At a time when many media scholars are blithely espousing the idea that cinema is dead, here comes a book that openly and unapologetically celebrates the latest national cinema that has found international success. Steve Choe's Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium is perhaps the only recent book published on Korean cinema that analyzes Korean films from the millennial decade without the context of hallyu or Korean Wave. While most recent books on contemporary Korean cinema rely on the popularity of the Korean Wave in order to tell the story of Korean cinema's globalization,Footnote ¹ Sovereign Violence is largely unconcerned with extra-filmic texts or cultural phenomenon. Even its cover, which is graced by not a recognizable hallyu star but a screen capture of an anonymous actress in an awkward close-up shot (it is apparently from Lee Chang-dong's Poetry) that cannot be easily identified even by a Korean film expert, is a radical departure from the recent wave of book covers that exploit the power of hallyu.Footnote ²

If Sovereign Violence’s total omission of hallyu is rather bold, then the confidence and careful attention placed on film analysis displayed on almost each and every page of this lengthy book are even more strikingly provocative. Drawn from Walter Benjamin's article “Critique of Violence,” the term divine violence lies at the core of Choe's analysis, a concept that is antithetical to the mythic violence that is compliant with the law of cause and effect. Choe's close textual readings rely on rigorous application of critical theory, and yet the book's elegant execution renders an almost effortless reading.

Choe argues that the millennial Korean films directed by Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Hong Sang-soo, and Kim Ki-duk all share the ambiguities accorded with this “divine violence.” This move, Choe claims, jettisons a conventional way of understanding the use of violence that normally is exchanged through a political “give-and-take” or legal “cause-and-effect.” The book's main assertion is that the Korean film auteurs, though criticized for representing crude violence and crass sexuality, are purposefully drawing from energies of “divine violence” that provoke profound ethical questions that go beyond the normative mode of employing violence to either summon appropriate punishment for crimes committed or seek a rational kind of justice. While conventional Hollywood plots are caught up in “mythic violence,” innovative Korean films rely on the power of “divine violence.” This allows for a new code of ethics to be written for cinema that not only interrogates the tumultuous Korean history of colonialism, war, and dictatorship, but also helps mute the melodramatic mode of victim-hero relationships.

The chapter on Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder (2003) where Choe raises the point of the face as both an expressive, melodramatic signifier and an ineligible reflection of morality that complements its theme of indeterminate violence is especially insightful. It is one of the most delightfully entertaining criticisms not just of Memories of Murder but also of the entire Korean cinema.

The transnational success of K-pop and K-drama usually makes a good entry point for any academic foray into the subject of Korean cinema; abandoning it however requires daunting levels of attentiveness and patience from any reader who may not be familiar with contemporary Korean films. Limiting perhaps its accessibility further is the fact that Sovereign Violence, despite its marketing copy that declares it to be a comprehensive analysis of nine major directors from Korea, is neither an eclectic selection of contemporary Korean films nor an offering of an insightful portrayal of the Korean film industry today. There are also some off-putting spelling and Romanization errors (for instance, the name of Park Jong-chul, the student activist found dead in 1987, is misspelled) and inexplicable ordering mistakes of Korean names (Kim Gok and Kim Sun are ordered “surname last” while most other Korean directors' names follow the “surname first” rule).

Some key theories are also somewhat trite and repetitive. Too often the book will submerge its readers into almost repetitive, clichéd theories of, for instance, Fredrich Nietszche's ressentiment, Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer, Gilles Deleuze's time-image, and Jacques Derrida's hospitality. At some point, one begins to wonder: where are the Korean aesthetics in all of this? Should not the same discussion of indetermination and deposition of the moral law derive not only from European modernist theories, but also from native Korean aesthetics?

Im Kwon-Taek, perhaps the predecessor for all these modernist and postmodernist filmmakers, is conspicuously absent from the book. Im's Sopyonje (1993) was quite possibly the first film of New Korean Cinema that departed from the humanistic depiction of violence and invoked instead “pure violence” by having the father figure commit a crime against his daughter. Sopyonje’s blinding of the daughter provokes a profound question of ethics that presages the coming of films by Kim Ki-duk and Park Chan-wook by nullifying the codes of melodrama and constructing instead an almost unsettling minjok identity that empties out the moral content in order to literally reconstruct p'ansori, the aesthetics of the Korean peasantry.

Despite Choe's insistence on employing dense theory to advance the understanding of contemporary Korean films, this is a book that cannot be easily put down. There are perhaps two reasons for this. First, Sovereign Violence raises topics like animal cruelty, faciality, revenge, and bio-politics found in the film texts that are relevant to both thinking about critical theory today and Korean arthouse cinema over the past two decades. Second, Korean cinema did go through a period of maturation over the past two decades that in some sense provided intellectual leadership for other cultural production. Though K-pop, K-drama, K-fashion, K-plastic surgery, and K-tours were probably all better at attracting foreign interests than K-cinema, film still remains as perhaps the only medium in Korea through which social critique and aesthetic renovation are consistently refurbished. Why? Choe seems to have the correct answer: it was cinema that helped to train Korean “audiences how to think ethical questions critically after 1997” (p. 13). This book places Choe as a leading scholar of Korean film studies, foremost among scholars who are trying to argue for cinema's relevance in the millennial age.