Sometimes a miracle comes with a steep price.
A doctor has a blind wife and a son who is in a wheelchair after an accident. Then one night, he finds a badly injured old miracle man on the road and saves his life. It turns out that the old man has miraculous powers, and he makes the doctor’s son walk again. But that comes with a price because another boy the same age wakes up unable to walk, and this is just the beginning of the troubles that await this family.
The Favor, aka Savior, is a South Korean horror movie that, as far as I can see, hasn’t been well received. I don’t understand why, because, even though this isn’t a masterpiece of horror, it’s pretty entertaining and a little disturbing. The Miracle Man is disgusting to look at because he is rotting on the outside, and after a while he sort of looks like he belongs in a Hellraiser movie.
The characters aren’t that deep or well written, but that’s not what’s important in a movie like this. The most important thing is the atmosphere and the feeling of dread while watching it, and it succeeds at what it’s trying to do. It tells us that when you are selfish, what you wish for can turn into something terrible for another person. The movie also offers a little black humor when it turns out that one character must pay the price for the miracles given to the mother and her son.
The characters in the movie are cold, sad, and selfish, and you don’t really care about their happiness. But you do feel sorry for one character and her son, who must pay the price because of this family. There are also other people who want to have the Miracle Man in their possession because they don’t know that the miracles he gives come with a price, and for the moment, that price is paid by this family of three.
I found The Favor, aka Savior, to be entertaining, which I didn’t expect. It doesn’t have the best script because it is a religious movie of some sort, and it never goes very deep into the religious topic it starts with. The Miracle Man seems to be a cursed man with some kind of demon inside him. Maybe. I’m not sure. But be prepared for unsympathetic Korean characters, something South Korean movies are among the best in the world at creating.