The Witch: Part 1. Subversion is a South Korean 2018 action-mystery film starring Kim Da-mi and written and directed by Park Hoon-jung.
Young Ja-Yoon's (Kim) dark past comes back to haunt her, 10 years after she managed to escape from a mysterious laboratory. A sinister man called Nobleman has learned of her special abilities and will now stop at nothing to get her into his masters' clutches.
But Ja-Yoon isn't the helpless, scared little girl everyone believes her to be...
Tropes associated with this movie:
- Alas, Poor Villain: For all his Smug Snake attitude and the things he was willing to put Ja-Yoon through, Nobleman's last living moments are used to portray him sympathetically. He laments how inhuman he, Ja-Yoon and the rest of the enhanced humans are, musing about how they "can't even die properly". While he also can't resist getting one last low-blow in, it's made clear that he has finally lost the will to go on and is probably welcoming death by now.
- Ambiguous Situation: When Ja-Yoon aims her gun at Nobleman, the screen cuts to black and a shot is heard. Later on Ja-Yoon walks past Nobleman's body, which is suspiciously angled so that we can't see his forehead. Did Ja-Yoon really shoot him? Or did she spare him as a sort of Cruel Mercy to just leave him to die painfully in the burning building and he's merely passed out from the strain of fighting her when we last see him?
- Amnesiac Dissonance: Ja-Yoon is a generally quiet and gentle girl, which causes her to become shaken whenever her past memories trigger, briefly turning her into a killing machine. In reality, the gentle girl was just an act from the beginning, and she framed her moments of self-defense as an example of this to make herself appear vulnerable to those she was manipulating.
- Amnesiac Hero: Ja-Yoon remembers nothing about her past as a lab experiment, and the movie is about her rediscovering the dark truths of what was done to her. Except that's only what she wants everyone else to think. She never had amnesia to begin with but faked it as part of a Batman Gambit to stave off the illness that's slowly killing her.
- Badass Adorable: Ja-Yoon is a short, slightly chubby girl, capable of dispatching of multiple armed goons with ease.
- Batman Gambit: Ja-Yoon manages to pull one on Dr. Baek and Mr. Choi, her former tormentors. Having known from the start that her genetic modification was the cause of her headaches and dwindling powers, she intentionally drew attention to herself at the audition and then let Dr. Baek's forces kidnap her, in order to procure a donor for a bone marrow transplant. After Dr. Baek has her injected with a serum that will hold her disease at bay for a month, a now fully powered Ja-Yoon gleefully informs her that she's been had, breaks free and goes on a one-girl-rampage inside her facility.
- Big Bad Duumvirate: Dr. Baek and Mr. Choi, who hunt Ja-Yoon throughout the movie and even threaten her family to make her come with them.
- Curb-Stomp Battle:
- Ja-Yoon delivers one to the group of armed men that break into her home and hold her parents at gun point. They barely have time to react before she guns them down in turn and uses her superhuman abilities to take care of the rest.
- Delivers this a second time to everyone at Dr. Baek's facility after successfully acquiring a temporary cure for her disease.
- Cute But Psycho: Ja-Yoon, after she drops her scared victim-facade. She casually obliterates every goon in the laboratory with an adorable smile on her face.
- The Dragon: Nobleman to Dr. Baek and Mr. Choi.
- Defiant to the End: Even in his seemingly last living moments at Ja-Yoon's mercy, Nobleman continues to act spiteful and petty towards her, trying to encourage her to commit suicide, as there is no way she can go back to a normal life after what she has done. When Ja-Yoon refuses and asks him were the facility with the formula for her serum is, he just sticks his tongue out at her and laughs.
- The Dog Bites Back: After stalking, threatening and tormenting what they thought was an amnesiac Ja-Yoon for the majority of the film, Dr. Baek, Mr. Choi and their cronies get utterly curbstomped by Ja-Yoon, who reveals she was just pretending to have forgotten everything. To top it all off, Ja-Yoon made them find her on purpose, which means they were never in a position of power over her to begin with.
