After schoolgirl Park Chae-lin (Jung Yi-ju) abandons her best friend Song Na-mi (Oh Woo-ri) and leads a horrific bullying campaign against Hwang ‘Phony’ Sun-woo (Bang Hyo-rin), the two wronged girls make a suicide pact, but first agree to track Chae-lin to Seoul to make her life as hellish as theirs has become. There they find that Chae-lin has dedicated herself to good works within an apocalyptic Christian sect, where she hopes that repentance will win her a ticket to Paradise.

Constantly unpredictable, writer/director Lim Oh-jeong’s debut starts as a story of extreme adolescent angst and ill-defined revenge, before complicating things with the possibility of a redemptive arc that makes the victims look more like villains, and then finding even in its new religious framework the same cruel hierarchies of power that dominate the playground. It is a messy tale of high-stakes teen friendship, with plenty of fireworks. 

Anton Bitel