Not long after the Korean drama "Hell's Minister" produced by Netflix was launched, it reached the Netflix global championship list in just one day and was named the new "Squid Game" by foreign media.
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho, the director of the hit movie "Busan Trip", he is good at portraying human nature and the theme of the end of the world, people face crises from all directions, lose their rationality and humanity, and each film is the best model for portraying human nature.
"The Minister of Hell" is no exception, while maintaining the director's unique world view, it once again breaks through the audience's imagination of ugly human nature, and shows the "lynching" and "public trial" in the play in a more violent and cruel way.
However, compared to the many praises that "Squid Games" has received around the world, everyone's comments on "Hell's Minister" are more polarized. Personally, I think that although "Hell's Minister" has some bugs in the motivation of the characters, it is obviously more original and profound in terms of theme and setting than "Squid Games".
1 Is this God's will, or is it supernatural?
The series consists of 6 episodes and two chapters, the first half of which focuses on the worldview and the story of the murder of the messengers of hell, and the second half is mainly about religion.
The first half tells the story of people receiving a death warning without warning, claiming that they will be taken to hell, and when the preview time comes, three giant black monsters appear and will be tortured and burned by the forewarner.
Amid the chaos caused by these inexplicable paranormal events, Zheng Jinshou (Liu Yaren), the leader of the new religious organization New Shinrikyo, makes a majestic voice. He claimed that only sinners are sentenced, and these events represent the divine will to regulate human behavior.
His blind followers, on the other hand, took matters into their own hands and were responsible for torturing those who disobeyed God's will. The world has become a hell on earth...
It turned out that all this was a conspiracy of Zheng Jinshou, who had received a death notice as early as 20 years ago, and did not want to live only in fear, so he began to promote the so-called "angel demonstration" remarks, hoping to explain the supernatural phenomenon as "God's will", and then become a kind of fear violence of faith.
His ultimate goal is to make the people of the world, whether they receive a death notice or not, live in the same uncertainty as him, and the only thing they can obey is the guidance of the Neo-Shinrikyo faith.
Neo-Shintoism has gradually become the biggest force, seemingly persuading people to be good, but in fact it is standing on the highest position of power, creating the "new theocratic era" in the play.
As the plot unfolds, we learn that those who are punished by God may not have actually committed any mistakes, but this behavior of first deciding on the object of punishment and then going back to impose the crime is actually equivalent to denying people's right to question authority. So that the desire to add to the sin is speechless.
2 The meaning behind "Messenger of Hell"
And this is where "The Minister of Hell" is most shocking.
Through such a plot, we will find that the terrifying power of the messenger of hell is actually just a lead, and the real horror is the selfishness of human nature, what kind of blindness people will fall into when they fall into panic, causing us to cling to the poisonous snake as a lifeline.
Even though he saw that the person next to him had been bitten hard, he still held on to it, convinced or hoping that this would not happen to him.
Just like in the real society, whether it is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster, we always hope to find a reason for an event, and when we encounter misfortune ourselves, we need a reason to blame the fault and let the emotions have a cathartic outlet.
And when others are in trouble, we also need reasons, trying to find a reason from them, trying to prove that we are different from each other, thus conceiving a logic for everything that may not exist, and then seeking inner security from it.
For example, we often see in Weibo comments "who made you want to go out in the middle of the night", "who made you wear such a short skirt", "who made you trust others too much". This theory of victim guilt is almost pervasive in all kinds of social news.
The "New Shinto" is precisely the opportunity to take advantage of the people's mentality, set the flames, and seek their own interests, so that when we really want to make changes in the face of the problem, we are drowned out by all kinds of verbal attacks.
3 This is the world of man
The key to the last 3 episodes of "The Minister of Hell" is the couple of Bae Young-jae (Park Jeong-min) and Song Joo-hyun (Won Jin-er), which is also the key to tears.
Bae Young-jae was suspicious of the new truth, and did waver briefly when he saw that the Messenger of Hell had really come to judge his colleagues, but at the same time, he was even more shocked that the child he had just given birth to with his wife, Zhaoxian, was also declared dead?
Are babies also guilty? What felonies have a baby committed a few days of age and is subject to capital punishment? The prophecy of the infant is the key to overturning the neo-Shinrim doctrine, which claims that only those who have committed the most heinous sins will be judged, but this is not the case.
In-jae and Cho-hyun can't bear to see the child being judged, and begin to confront the Messenger of Hell, and finally the two choose the extreme way, that is, to hold the baby in their arms together, wanting to be devoured by the monster with the child... In the end, however, it was Inzai and Cho Hyun who were burned to ashes, and the baby miraculously survived.
Under the surface of seemingly detached from reality, "The Angel of Hell" discusses exactly such a situation that is constantly happening around you and me. We see the appearance of the event, but we may always be anxious to believe the statement or explanation we see in the first place because of fear, anger, or all kinds of emotions.
But are those claims really true? Are we solving problems, or are we solving those who ask questions or are they having problems?
From this point of view, we may find that the three monsters in "The Minister of Hell" are actually just guides, and those who really open the gates of hell are those who believe that they are righteous.
The most touching line in "The Minister of Hell" is the most thought-provoking sentence of the taxi driver who rescued Min Hye-jin (Kim Hyun-joo) and the baby: "I don't understand what God is, nor am I interested in knowing, I only know that this is the world of man, and the world of man should be watched and done by man himself." ”
The reason why Yan Shanghao's works are charming is that he always sets up a reversal link in the last act, and often ends with "women" or "children", while symbolizing the arrival of a better world.
The destruction of faith does not begin with external forces, not from what changes the supernatural forces themselves have caused, but from the person who proposes the explanation to define what is happening in the present moment. The beliefs and daily concepts on which people depend for their survival are collapsing little by little, but after the collapse, they can continue to rebuild, reconstructing a "daily life" under the new theoretical system, God, which is always man-made.