Beasts Clawing at Straws · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the bag. A worn duffel forgotten in a sauna locker, swollen with more money than Joongman — the man who mops that sauna — could earn in a lifetime of honest mopping. He finds it. He doesn't report it. From that one held breath the whole film unspools, and everyone who comes near the bag bends toward it the way iron bends toward a magnet. Watch the film once and you track the plot. Watch how people behave around the money and you're watching something Gilles Deleuze gave a name to.

Between the close-up that holds a feeling and the deed that answers a crisis, Deleuze placed a darker thing he called the impulse-image. Its world isn't social life — manners, jobs, roles — but the appetite churning underneath. He called that underneath the originary world: a savage zone of pure drives that erupts through the ordinary setting (the derived milieu) and drags whoever it grips down a line of slope toward exhaustion and ruin. This is almost the entire grammar of Beasts Clawing at Straws, and naming it is what lets the film stop looking like a clever crime puzzle and start looking like a study of what people are when the social skin is peeled off.

Kim Yong-hoon builds the derived milieu with documentary precision: dead-end shifts, a sick mother, a loan shark's vig, the private-debt machine grinding Mi-ran down. Recognizable, contemporary, Korean. But the film keeps pulling these people into the sauna — its 'moral and spatial hub,' a place where, stripped to towels, class melts off and 'something rawer' takes over. That's the originary world surfacing. The men scramble, sweat, lie; the milieu of debt is just the crust over an appetite that was always there.

The bag itself is the film's fetish — in Deleuze's exact sense, a part-object torn loose from the world and charged with compulsive force. The plot calls it a MacGuffin, and it is one; its contents matter less than the wanting it switches on. But Deleuze sharpens the point. The fetish doesn't reward desire, it exposes it. Each person's grab at the bag X-rays the specific wound they carry — Joongman's ordinariness curdling into theft by increments, Taeyoung's debt-panic, Mi-ran's exhaustion, Yeonhee's cold arithmetic of escape. And every grab tightens the trap. That's the line of slope made into structure: in the lineage of A Simple Plan, each cover-up demands a worse crime, and the slope only runs one way. Kim films the descent with a clinical, off-center camera that keeps you at observing distance — close enough to read the compromise on a face, far enough to feel the cold comedy of it. The deadpan is inherited honestly from Fargo, where small humiliations scale into murder and the film refuses to flinch or absolve.

Now the form. The chapter structure is the film's second engine, and it works on you. Deleuze's relation-image is cinema where meaning lives not on screen but in the relations the viewer holds — the audience installed as a knowing third party. Kim builds exactly this. Each chapter locks us inside one subjectivity, then the next chapter doubles back over ground we've already crossed and shows what that character couldn't see. We hold the web; they're caught in it. The bag becomes a symbol in the strict sense — the single object condensing every relation in the story. This is the architecture of Blood Simple, where multiple people pursue one object in mutual ignorance, so the object, not any villain, becomes the mechanism of catastrophe. No Country for Old Men and Pulp Fiction taught the withholding; Rashomon taught the return-and-accumulate, each pass adding rather than merely contradicting.

That reordering does one more thing Deleuze would flag: it turns the image into a lectosign, an image that has to be read rather than simply watched. A scene witnessed in chapter one means one thing; re-encountered later, it flips into retroactive irony you couldn't have felt in sequence. The film withholds legibility on purpose, so that comprehension arrives late and lands hard.

And then there's Yeonhee. While the men scramble, Jeon Do-yeon plays her almost entirely still — composure as power, the one figure who is never grabbing because she is the one doing the moving. She is Deleuze's forger: the protagonist of shifting identity who doesn't suffer the false world but authors it, forging a way out by remaking who she is. The film's late turns belong to her, and they're why its fatalism has a cold spark in it rather than only despair.

What did Beasts do for film? It took the Coen-brothers bag-of-money naturalism — an American form about ordinary greed — and rerouted it through the specific economic fault lines of post-Parasite Korea, then fused it to a relation-image structure so that the impulse-image reads as social diagnosis and not just genre. Naturalism usually shows you one person sliding down. Kim shows you a whole society on the same slope, and uses the chapter form to make the slope visible from above.

Watch it again and don't watch the bag. Watch the hands that reach for it. The film already knows what they'll do; it's only waiting for you to.