Aahana Swrup
Netflix’s ‘Revelations’ is a Korean crime film in which a detective and a pastor find themselves involved in the same missing person case that ends up unraveling the darkest parts of their own soul. Detective Lee Yeon-hui lost her younger sister to the cruelties of one Kwon Yang-rae. Therefore, she’s on edge when the man is paroled from his prison sentence and returns to town. Nonetheless, it isn’t long before the criminal becomes a suspect in the abduction of another young girl, A-yeong. As Yeon-hui investigates the case, her paths cross with Sung Min-chan, the pastor of the victim’s church. Unbeknownst to the officer, Min-chan is planning on delivering divine retribution on Yang-rae, convinced that the heavens are sending him signs to carry out the Lord’s will. As the story charts a three-way cat-and-mouse chase between these characters, it arrives at an unexpected conclusion that must have gripped the audience’s attention. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Revelations Plot Synopsis
Ever since Yeon-ju’s death, her older sister, Lee Yeon-hui, has been haunted by her ghost and an ever-present sense of guilt. As a result, the detective can’t help but keep tabs on her sister’s abuser, Kwon Yang-rae, once he gets out of prison on parole. Consequently, she notices the man following a young girl, A-yeong, around town and to her church. During the service, A-yeong’s pastor, Min-chan, also takes notice of the man, but mostly in terms of getting another registered congregant. Although he’s troubled to learn that the man is a criminal—thanks to his ankle monitor—he still keeps the church’s door open for him. However, after their short meeting, the day begins going astronomically downhill for the pastor.
Min-chan discovers that his wife is having an extramarital affair and that his superior, Pastor Jung, isn’t considering him to lead their community’s new megachurch that is currently under construction. In the stir of these developments, he also forgets to pick his daughter up from school. To his horror, the school informs his wife that another man has already picked her up in the afternoon. Instantly, Min-chan suspects Yang-rae’s involvement and rushes to get his address from the sex offenders registry online. As such, he finds himself following after the shady guy under the night’s darkness. Eventually, the two come to a confrontation in a woodsy pathway, which quickly escalates into a physical altercation.
Eventually, a fatal fall sends Yang-rae falling down a slope—cracking his head on a stone. Shortly afterward, a phone call informs Min-chan that his daughter is actually safe and sound at a friend’s house. In quick succession, horror dawns on the priest before the lightning in the sky compels him to glimpse at an image of Christ. Consequently, he perceives the image as a sign from God and pushes Yang-rae into the ravine below. The next day, the authorities are in a flurry, looking for A-yeong, who has gone missing. They suspect Yang-rae of being behind the abduction, which pulls Min-chan into the fold in Yeon-hui’s official investigation. Although the pastor keeps his crime a secret, he continues struggling with the reality of his actions. Nonetheless, when Pastor Jung ends up finally offering him a lead position in his new church—and Min-chan glimpses at another heavenly imagery—he reasons that God had wanted him to kill Yang-rae.
Therefore, when Min-chan coincidentally finds the apparently still alive man in the care center, he kidnaps him, stowing him away at an under-construction lot. However, before the pastor can kill him, Yang-rae reveals that he kidnapped A-yeong and thus knows her current location. Nonetheless, the pastor refuses to believe him. In time, Yeon-hui’s investigation brings her to the under-construction building, where a final confrontation happens between the three of them. During this altercation, the pastor reveals his plans to kill the criminal and frame the detective for his murder before killing her as well. In the end, despite Yeon-hui’s best efforts, she fails to save Yang-rae, who reveals that a “one-eyed monster” ate A-yeong moments before he fell to his death.
Revelations Ending: What Does Yang-rae Mean by One-Eyed Monster?
Even though Yang-rae’s death acts as somewhat of a climax for the narrative, it still leaves the story with its biggest and most pressing conflict: A-yeong. When Min-chan makes the decision to kill Yang-rae once and for all, he convinces himself to believe the young girl is long dead. After all, if he allows himself to believe that there’s still a chance to save A-yeong, it would mean taking Yang-rae to the cops and revealing his own crimes in the process. Therefore, by intercepting meaning in shadows and numbers on the walls, Min-chan assures himself that God has told him that the girl is dead and Yang-rae must now die to pay for his sins. Inversely, Yeon-hui—who is just as eager to end the criminal’s life for what he had done to his sister—believes in the possibility that he is telling the truth.
