In 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared after her husband confessed to having an extramarital affair. What she did during those eleven days remains a mystery to this day. Director Kim Dae-sung's Blood Rain suggests, against the odds, that she may have flown to Korea and written an old-fashioned potboiler as a restorative. The plot is standard Christie. It's 1808 and the royal investigator (Seung Won-cha) -- working on an arson case on the island of Donghwa -- suddenly lands in the middle of a gruesome murder case. As any Christie fan knows, everyone's a suspect so while one piece of evidence points at the paper mill owner's son (Park Young-woo) and another at the local artist (Ji Seong), who did it, even who had it done to him, stays unknown 'til the bitter end. There's a rational vs. superstitious conflict at work here but only a genre novice would side with the villagers blaming the vengeful ghost of Commissioner Kang (Jeon Ho-jin). And while she's without a motive, the island shaman (Choi Ji-na) is the creepiest character on screen. No one else could inspire followers to chop the heads off five real-life chickens, a jarringly bloody sequence that makes a human dismemberment earlier in the flick that less memorable. I see a PETA protest coming.
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