Another example of fine filmmaking from Korea, Children begins with elementary school boys playing together, like kids everywhere, running and laughing, without a care in the world. The mood changes quickly when they are reported missing, and a search involving thousands of volunteers is undertaken with no results. The parents quit their jobs to look for their sons full time. A television producer who has won a prize for his nature documentary gets into trouble when his boss finds out that he faked some of the scenes in his film, and he is demoted and transferred. He wants to regain his reputation, so he teams up with a college professor to solve the case of the missing boys. They come up with a theory that one boys parents were involved and they get the police to help dig up the fathers property to find the buried bodies. Nothing is found and the TV man and the prof are disgraced. Ten years after the original disappearances, a monsoon and flooding reveals some bones, which after forensic exams, turn out to be the five boys. The police quickly try to rule the cause of death as hypothermia because of embarrassment in not solving the case, but the coroner concludes that they were murdered. The TV producer returns to follow up and becomes tied up with a possible suspect. The ending is somewhat ambiguous and I was left wondering about the real story that the movie is based on. The acting is superb, but at over two hours, Children could have been edited by fifteen minutes, as it is too slowly paced. Even with the small criticisms, it is a shattering drama.
Review of Children...