Therefore, Yang-rae’s dying words of the One-Eyed Monster and its connection to A-yeong become crucial clues for the detective. Yet, the man’s death all but cements the young girl’s demise. A-yeong has been missing for multiple days now. Even though the cops have a hunch about looking for her at Yang-rae’s place of employment at an under-construction redevelopment zone, it will take them days to locate her. As such, there’s a strong chance that the girl would die before anyone could come to save her. Still, Yeon-hui is loathe to give up without a fight. So far, the detective has been struggling with Yang-rae’s case—mostly because she can’t find it in herself to view him as a human being after what he did to her sister.
Nonetheless, Yeon-hui realizes that she must first understand Yang-rae to be able to dissect and retrace his actions. Thus, she shows up at his psychiatrist, Dr. Lee’s office. Previously, she had only antagonized the doctor for his part in explaining Yang-rae’s mental trauma during his court case, subsequently aiding in his sympathetic sentencing. However, Yeon-hui offers him some understanding as well. As a result, while going through his files on the man, she learns about the latter’s awful childhood, wherein his father relentlessly abused him for sixteen years before he was finally free from the torment. During their earlier sessions, Yang-rae mentioned the one-eyed monster and seemed to have also drawn a horrifying image of it on his dilapidated house’s wall.
For the same reason, Lee believes the One-Eyed Monster is in some way related to Yang-rae’s childhood. He theorizes it could either be a moniker he has given the monster within himself or his abusive father. Nevertheless, thanks to a fortunate phone call from her contractor dad, Yeon-hui arrives at a different conclusion. She’s looking for something that might have triggered the man into slipping back into his demented habits despite a recent display of mental improvement. Thus, once she hears of an oculus window—which makes a house resemble “a one-eyed thing,” she realizes the monster isn’t actually a human. Instead, it’s the home that Yang-rae grew up in, enduring his father’s painful abuse and his mother’s helpless by-standing. His father kept him on the top floor with the circular window—a consistent motif in his therapy drawings. Consequently, he grew to associate the window with his painful childhood memories. For him, the window became a powerful symbol—much like the imagined ghost of Yeon-hui’s sister and Min-chan’s signs from God.
Is A-yeong Alive? Does Yeon-hui Save Her?
The story keeps the audience on edge about A-yeong’s survival for quite some time. Yeon-hui is hopeful that the girl is still alive. Yet, her hope is stained with her own trauma. She can’t bear to lose the teenager since it would serve as a bitter reminder of her own sister. Alternatively, Min-chan is firm in his belief that A-yeong is dead and Yang-rae is only bluffing to save his own skin. However, his logic is also influenced by his own desperation to prevent the criminal from talking to the authorities. Therefore, the narrative forces the audience to hedge their bets on one of these characters and their muddied faith.
However, once Yang-rae is delivered to his fate, A-yeong’s reality reveals itself. As it turns out, the girl is alive, even if tied up and gagged in the attic of an abandoned house. The house is in the redevelopment zone where the criminal had been working as a construction worker. Therefore, it triggered his memories of his past. Thus, he had been vying to recreate the situation with himself in the place of power and A-yeong as his helpless victim. Nonetheless, now that he’s gone, no one else is privy to the fact that the girl is trapped inside the house. Worse yet, the building is moments away from being demolished. Once Yeon-hui realizes what the One-Eyed Monster refers to, it becomes vastly easier to trace Yang-rae’s steps.
Lee has already theorized that something must have triggered Yang-rae’s backslide into kidnapping and torture. Therefore, it stands to reason that finding the trigger would bring the detective one step closer to his hideout. Once she realizes what she’s looking for, it becomes easier to find the house with the Oculus window. Fortunately, Yeon-hui is able to arrive at the building in the nick of time, bursting through the door and to A-yeong’s rescue before the house collapses on her. In the end, she saves the young girl—and heals a part of herself that has always carried the guilt of not saving Yeon-ju in the same manner.
