Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Asura: The City of Madness
2016 · Kim Sung-soo · Asura: The City of Madness on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how wet and gray nearly every exterior looks. (light)
The film sticks to a sodium-and-steel palette, and rain keeps smearing every surface, so the city never looks clean even in its ordinary scenes.
Payoff: The look refuses to make any of this corruption look glamorous.
Watch the mayor's hands whenever he greets someone. (performance)
Hwang Jung-min plays Park as one continuous gesture, a grip on the shoulder, a slap, a grin, that can turn into violence without changing register.
Payoff: Hospitality and appetite look like the exact same motion in his hands.
Notice how often characters get boxed into doorways, corridors, or cars. (staging)
Kim Sung-soo repeatedly traps his people in small enclosed spaces within the larger sprawl of the half-built city, boxes inside a bigger box.
Payoff: There is nowhere in this city that reads as open or safe.
Listen for how wet and heavy every blow sounds on the soundtrack. (sound)
The mix favors the percussive impact of fists and bodies, and the quieter scenes stay tense with the hum of phones, traffic, and fluorescent rooms.
Payoff: The sound design never lets you settle, even between fights.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Park's hands. In this film hospitality and violence turn out to be the exact same gesture.