Pietà, review - Telegraph Pietà (18 cert, 119 min) dir: Kim Ki-duk stars: Lee Jung-jin, Jo Min-soo Here's the film which rather startled everyone by trumping The Master to win the Golden Lion at Venice last year, making it the first Korean movie ever to win the top award at a major festival. It's not that the director, Kim Ki-duk, is in any way a novice - it's actually his 18th feature, and the tremendous Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (2003) could have easily and justifiably claimed such a prize. It's that this particular film feels like punishment. In his bad-boy early years, Kim was notorious for scenes of animal torture and characters swallowing fish hooks. It's almost comical as a directorial imprint that Pietà opens with a huge hook dangling in the middle of the screen, from which a small-time shop owner in Seoul contrives to hang himself. He owes money to the thuggish Lee (Lee Jung-jin), whose favoured method of extracting payment is to force his debtors to self-inflict industrial accidents and claim on insurance. A mysterious woman, Jang (Jo Min-soo) turns up, claiming to be Lee's long-lost mother, and this long, meandering, undisciplined movie sets about showing him the error of his ways. Kim intends a parable about capitalism run amok, which is about as subtle as a wrecking ball aimed at the World Bank. Moreover, the mother-son side of things feels like a pale imitation of what Kim's countryman, Bong Joon-ho, achieved with his 2009 crime melodrama Mother. After several films which have failed to achieve wide distribution - the last one, Amen (2011), featured Kim on screen as a "gas-masked rapist" - it's good to be reminded of his existence, in a conditional sort of way. Perhaps next time he'll give us a film worth celebrating.