Fantastically talented and exciting directors appear to be growing on trees in South Korea, and this year’s Fantastic Fest has already added a couple more (based on the debuts of The Man From Nowhere and Bedevilled). But these young upstarts have a ways to go before they can point to the quantity of their output as well as their quality. So for now at least the three reigning masters of Korean cinema are safe. Chan-wook Park and Joon-ho Bong receive much deserved praise, but just as good as either of them is the seemingly less well known Ji-woon Kim. He’s moved fluidly from black comedy (A Quiet Family) to horror (A Tale Of Two Sisters) to crime (A Bittersweet Life) to western (The Good the Bad the Weird) and has succeeded brilliantly each time. His latest film goes darker than anything he’s made so far with a brutal and twisted tale of obsession, revenge, and madness…

Foreign Objects travels the world of international cinema each week to look for films worth visiting. So renew your passport, get your shots, and brush up on the local age of legal consent, this week we’re heading to… South Korea!

Westerns are a uniquely American type of film, are they not? So why, with that in mind, would two Asian filmmakers both go into the western shoot-em-up business at the exact same time? We explore the facts.