A bag stuffed with cash sits in a sauna locker, and every desperate person who touches it in Beasts Clawing at Straws gets pulled a little further under.
What is Beasts Clawing at Straws about?
Jung-man scrapes by cleaning a bathhouse and caring for his mother when that bag of money lands in his hands, and from there the film fans out into a web of people circling the same windfall from different angles. Tae-young owes a loan shark after his girlfriend vanishes with borrowed cash, and Mi-ran, trapped in an abusive marriage and a dead-end bar job, finds a younger lover willing to go much further than she expects. A body turns up before long, and the timeline keeps looping back on itself so that the audience assembles the full, ugly shape of the scheme only once every player's motive is on the table. Dark comedy runs underneath the crime plotting throughout, so the desperation plays as absurd as it is dangerous.
About the cast
Jeon Do-yeon and Jung Woo-sung lead an ensemble built around overlapping storylines, joined by Bae Seong-woo, Youn Yuh-jung, Jeong Man-sik, Jin Kyung, Shin Hyun-bin, and Jung Ga-ram. The structure gives nearly every one of them a stretch of the film where their character's slice of the plot takes center stage before the pieces start knocking into each other.
Context & significance
Director Kim Yong-hoon adapts the film from a Japanese novel, and the South Korean crime scene it draws on favors this kind of interlocking, morally grubby ensemble over a single clean hero. Released in 2020, the film sits closer to pitch-black comedy than straight thriller, closer in tone to a heist gone wrong than a detective story, with the money itself functioning almost like a main character that different people keep trying to claim.
Watching Beasts Clawing at Straws on Ktime
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