like lava.

The appearance evoking Oh Dae-su from the film 'Oldboy' is likely no accident. The distance between the face of an ordinary middle-aged woman running a tailor shop and the face of someone who has decided to kill someone.

The film does not skip across this distance. The moment madness enters that face in the latter half is the true climax of this film.

The reason the three daughters join their mother's revenge is not singular. The heart to complete the revenge and the heart to follow because the mother seems to survive coexist.

For the past eight years, the mother, burdened by the grief of losing the youngest, could not properly care for her remaining daughters. This journey is also a double-edged path for the daughters. The heart to confirm the end of hatred and the heart to hold onto mother again.

Ok-sil ultimately faces Baek Sang-hyun alone. Before him crying to be spared, she pulls out a note she has written in advance. It contains a question she has asked countless times: Why did you kill my daughter? What were her last words?

But in the end, she asks nothing. Instead, she says, "I was so afraid I would forgive you." For Ok-sil, forgiveness was not peace but a betrayal of love for her daughter.

Ok-sil kills the offender and ties his body with rope, dragging it to the top of a tall pine tree. She ties the end of the rope around her own waist and hangs with all her strength.

She pushes the secret revenge to the highest and most visible place. It is also a gesture to finally bring the agonizing pain that no one acknowledged into a visible place.

The ending of the film returns to that day. The morning Gyeongju left for a school trip. The mother finally delivers the words she could not say then. Gyeongju leaves the neighborhood peacefully with the words "I'll be back."

This scene is both the completion of revenge and the completion of parting. What the mother has severed is not just one life. It is the pain that had held her for eight years. Only then could the mother let her daughter go.

In the end, the title 'A Trip to Gyeongju' was a preview. Name and place, travel and peculiar behavior, forgiveness and betrayal, revenge and parting.

The film develops by forcibly joining two hearts that seem irreconcilable. And it does not smooth away that suture line.

It ends not with melodramatic forgiveness nor with the catharsis of exhilarating revenge, but somewhere in between, never turning away its gaze until the end.

What lingers longest from the film is the receding silhouette of Gyeongju on a bicycle. The daughter the mother had held onto for eight years finally recedes with her own strength.

In that moment, the mother's peculiar behavior becomes travel. The journey begun for revenge ultimately becomes a time of mourning to let her daughter go. But revenge's end does not return the lost time.

Revenge has ended, but the life after that day cannot be undone. That will be the unresolved fatigue 'A Trip to Gyeongju' leaves with audiences.

The film opens on the 26th. Runtime is 111 minutes.

"A Mother Who Must Kill to Live" (A Trip to Gyeongju ★★★☆)

<Photo provided=Lotte Entertainment>