Black Knight

I finished Black knight in one go and I have to write what I thought of it!
A waste of talent ...
I mean, in itself it was very good! But with potential that I feel was wasted in so few episodes.
As a psychologist, I was intrigued by the insights present which, with more character development, I think would have made this drama even more interesting. Everyone's acting was excellent although I found Kim Woo less interesting than the others, and a bit static. While SSH's acting showed the maturity he has reached and his ability for complex roles. Note of credit to young Kang yoo. Actually all the scenes were very good, very good indeed! But it was like there was no glue between them. The scenes disappeared without leaving me time to savour the huge emotional content the scene contained. The really interesting part of the plot is the introduction of the love-hate conflict between father and son, with some insights : -Ryu's inability to get out of a love-sick relationship with his father and on the other hand his irrepressible desire for rebellion and metaphorically the need to 'kill his father' (overcoming him and taking away what he had built); -the reference to the Oedipus myth (and the Oedipus complex) but made more painful, because faced with the father's inability to understand the son's desire to be recognised, this unsatisfied desire for recognition is dramatically transformed into a real death, albeit carried out by a hitman (minister of justice). How much potential there is in this idea of a father who intervenes to save humanity, but to the detriment of his paternal role and without realising, except superficially, that it is he himself who has provoked this situation: not because of an alleged similarity (my son is like me, he claims in the film) but because of a parental lack of abandonment: the father, caught up in his sense of guilt, has totally forgotten about his son on whom he throws his unresolved problems, instead of protecting him. A son who in his loneliness (I would say existential, the illness is a symbol of this) despite his unworthy actions, I never totally disliked him and not only because he was played by SSH 🙂 but also because from a human, social and family point of view, events chain together dramatically and responsibilities should sometimes be better distributed. In this sense it reminded me of The Karamazof Brothers in which the father in his selfishness generates hatred in his children. One of these (Ivan) desires and theorises the death of his father (Ryu fights to symbolically possess his father's company and does everything he can to keep it alive, for example by polluting, perhaps because the only thing that really binds him to his father) but it is Smerdjakov (the Minister of Justice) who carries out the heinous act ...
In short, enormous potential, good actors, but it was like seeing an incomplete plot ... another example of very interesting intuition is when Ryu, wounded for the umpteenth time by his father, goes and kills a young man apparently out of sheer cruelty ... a key passage in the understanding of the formation of the heinous gestures was as if thrown in there, at random, without understanding its potential as a symbol of a pain which in a chain invests innocents and which, in a certain way, we know where it arrives but we do not know where it started from ...
I would have other examples but I will finish here ... I liked the setting as if everything was muffled by the pain, too great, too immense, too much ... a pain so immense that not even the joy for the life of young adolescents can scratch it ... Could it really be that we humans end up like this? Perhaps we really had better start asking ourselves that question.

Returning to the Karamazof brothers' book, it seems to me that the moral might be similar ... we are all responsible for what happens ...
Ryu collaborates, then, with the murderer of his father, giving a sort of approval of that act and not understanding that not confronting his inner demons (it takes courage) has created the trap in which he has fallen ... In short beautiful, interesting ... engaging …
I conclude by thanking SSH for giving us all another wonderful recitation. Thanks