Welcome back to Movie Recaps.
Today I will show you a crime, drama, thriller film from 2020, titled Beasts Clawing at Straws.
Spoilers ahead!
Watch out and take care.
Mi-ran is a young woman that works as an escort at a bar to get back all the money she lost
in the stock market.
It's also a way to stay away from her apartment because going back there means being available
for her husband to beat up.
One afternoon, bouncer Carp calls her to take care of a particularly hard-to-please client,
and that's how she meets Jin-tae, a young man from China that jokingly tells her he
left his country because he killed a man.
They get along so well that they exchange phone numbers and even start seeing each other
outside her workplace.
After spending the night together, Jin-tae discovers the bruises Mi-ran's husband left
on her body and comments that wife-beaters never change, which he knows because his father
used to hit his mother too.
She was the one that didn't let him do anything about it, and Jin-tae begs Mi-ran not to make
the same mistake and put an end to it.
Mi-ran begins considering the idea when she remembers the money she would get from the
life insurance policy, and after lots of thinking, she accepts sharing that money with Jin-tae
and start a new life with him if he kills her husband.
Mi-ran gives Jin-tae precise instructions of where and when to find her husband, so
one rainy night, he parks outside the bar the husband usually hangs out at and waits
for him to come out.
As soon as he sees a man leaving, Jin-tae runs over him with his car and takes the body
to the forest outside the city to bury it there.
When he calls Mi-ran to tell her the news, she isn't happy to hear this result: they
were supposed to make it look like a car accident, not bury him, because without a body, they'll
have to wait years for her husband to officially be declared MIA before she can get the insurance
money.
Things get worse when suddenly, her husband enters the apartment, which means Jin-tae
killed the wrong guy.
She tries to call Jin-tae to tell him what's happened only to suddenly have him at her
door, ready to celebrate.
Mi-ran drags him to his car to talk privately and tells him to get rid of the car and return
to China, promising she'll follow him there in the future after she settles matters here
and earns some money for the trip.
Sometime later, Mi-ran is too bruised to work, but there's a client that specifically wants
her and won't take no for an answer.
Suddenly, a beautiful lady interrupts the argument: it's the boss, Yeon-hee.
The client slaps her when he hears she isn't on his side, and she retaliates by breaking
a bottle on his head before taking Mi-ran with her to her office.
After sharing a drink with her, she gives her some money to stay at the hospital for
a few days so she can rest, because she understands her situation since her now-dead husband was
a beater too.
If Mi-ran ever needs her help, she is free to go to Yeon-hee for it.
Once she starts feeling better, Mi-ran goes to visit Jin-tae, who is looking incredibly
sick.
He hasn't been sleeping well because he keeps hearing the voice of the man he killed and
he's starting to think he should turn himself in, but Mi-ran doesn't let him even when he
promises he won't mention her at all.
Instead, she takes him back to the forest where he buried the body so they can do a
proper memorial and help the guy pass on.
She thinks this should help Jin-tae find closure, but it doesn't, so when he starts hearing
the voices again and runs to tell the police, Mi-ran runs him over with her car.
Crying over what she just did, Mi-ran picks her now ringing phone: it is Yeon-hee, who
is calling to ask why she isn't working but still accepts to come and help her anyway.
Mi-ran buries the body while waiting for her and once she gets there, she takes Mi-ran
to a car scrap yard where she pays some men to destroy the car.
Afterward, they go back to Yeon-hee's place, where she gives Mi-ran tips on how to kill
her husband without getting caught.
The cause will be depression and overdrinking, and Mi-ran must cremate the body as soon as
the investigation allows her to.
Said investigation takes months to close, during which Mi-ran gets the exact same shark
tattoo Yeon-hee has because she likes it so much.
When she finally gets the insurance money, Mi-ran puts it all in a brown bag except for
a small amount she gives Yeon-hee as thanks.
The two women make a toast to celebrate that Mi-ran is about to start a new life and that
the police have found out the man Jin-tae killed had also been a horrible criminal.
But Mi-ran suddenly starts feeling dizzy, and before she falls unconscious, she realizes
Yeon-hee put something in her drink.
She wakes up a few hours later, only to find herself in her underwear and tied to a table.
Yeon-hee is there too, and after lamenting not having used enough sedatives to keep Mi-ran
asleep, she proceeds to cut her body in pieces using a power saw.
