The Piper: Drats for the Rats

A picturesque village turns into a less picturesque leper colony which then turns into a troubled town with no lepers but infinite rats. How did this happen exactly? I'm not totally sure but when a traveling musician (Ryu Seung-ryong) and his tubercular son arrive they may be able to help with the infestation problem at least. That is — of course — if you think a pied piper is capable of mesmerizing thousands of rodents so that they'll pile into an old building so he can seal the doorway shut with a rock. Once "trapped," these squeaky little guys aren't the type to dig their way out or climb up over the top of the rock either, which might stretch the limits of your imagination but then again, these particular rats know human behavior well enough to realize it's just a waiting game. People are so terribly predictable!

Rats, however, are not. "But rats don't eat humans!" or something to that effect is screamed by the mean-spirited town leader (Lee Sung-min) at one point yet we all know, deep in our hearts that, given the chance, of course a rat would eat a human. Where did the bossy old crank get such a stupid idea? This only proves that rats do know humans better than humans know rats. Because despite this proclamation, these rats are indeed going to feast on human flesh. Furthermore, their tastes will be discriminating. They have their preferences — avoiding human veal and sticking to human beef. Rats have ethics, you know. Yet as the faux local shaman (Chun Woo-hee) points out when she repeats the previous shaman's curse on the village, the uneaten kids will have a terrible fate of their own.

It's here where The Piper takes its darkest turn, which is pretty dark considering the dismemberment, physical brutality, and mass cowardice we've seen throughout Kim Kwang-tae's directorial debut. So what's Kim's intended message? Be kind to the sick? A deal's a deal? Kill all rats? Kill all people? Maybe it's quite basic. Something like... People take pleasure from watching the animal kingdom revenge its tormentors. Remember Hitchcock's The Birds?