- Foreshadowing: After killing the armed men at her house, Ja-Yoon looks down at her bloodied hands and drops the gun she was holding, visibly shaken by the whole ordeal. However, she stays remarkably calm and doesn't even cry or break down after doing so. This foreshadows that while she probably dislikes being pulled back into her dark past, she has already resigned herself to get her hands dirty in order to find a cure.
- Happily Adopted: Mr. and Mrs. Goo treat Ja-Yoon like their own daughter and she in turns seems to love them just as much. After escaping Dr. Baek, she gives Mr. Goo her serum, despite needing it for her disease, so he can cure Mrs. Goo's dementia.
- Healing Factor: All modified humans possess an enhanced version of this that allows them to recover from otherwise fatal injuries. The only way to kill them is to shoot them in the head.
- Ironic Echo: After Ja-Yoon kills the armed men who invaded her house, Nobleman enters and mockingly compliments her, saying that she is "on another level". When Ja-Yoon fights him in the film's climax and it becomes clear that he is no match for her, she just as mockingly repeats his compliment, stating that she is, indeed, "on another level".
- Master Actor: Ja-Yoon was never an innocent amnesiac tormented by the capacity for murder she possessed, but she plays the part so well for most of the movie that it comes as a legitimate shock when she drops the act.
- Noble Demon: As gleeful as Ja-Yoon can get when dispatching her tormentors, she does show that she is capable of gratitude and kindness towards those who treat her well, as seen when she gives away the serum she needs to survive to Mr. Goo, her adoptive father, so that he can cure his wife's dementia.
- Psychopathic Manchild:
- Nobleman is a sadistic psychopath who will gleefully taunt Ja-Yoon about her Dark and Troubled Past every chance he gets, make thinly veiled threats against her friends and family with a smile on his face and assaults regular civilians for the crime of accidentally bumping into him while on the phone.
- Ja-Yoon is revealed to be one in the film's climax. She takes enormous pleasure in torturing Dr. Baek and fighting and brutalizing Nobleman and everyone else in the facility trying to get in her way. Though this could at least be understandable to some extent, see The Dog Bites Back above.
- Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: The only way to counter the modified human's Healing Factor and kill them for good.
- Secretly Dying: Dr. Baek reveals to Ja-Yoon that her genetic modifications resulted in an illness that will eventually take her life, if it doesn't get treatment. Ja-Yoon later reveals to her that she knew. That's the reason why she's there after all.
- Showy Invincible Hero: Once Ja-Yoon drops the act, she spends the rest of the movie being completely untouchable. Considering the catharsis of watching her tormentors finally getting theirs, it's not necessarily a problem. There's also the fact that, even though no one can significantly harm her, she's still slowly dying from the experiments done to her, so she still has a time limit to contend with at the end of the movie.
- Slasher Smile: For much of the final act, Ja-Yoon has one on her face near-constantly as she goes to town on everyone.
- Smug Snake: Nobleman gleefully antagonizes everyone with an insufferable air of superiority. He does actually have the power to carry out most of his threats, but he is just as quick to lose his composure when things stop going his way. He also pales in every regard to Ja-Yoon once she stops pretending to be an amnesiac.
- Smug Super: Once Ja-Yoon reveals her deception, she very gleefully toys with Dr. Baek and Mr Choi's forces, all to demonstrate just how powerless they are against her. Nobleman, who is pretty powerful himself, ends up coming off as a Smug Snake compared to her, as she can fully back up her claim that she's stronger than him.
- Spoiler Title: Downplayed. The title isn't lying, you're in for one hell of a subversion in the film's climax.
- The Starscream: Mr. Choi ends up killing Dr. Baek, right after she demands him to capture Nobleman and Ja-Yoon. He doesn't get to enjoy his promotion for very long, as Ja-Yoon kills him shortly after.
- Wham Line: "Hello doctor, it's been a while."
- Would Hit a Girl: Nobleman and his Mooks certainly have no issue with manhandling Ja-Yoon, despite her being underage.
