The muddy swampland at the end of Shin Sang-ok’s Jiokhwa (US: The Flower in Hell) is a perfect symbol for the formless, bottomless sea of degradation that Seoul had become in the wake of the Korean War. In the Cold War era and with the world’s superpowers on opposing sides, the conflict between North and South Korea represented a clash of moral, political, and economic values, and Sang-ok’s film seems to expose how the carnage from such a tectonic clash takes form in the small lives of ordinary people. Essentially a criminal drama centered on a sibling love triangle, the film stars Hae-won Jo as Dong-sik, a recently discharged soldier who arrives in Seoul from the countryside to find and persuade his older brother Yeong-shik (Kim Hak) to come home and help take care of their mother. The challenge with Yeong-shik is two-fold: first, he’s fallen in with a gang of thieves and is plotting a train robbery, and second, he’s smitten by his prostitute girlfriend So-nya (Choi Eun-hee), who services primarily U.S. military men and makes her attraction toward Dong-sik immediately clear. Sonya is seductive, manipulative, and selfish but she isn’t a typical femme fatale as her feelings for Dong-sik appear genuine and her betrayal of Yeong-shik appears spontaneous; rather, she’s a human embodiment of the amorality that soaks in to so many societies reeling from war. Viewers should know going in that the film’s first hour is slow and steady, but the tension kicks in hard in the third act.