Pluto

Su-won Shin, the director of this arthouse Korean high school thriller, was a teacher before she started making films. Heaven knows what happened in her classroom, but ‘Pluto’ begins with a star pupil found murdered in the grounds of a top-ranking private boarding school. The boy’s classmate June (Da-wit Lee) is arrested and interrogated by police. Unlike the rest of the students, newcomer June is not the son of wealthy parents. We watch in flashback as he struggles to fit in. His grades tumble and June begs an elite group of super-boffs – who have access to notebooks with exam-passing techniques – to join their gang. But first June must pass a series of brutal and humiliating initiations. To what lengths will he go to get into a good university? Rape? Murder? Clearly there’s a warning in this dark, thoughtful film to tiger parents in Korea about the pressure they put on kids. But we can all relate to the sadistic streak in teenagers.