Meanwhile, Tae-young, a customs officer, meets with Mr. Park, a crime lord he owes money
to and now is threatening him with death if he doesn't get paid.
Tae-young hasn't been able to pay him back because his ex-girlfriend Yeon-hee ran away
with everything some months ago, but he has a plan in mind, so he convinces Mr. Park to
give him another week.
His plan is to use his position as customs officer to help a high school friend, Oh Dong-pal,
flee the country, for which he'll get handsomely paid.
For this task, he recruits the help of Carp, who is his very distant cousin but also one
of Mr. Park's henchmen.
At first, Carp doesn't want anything to do with it, but Tae-young promises he'll share
the money and reminds him of his gambling debt, so Carp ends up accepting.
The night they are supposed to meet with Dong-pal, they wait for him by the port but they can't
find him.
While Tae-young is waiting in his car, he's approached by a cop, Myung-goo, who knows
his identity and wants to ask him some questions about Dong-pal.
They go to a restaurant and while eating, Myung-goo tells Tae-young that Dong-pal is
a wanted man because of some scams he's pulled, but Tae-young pretends he hasn't talked to
Dong-pal since high school.
Myung-goo also asks him some suspicious questions about his marital status before taking a selfie
together and leaving, so now Tae-young has to deal with the bill.
The next day, Mr. Park calls Tae-young to meet him again and tells him Carp has shared
the plan with him.
At first, Tae-young denies there is any plan, but when they're about to hurt Carp for lying,
Tae-young decides to tell the truth to save him.
Mr. Park inserts himself into the plan and demands part of the money, so now Tae-young
and Carp have to double their efforts to find Don-pal or Mr. Park will kill them.
To do so, Tae-young asks Carp to follow Myung-goo around to see if the clues the police get
can help them as well.
A couple of days later, Tae-young returns to his apartment to find Yeon-hee waiting
for him there and making dinner.
Tae-young is furious with her for having left without a word all those months ago, but Yeon-hee
doesn't offer an explanation, she just tells him she had things to do.
Seeing as this isn't enough to calm him down, Yeon-hee tries to leave the apartment, but
Tae-young stops her because he can't deny he's missed her, and the two of them end up
in bed together.
Afterward, Yeon-hee asks him to help her leave the country using Mi-ran's passport, but Tae-young
refuses, telling her he can't trick him with intimacy any longer.
Their conversation is suddenly interrupted by the doorbell: it's Myung-goo, who has brought
food to make up for having made Tae-young pay for their meal the other day, and he invites
himself in, getting surprised when he sees Yeon-hee because Tae-young had told him he
was single.
While the three of them share dinner, Tae-young ignores the constant calls from Carp and asks
Myung-goo if the cops have found Dong-pal.
It turns out they have and he's already been arrested, so now Myung-goo is on the case
of the female body they found in pieces.
He shows them the shark tattoo one of the legs had, and this makes Tae-young incredibly
nervous, because it may mean Yon-hee has killed someone.
When they run out of beer, Tae-young volunteers to go to the convenience store so he can call
Carp while he shops.
He puts him up to date with what's going on, unaware that one of Park's henchmen is spying
on Carp, and when they're done, he returns to his apartment only to find Yeon-hee has
killed Myung-goo for touching her leg.
Tae-young can't call the police if he doesn't want to be a suspect as well, so he cleans
the carpet while Yon-hee hides the body in the bathtub.
It's then that he gets an idea, and when Yeon-hee leaves the restroom, he knocks her out with
a pan before grabbing her bag and stealing her car keys.
He rushes to the parking lot and finds the car with the bag full of money, which he takes
with him as he leaves the building.
Meanwhile, Yon-hee wakes up to find Mr. Park and her henchmen in the apartment, so to stop
them from hurting her, she calls Tae-young to prove he has the money she could share
with Park.
After hearing how Tae-young boasts, Park knows Yeon-hee has been telling the truth and sends
his henchmen to catch Tae-young before he leaves the country.
At the port, while waiting for the next ship to leave, Tae-young decides to spend a few
hours at the local sauna.
He puts the money bag in a locker and, after putting the key in his pocket, he asks the
clerk, Jung-man, for cigarettes, which aren't sold there.
Since Jung-man refuses to go buy them for him because he's the only employee working
at the moment and he can't leave the place alone, Tae-young goes to the convenience store
himself.
