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What if the Big Bad Wolf is the only person who seems to care about you? In the film “The Man From Nowhere” , a little girl raised by her drug-addict mom forms an odd friendship with a hoodlum, Tae-sik, who works at the local pawnshop. Tae-sik exudes a murky anonymity that confuses people into believing he is a convict.. When asked by Tae-sik, (Won Bin) if she thinks he looks like a bad guy, she replies an affirmative, “You look like prison would suit you.” So-mi (Kim Sae-ron) speaks in sullen truths and frank wisdom. She needs him around to prove that someone cares, and he needs her to feel a sense of humanity in his hardened life.
The girl’s nickname is “Trashcan” because she is considered worthless, something she talks of causually. 
He does everything he can to show her this is not true even if that means risking his meaningless life time and time again. She calls him “Ahjussi,” the Korean title for the film. The term “ahjussi” is used in Korea to address an older man who is not quite a stranger but not quite family. It can be a term applied to someone that you do not know at all or someone that you have known for along time.
Things are not what they seem in this film. The bumbling police are often confused with the gangsters that they are staking out. They arrive at crime scenes too late and stand around in confusion in the aftermath of Tae-sik’s killing sprees . The girl’s lipstick-wearing grandmother invokes an Asian Cruella de Ville who herds children instead of Dalmantions. ( not her grandmother, just the grandmother figure in the film) 
Always seen in her red sweatshirt, So -mi is kidnapped into a world of drugs, gangsters, and organ trafficking. The mafia uses unwanted children to manufacture and smuggle drugs in the harshest conditions. As the film unravels the mafia’s dirty deeds become more apparent and the viewer starts imagining the horrible deaths they themselves would inflict on each villain.
And Tae-sik is just the man to fulfill these brutal wishes of vengeance. So-mi’s quiet voice rings through Tae-sik’s conscience as he moves through the action scenes of the film that wash everything in blue-toned images and high speed cinematography. Every brutal sequence is played like out like a swift dance and revert back and forth from third person point of view to first person POV as if you were the one being punched and stabbed. After a near fatal injury while battling the mafia, he comes back tand cut his unkempt hair into a stylized faux-hawk and transforms into a pretty boy with killer instincts – Korea’s favored archetype for a male protagonist. His bull-eye shooting and slash and kill knife style shows his past training. .
Won Bin is no newcomer to action movies but in this role he seems to have seasoned himself into a brooding beauty that protects and attacks with style and grace. His stoicism is only broken when necessary, and when he speaks, his deep voice resonates with meaning and heavy threats. . The soundtrack is lilting at times and other times driven by pop beats that push the action forward. Silence is heavily utilized for dramatic pause and for the clean white flash backs to a past that was pristine before everything was lost.
Korean thrillers are typically characterized by intense blood splattering violence and themes saturated with vengeance; this film is no exception. But this flick seems bigger than life in the symbolism and dynamics of the lone killer and young girl. Here, in the world that Director Lee has created, an outcast with his knife and semi-automatic can become a child’s savior and hero.
“The Man From Nowhere” 2010
Written and directed by Lee Jeong-beom
Watch trailer here
Available on Netflix Instant and select video stores
Tags: Cinema, film, Korean, Lee Jeong-beom, The Man From Nowhere, Won Bin
Filed Under: Cinema Feature Sights
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