Call of God: a soporific psychosexual drama

• Reviewed at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.

Shot in Estonia, Latvia and Kyrgyzstan in 2019, Kim Kiduk’s final film Call of God was assembled by his Estonian collaborator Artur Veeber, and was shown out of competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The Festival has frequently provided the Korean director with a welcoming and appreciative audience for his provocative and unsettling brand of cinema, arguably more than South Korea has. In 2004 he picked up the Silver Lion for 3-Iron; 8 years later, Pietà became the first Korean film to claim the Golden Lion. So it’s fitting that – following his death from Covid-19 in the winter of 2020 at the age of 59 – Kiduk’s last film should be screened on the Lido, bringing down the curtain on a controversial career. It’s also important to note that the film’s inclusion came despite strong objections from members of the Korean film community, following multiple allegations of sexual assault and rape made against Kiduk and his frequent collaborator Cho Jaehyun.

Any attempt to separate the art and the artist is bound to founder on the insistently aggressive psychosexual nature of Kiduk’s work. His latest, while not as extreme as many of his previous work, taps into a similar vein. A Man (Abvlai Maratov) asks a Girl on the street (Zhanel Sergazina) for directions to the Dream Café. She’s going in that direction and agrees to show him the way, but an attempted mugging brings the two closer together and soon enough, an intense, obsessive relationship springs between them. He’s a writer of love stories, but is going to the café to find an old girlfriend of whom he is jealous. He has a particular peccadillo: his ex shouldn’t have a lover who is older than he is.

The relationship between the Man and the Girl accelerates from shy kissing – “I’m not that kind of girl” – into sex in a car, sex on another ex-girlfriend’s grave, devoted love through jealousy and violence, and onto assault and murder. Their actions are repeatedly interrupted at key moments by the Girl waking up in her bedroom as her phone marimbas to life, only for a man’s voice to reveal that the dream is a prediction of the future and she can go back to sleep. Are these the Girl’s own fantasies as she sleeps, watched over by her huge teddy bear? Or is the male voice guiding and controlling her? This issue of control becomes darkly humorous as Man and Girl become increasingly jealous of each other, flying into rages whenever a wayward glance is caught. To avoid disaster, they confine themselves to a flat and play games to pass the time, but soon a neighbour begins to suspect foul play.

A limited cast, minimal production values and the use of real locations have become familiar signs that a director has used the pandemic to get back to basics, so it is surprising that Call of God was shot before the lockdown, given the film’s ostensible aesthetics of necessity. The black and white cinematography – Kiduk acting as his own cameraman – boasts flashes of beauty but ultimately feels pedestrian, besides a sudden burst of colour at the end. The whole thing bears more than a passing resemblance to a student film, not least in its sophomoric plot. The ‘it was all a dream’ conceit, multiplied several times over, carries some of the blame, but it’s also hard to ignore the way the film meanders, striving strenuously but vainly for meaning. It feels like a premature coda rather than a confident conclusion. As for the lead actors, Maratov smoulders effectively enough; Sergazina has more to do, playing both her dream self and her waking self, with the attendant changes in personality. This being a Kiduk film, she is slapped in the face several times, and the violence in her relationship with the Man only increases.

There is a more playful realisation of the volatility of their relationship when, dressed only in their underwear, they improvise a knife-throwing act with balloons and darts. It’s also a rare moment of the film waking up and showing some spontaneity and life. But in its depiction of a couple engaging in semi-violent games in a room, one senses that this is a sly comment on Kiduk’s own alleged behaviour. For the late director, such tendencies are not aberrant, but rather written into the very nature of sexual relations.