If I Had a Heart
2013 · 12m · South Korea
Directed by The Halsall Brothers
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
Abandoned in a coin-locker at Seoul Station decades ago, Sam Il — a man who has accepted death as a release — is pulled into a violent neon-noir tale of revenge in the underbelly of Seoul.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A coin-locker baby becomes a noir assassin—premise checks out as gloriously weird—but the execution plays it straight, which is where it loses me; the subversion is in the setup, not the filmmaking.
The Halsall Brothers situate themselves squarely in the lineage of East Asian neo-noir and pulp revenge cinema, with composed frames and a disciplined tonal palette that respects the genre's formal conventions even as they localize it to Seoul's underbelly.
The choice to keep Sam Il's abandonment and his present violence in constant tonal conversation—never letting us forget the wound underneath the neon—hinges entirely on restraint in the editing and sound design, and they nail it; a 12-minute film that feels like it's been cut with a scalpel.
Reviews
The Halsall Brothers' dark and moody short If I Had a Heart wastes no time in letting their audience know exactly what to expect over the next 12-minutes, as we're quickly submerged into the violent, seedy world of their Korean based neon-noir.