Sun-woo, elegant of dress and speech, is ostensibly the manager of a four-star restaurant—but we know there is more without being told as such. One night he’s summoned to one of the party rooms to “deal with” an unruly client. He unhurriedly finishes his dessert, adjusts his cuffs, walks downstairs, and politely asks the thuggish man and his cronies to leave. They do not, and that serves as a trigger release: he leaps up onto the table, thrashes them all into submission, and sends them back home to their gangster boss.

Sun-woo (Byung-hun Lee, of JSA and 3-Iron) has been working for seven years as an enforcer for “President” Kang, head of a large Korean crime syndicate. He is still young and handsome, and from what we can tell he was recruited directly into this job without much in the way of formative experiences in the real world. He has never had a real vocation, never fallen in love, and never had his loyalties tested in any significant way. For all of his brutal worldliness he is still in some ways unformed, embryonic—and A Bittersweet Life is, more than anything else, about Sun-Woo growing past his protected world and becoming autonomous, however briefly.

Berserk does the one thing I almost never see in epic fantasy: It takes the full implications of its setting seriously. Even The Lord of the Rings, for all of its scope and careful detail, feels too much like a fairy-tale for the darker elements of the story to really be taken seriously. Berserk is as blood-spattered, violent, and grim as a tale deserves to be when it is set in an era of feudal warfare. It knows that life in such a time is, to quote Hobbes, nasty, brutish and short; that men will do anything in their power to live a little longer than the opposition; that history is written by victors and studied by everyone else; and that our world is built thanks to the millions of dead who came before.

It’s also an incredibly exhilarating show, and for exactly all of those reasons. Granted, it’s hard to make any movie about war—whether it’s the Vietnam War or a wholly fantastic conflict—without making it entertaining, and thereby making war itself seem like fun. François Truffaut pointed this out time and again, which was probably a big part of the reason the anti-war Johnny Got his Gun was one of his favorite films. Berserk makes war seem exciting, but also never shies from the fact that (as Barrows Dunham put it) in war one’s lands are devastated, one’s friends get killed, ones family gets killed, and you get killed yourself. So what kind of man would possibly want to make a living out of it?