A wandering musician is traveling to Seoul for his son Yeongnam, who badly needs treatment for a lung disease. Coming to a small village on the way, the musician asks about a bed for a night, and discovers this village has a serious rat problem. Claiming that vermin respond to the sound of his pipe, he insists that he can wipe out the plague of rats with just his medicine and the sound of his pipe. The village chief offers him good money for this service, but when all the rats are gone, he changes his mind. The chief and the villagers then run the musician out of their village. Although The Piper clearly plays on the German folktale ′The Pied Piper of Hamelin,′ this film is less of a universal fantasy and more a metaphor that sharply criticizes some realities in Korea. Not long after the Korean War, the fear of outsiders often led to quite irrational collective behavior. The Piper is a clever genre film that pointedly indicates how the logic of exclusion can work. (NAM Dong-chul)