On his way out, he sees Park's henchmen are following him around so he starts running
away, but as soon as he tries to cross the street, he is run over by a truck.
A moment later, when Jung-man closes up the sauna to clean, he checks all the lockers
to be sure they're empty and finds the bag with the money.
Afraid someone may still ask for it later, he tells his coworker he'll leave it in the
storage room, making sure to hide it behind other bags to make it harder to find.
Then he returns home, which happens to be an old abandoned restaurant, and finds his
mother having gone through another episode because of her Alzheimers, which puts extra
stress on Jung-man's wife who has to deal with her while her husband is at work.
To make matters worse, his wife tells him their daughter has called to tell them she
couldn't get a student loan and she'll be taking the semester off to work.
The next day, Jung-man arrives three minutes late at work, so his very young manager scolds
him for it and reminds him that arriving late twice in a month equals losing the job, showing
no sympathy for Jung-man's struggles with his sick mother.
He also doesn't allow Jung-man to leave work earlier when his wife ends up in the hospital
because his mother pushed her down the stairs during another breakdown.
By the time he makes it to the hospital, his daughter had already arrived even when she
came all the way from Seoul, and his wife tells him she can't take care of his mother
any longer.
Now that he's the sole caretaker of his mother, Jung-man is under even more stress and one
morning, he oversleeps.
When he calls his manager to tell him he may arrive a bit late, he's fired on the spot.
The first thing he remembers after hanging up is the bag with the money, so he doesn't
hesitate to ride his bicycle in the rain and go back to the sauna for it.
There's a new employee already working there, so Jung-man just tells him he's come to pick
up his own stuff.
After grabbing the bag with the money from the storage room, Jung-man tries to leave,
but he's stopped twice on his way out.
First by two cops, who show him a picture of Myung-goo and ask him if he's seen him.
Then he's stopped by his manager, who doesn't believe that bag is Jung-man's and requests
to see its contents, but Jung-man finally stands up to him and tells him he can't order
him around anymore.
Afterward, Jung-man rushes back to his house and hides the bag inside an old box where
he keeps old things that used to belong to his dead father, like his kitchen knives.
The following day, he discovers his wife has started to work because he's unemployed, so
Jung-man tells her he has some money and they should open the restaurant again, but she
turns him down.
Afterward, he goes to a café to meet his manager, who wants to give him what he owes
him of his salary not to have legal trouble in the future.
When Jung-man gets there he discovers this is a lie: his manager is sharing a table with
Yeon-hee and Mr. Park pretending to be cops.
They ask him about the brown bag and even show him a photo - Jung-man considers saying
he hasn't seen him before but his manager obviously remembers it, so instead he says
his own bag just happens to be the same model as the one on the picture.
The manager doesn't believe him and says so, but Jung-man sticks to his story before leaving
the restaurant, unaware that he's being followed.
He rushes back home and opens the box to take out the money bag, but at that moment, Yeon-hee
and Park break into the room and take the bag from him.
Yeon-hee quickly can tell there's some money missing, so Jung-man explains he has used
some of it to pay for his daughter's tuition before his mother barges in and attacks Yeon-hee.
Park quickly knocks her out with an iron and does the same on Jung-man, so while he's distracted
by that, Yeon-hee grabs the old kitchen knives from the box and uses them to kill Park.
On her way out, she lights the house on fire, and the smoke is quickly noticed by Park's
right hand, who comes inside to check on him and finds him dead.
Moments later, Jung-man wakes up and sees it's just him and his mother in the house.
He hurries to drag her out and together they watch their home burn while she tries to comfort
him by telling him that as long as he has both hands and both feet, he has a chance
to start over and rebuild.
Meanwhile, at the airport, Yeon-hee still has thirty minutes before her plane leaves,
so she puts the money bag in a locker and with the key in her pocket, she goes to the
bathroom.
While washing her hands she's approached by Park's right hand, who ignores her money offer
and drags her into one of the stalls to stab her over and over until she dies.
When he leaves the bathroom, he's caught on camera, and these security recordings will
appear on tv the next day when the police start looking for him.
One of the poor cleaning ladies is given the task of cleaning the blood off the bathroom
floor and walls after the body is taken away, and while she's mopping the floor, she finds
the locker key Yeon-hee dropped while struggling against her aggressor.
The woman uses the key to open the corresponding locker and is shocked to find a bag full of
money, which she takes with her while leaving the building before anyone else can see it.