The Magician \ Joseon Magician \ 조선마술사 \ Joseonmasoolsa

To put it most concisely....The Phantom of the Opera meets The Prestige meets The Titanic meets The Fall in Joseon-era Korea. Wow.

child Bo-Eum

This is the story of two slave children, Hwan-Hee {Yoo Seung-Ho} and Bo-Eum {Jo Yoon-Hee} who escape their {abusive in all possible ways} master in a bloody betrayal that ends in one assistant dead and their master in furious enemy hands.

Hwan-Hee on stage

As adults, one of the two is a master magician*, drowning self-hatred and the horror of his past in alcohol, drugs, and any pretty assistant he can get to follow him backstage. The other's horror is even more never-ending: she has claimed safety from the owner of their new magic show, and in exchange has become a palm reader and a gisaeng...and she spends her free time obsessively going after the thoughtless, pretty girls who attract her fellow escapee, leaving him demanding in angered frustration and the viewer wondering in shocked horror if she kills each and every one.

first meeting

Then Hwan-Hee meets a new girl. Sold by her parents, bound to obey for the safety of her brothers, Cheong-Myung {Go Ara} is as much a slave as he ever was, though she is a princess on her way to wed an emperor. Watched only by a sympathetic guard, she begins sneaking out at night to meet him, delighting in the one person who treats her "as a commoner" - as a person. 

You already know it's going nowhere good...and then their old master appears, here to steal the emperor's future bride and the ancient sword being sent as a gift. Or rather, he'll do that while accomplishing his main goal, which is revenge on the two who scarred his face and quite clearly left him for dead. 

I've seen it described as enchanting, and it is. Enchanting and poignant and lovely and painful all at once.

"You're like a family," Cheong-Myung says wistfully, after a night in the town's underbelly where she meets the stage hands and fellow performers.

"Are we?" Hwan-Hee asks, and the question is just as wistful.

The subject matter is {obviously...} very dark...yet all that I stated above is whispers and implications. Rather than the overwhelming darkness that could have been shown, you see light and color and glorious beauty that overlays the entire movie with a magical glow. It's a story of young love shadowed by the past and the future. 

Until you reach the end, when the young magician returns to meet the revenge that awaits him head-on, only to be drawn into a magical house of horrors, where lamp tricks and mirrors play with his mind, and every swirling curtain moves to show him another dying friend...And you realize exactly how young he is, as time turns back and he becomes again the helpless child, kneeling before his master and begging for the pain to stop. 

But he has grown in all those years away, and even as his master systematically tears him apart, he works his own kind of magic to restore justice once again.

Exactly what that means, and whether the ending is magic or wistfulness, I will leave you to discover when you watch it yourself.

*{For the curious, there is no actual magic involved on the part of the good guys. Besides a tortured loathing for the blue eye that marks him a freak, part of the scathing self-hatred mentioned above has to do with the fact that Hwan-Hee has no way to help the sick, starving peasants who frantically beg him to save them with his magic.}