Is God Really Sending Signs to Min-chan? What Happens to Him?
In the aftermath of Yang-rae’s death, Min-chan is arrested and sent to prison for his crimes. The pastor doesn’t attempt to hide his actions and instead carries them proudly, insisting that he was simply carrying out God’s will. Throughout the story, he encounters multiple images that compel him to think the Lord is sending him messages. The first time this happens is on the heels of Yang-rae’s perceived death at Min-chan’s hands. At that moment, the latter realizes the colossal trouble he’s in by causing someone else’s death—not only in terms of legality but morality as well. He has committed a grave sin, and he’s desperate to justify his actions.
For the same reason, when the lightning casts the sky in the shrubbery’s shadow, Min-chan disillusions himself into thinking it is actually a sign from God. Yang-rae is a registered sex offender who has done deplorable things. Surely, that means the heavens want him punished. Therefore, it’s easy for the pastor to make himself believe God wants him to kill the man. From there, as his actions grow more and more perverse, so does the gravity of his delusion. He desperately looks for patterns that don’t actually exist outside of his mind and takes them as proof of divine providence. This also compels him to become sure in the belief that A-yeong is dead without any real evidence. If A-yeong is alive, it would hinder Min-chan from killing Yang-rae. Thus, in his mind, the same can’t possibly be true.
Nevertheless, Yeon-hui proves otherwise by not only finding A-yeong but also saving her. In the aftermath, the detective visits Min-chan in prison to share this information with him. Once the pastor realizes that his bloodthirst for Yang-rae has directly put the young girl’s life in danger, it dismantles his whole belief system. So far, he had been convincing himself that his actions were in line with God’s will. However, he can’t possibly explain why the Lord would want him to kill the man who knew the location of a dying girl. As such, reality begins to sink in, and he realizes that every sign he sees has only been a product of his own delusion. Even so, when he returns to his jail cell and glimpses at the likeness of Christ stained on the cell walls, he realizes that he can’t ever truly escape his own false fantasies of godly intervention.
Why Does Yeon-Hui Try to Save Yang-rae? Does He Die?
Even though Yeon-hui offers a clear moral compass for the narrative, her character is equally as driven by her misleading faith as Yang-rae and Min-chan. Instead of a One-Eyed Monster or misread signs from God, her disillusionment comes from the ghost of her sister. Yeon-ju was held captive by Yang-rae for days on end, tortured and abused by the man. Over the course of this torment, she even once had a phone conversation with Yeon-hui while her attacker held her at knifepoint. Unfortunately, her older sister hadn’t been able to tell that something was wrong with her sister during the call. As such, Yeon-ju continued to remain Yang-rae’s captive until she managed to escape on her own and contacted the cops.
In the aftermath, a court trial followed in which Lee’s assessment of Yang-rae’s psyche and past abuse earned him massive sympathy points from the court and the public at large. People continued pitying him online, overlooking the damage he had done to Yeon-ju. As a result, the girl succumbed to the pressure and eventually committed suicide. For the same reason, Yeon-hui has always blamed Yang-rae for her sister’s demise. Yet, a part of her can’t help but blame herself as well for not finding and helping Yeon-ju in time. This is manifested in her head as her sister’s vengeful ghost.
As such, during the final confrontation, Yeon-hui is tempted to kill Yang-rae and avenge her sister. Nonetheless, when it comes down to it—with Yang-rae dangling out a window—the detective chooses to try and save him by hanging on to him. Here, her actions are driven by her desperation to save A-yeong. Yeon-hui knows she can’t save her sister, which is why she’s even more hellbent on saving the young girl. For a moment, she ignores her demons and holds onto the hope of finding A-yeong alive, which compels her to try her tormenter—the only person who knows her whereabouts. In the end, her efforts pay off since it encourages Yang-rae to bestow her with an instrumental clue before he slips to his demise.
Read More: Revelations: Is the Netflix Movie Based on a True Story?
