Park Hoon-jung’s sci-fi action-horror The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion, or The Witch: Subversion, introduced a hyper-violent world of superpowered youth. It followed Ja-yoon (Da-mi Kim), an amnesiac teen who’d once fled a lab as a child and unlocked painful memories and supernatural abilities when the lab’s enforcers came to retrieve her. Part 1 ended in a bloodbath and a fully reawakened Ja-yoon on a mission. The Witch 2: The Other One jumps ahead in the bloody saga, moving away from the secret lab and out into the world where a new superpowered girl gets discovered. It sparks a grim journey that leaves a bloody trail of corpses and an occasionally confounding narrative in her wake.
A girl (Shin Sia) wakes in a huge facility littered with dead bodies and pools of blood. The lone survivor, the blood-drenched Girl wanders into the nearby woods until she comes across a road, where she’s spotted and picked up by a passing van. The Girl realizes that the men inside intend to murder her to cover up their kidnapping of hostage Kyung-hee (Park Eun-bin). Their mistake. After a quick and ruthless dispatching, Kyung-hee gets the injured Girl help and brings her home. Kyung-hee has her own dangerous domestic woes to contend with, but it’s nothing compared to the mysteriously powerful Girl and the assassins tracking her.
The Other One doesn’t offer the most accessible entry point into this chapter. Park Hoon-jung toggles between various scenes and characters to establish key players with such abruptness that it’s tough to get an initial sense of what’s happening. It doesn’t help that very little of it bears clear ties to the previous film. The speedy transitions relay that two different factions of lethal mercenaries are pursuing the Girl, and a third enters the equation in the form of Kyung-hee’s villainous uncle (Jin Goo). Enigmatic hints at overarching mythology, specifically with an opening scene that sets up the idea of clones and twins, further confounds when these concepts remain elusive and unexplored.
Once all the characters have been added to the board, The Other One settles into a more familiar story that parallels its predecessor. Like Ja-yoon, the central Girl bonds with caretaker Kyung-hee and her younger brother Dae-gil (Sung Yoo-bin) and feels protective of them. The Girl experiences normality for the first time, leading to a scant few moments of levity and an endearing interest in food.
But this is the second chapter in an ongoing saga and an action-horror one at that. Park Hoon-jung increases the violence, body count, and bloodletting for this sequel. The action sequences are intense, and the overall tone is grimmer. The gory action is where The Other One shines, and luckily the filmmaker rarely relents on that front.
The nonstop thrills mean a brisk pace for the robust runtime, even when the narrative retreads similar beats, but it also makes it a lot tougher to get a strong sense of character. Head agent Jo Hyun (Seo Eun-soo) has strong ties to a character from Part 1. Still, other than her established toughness and knack for slaying people like Girl, we know next to nothing about her save for her intentionally comedic dynamics with her partner (Justin John Harvey). Harvey demonstrates action chops, but line delivery across multiple languages can distract.
While the narrative may fare much weaker this round, Park Hoon-jung’s knack for strong visuals and staging, late-game revelations, and an epic climax make up for it. Curiously, one crucial piece of setup gets withheld until post-credits. But overall, The Other One does move the needle forward and opens up intriguing new possibilities for the third chapter. More importantly, The Other One instills interest and deep curiosity to see where this insanely bloody, wild saga goes next.
The Witch 2: The Other One releases in theaters on June 17, 2022.
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