🎬 Trailer & Vibe
High Society (2018) portrays the dark and scandalous world of the political and artistic elite in Seoul. The trailer artfully showcases gallery openings, political meetings, intimate rendezvous in hotel rooms, and scenes hinting toward moral deterioration. The tone is coldly glamorous and cynically realistic, revealing to the audience glimpses of betrayal and deception, sexual intrigue and power struggles, along with the rot hidden behind the façades of Korea’s upper class.
👤 Cast & Roles
Park Hae-il as Jang Tae-joon: A prideful and driven adjunct professor at a university who is married to Soo-yeon and is fiercely seeking to overcome the limits of his former self and embraces his ambitions after she decides to run for the National Assembly.
Soo Ae as Oh Soo-yeon: The wife of Tae-joon, an art gallery deputy director, and a beauty and sociopath climbing through the social strata leveraging her intelligence and connections.
Yoon Je-moon as Han Yong-suk: A sleek and powerful politician who uses Tae-joon for some of his political agendas.
Ra Mi-ran as Lee Hwa-ran: The director of the gallery who is in competition with Soo-yeon for social power thus creates conflict among them.
Middle-class South Koreans like Jang Tae-joon and his wife, Oh Soo-yeon, are members of the group that we may consider as the new upwardly mobile bourgeois. Tae–joon as a University trained economist teaches privately as a respected professor while Oh operates a distinguished art gallery. In public, they project a well-mannered, ambitious couple that is upwardly mobile.
But the surface is surgically concealing an unloving marriage that operates like a covert, calculated business arrangement. When Tae-joon is diplomatically offered the chance to run for the National Assembly, Soo-yeon opportunistically chooses to support him. In exchange, she enables herself to cheat with art investors—one of the social classes etiquette permits her to mingle with. Their love and moral code becomes optional as both begin to reciprocally erode basic human decency for ambition.
Tae-joon’s campaign drives scandals, blackmail, and spiraling corruption deeper into his and Soo-yeon’s lives. Public disgrace emerges when her secret becomes common knowledge, threatening to annihilate whatever is left of their social standing. In the sullen closing parts of the story, both lose touch with their “human-ness” and the empathy to love a fellow being in a struggle for the so called “ultimate goal” of power. What they achieve is nothing but vacuous ostentation where dignity has a price tag of zero.
⭐ Themes & Reception
Critics have not missed High Society’s striking articulation of ke-mono gates that simultaneously tackles classist greed, human ambition, and social climbing rot across generations. Its incensed examination puts into interwoven focus beauty, sex, and power wielded in Korea’s elite circles, stripped bare and devoid of meaning, pride, and life.
Soo Ae’s fearless performance received praise, as did the film’s depiction of “social rot,” though some critics took issue with the film’s cynicism. Additionally, viewers looking for an erotic psychological drama appreciated the film’s exploration of moral decline and its sexual content.
🎞️ Last Thoughts
It presents a captivating yet disturbing insight into the upper echelons of Korea’s society, where politics, art, sex, and other forms of power are wielded with stealth and tremendous violence in High Society. Powerful and emotionally charged, it depicts a grim portrayal of humanity’s ambition. It She paints a vivid picture of societal ruthlessness under the guise of wealth and status, offering a glimpse into a world where comfort breeds discontent. The film serves as a visceral reminder of the relentless pursuit of dominance and the human condition’s dark depths.
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