Violence breeds violence, but there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

“Nothing changes.” These are the last words of Jinsoo, a young man suffering from brutal bullying at school, before he takes the fatal step that sets off a rather unpredictable sequence of events in this startlingly honest film d’auteur.

From the very beginning of the film, we are thrown into a cruel world where physical beatings and verbal abuse seem to be the socially accepted norm of everyday life. At school and at home. But it is far from normal. There are the wolves and then there are the sheep, the bullies and the bullied, and no one is going to change the rules of that game. But when one of the boys being beaten is threatened with the worst, one of the bullies realises it’s time to take a new perspective on life.

“The Loop” captivates with a raw and bold demonstration of the nature of violence to create new violence, which in the end appears as a repetitive nightmare. Despite the film’s bleak undertones, however, its authors seek to instil a sense of hope for a more promising future.

Helmut Jänes