Post Credits Scene: The ambitious Kannada crime epic Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana is steeped in Indian mythology, but has the violent spirit of a Korean gangster picture.

From its disorientating open credits sequence set to a jazzy English number to its blood-drenched final moments in a muddy Mangaluru village, writer-director-star Raj B Shetty’s Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana defies logic. It shouldn’t (and often doesn’t) work. With a run-time of over two-and-a-half hours, it’s overlong and inconsistent, but boy is it more interesting than most movies that we see these days.

Calling it a noble failure would imply some sort of moral superiority. But this is a grimy film about unambiguously reprehensible men. And much like its ‘protagonist’, a man named Shiva who is ‘reborn’ after being left for dead as a child, it revels in nastiness. The unremarkable-looking right-hand man to a local goon named Hari, Shiva’s the guy you call when dirty work needs to be done-at slitting throats and bashing in skulls as he is with doing ‘Vasili’ and deploying intimidation tactics. The mere mention of his name sends shivers down his enemies’ spines–he’s Shiva the God of Death.

And Garuda Gamana is a mythologically dense examination of masculinity and brotherhood, destiny, and ambition. But even though it is set in Mangaluru, in spirit, it has more in common with the South Korean crime sagas of the mid-2000s and will be of tremendous interest to the PirateBay generation that grew up on them.

Korean cinema isn’t limited to what it has now become. What we’re seeing-the global domination of K-pop and the popularity of romance serials-is the culmination of a cultural movement that can trace its roots to where it all began, the liberation of Korea at the end of World War II when the Peninsula was divided into two nations-the North and the South.

While the North slipped into an isolationist mindset that has only metastasized over time, the South embraced a perceived democracy.

After a short-lived Golden Age dominated mostly by patriotic movies, followed by a period of inactivity and an extended stretch of strict censorship, a new generation of filmmakers emerged. Their work mirrored the sudden globalization of their country. They made movies that were, on the surface, stylistically similar to the glossy films made in the West, but were actually a direct reaction to their unresolved relationship with their nation’s past. Forget making them, the mere act of watching movies became a form of expression.

The intersection between violence and its residual psychological impact is a theme that was widely addressed by filmmakers such as Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho, particularly in the Vengeance Trilogy (2002-2005) and Memories of Murder (2003). These are touchstone titles, the sort whose anniversaries are celebrated. More shockingly, they made these movies at the start of their careers. In 2018, The New York Times called Park ‘the man who put Korean cinema on the map’. Just two years later, Director Bong made history with his stark social satire parasite which became the first South Korean film to get any sort of recognition at the Oscars.

But these are just the bookends to a New Wave of Korean cinema that began many years ago, in the early 2000s. Between the breakout success of Park’s Oldboy (2003) and Parasite’s sweeping victory at the Academy Awards, there were films like Nameless Gangster (2012), described by Time magazine as a mob movie that would make Martin Scorsese proud, and Train to Busan (2016), which earned its director Yeon Sang-ho a Netflix deal and its star Ma Dong-Seok a spot in the Eternals cast.