Home A Loan (고인아파트, Kim Tae-kyung, 2026)

Posted on by

Is it the “black mould” that’s driving new homeowner Eun-jin (Yoo Seon) out of her mind, or the combination of unresolved trauma and the financial pressures of trying to secure a safe and comfortable living environment for your family in contemporary Seoul where out of control property prices have made ownership an unattainable dream for many? Echoing a motif that’s become increasingly familiar in recent Korean films, Eun-jin buys an apartment which looks out onto a complex of other, much nicer, luxury apartment blocks that are well out of her reach. Yet she’s convinced herself that the building she’s moved in to will soon be redeveloped and she could make a life-changing amount of money by flipping it once the renovations are completed.

The only snag would seem to be that the block is plastered in signs that say things like “redevelopment equals death”. In fact, Gong-in Apartments is well known locally as “Go-in Apartments” which sounds like “apartments of the departed”, making this place seem “haunted” in a less literal sense as something that exists out of time with the world around it. The local residents seem to regard the blocks as old-fashioned and an eyesore. They are slightly embarrassed by them, and prefer to avoid the people that live there. The block is then “haunted” in another sense in that most of the “inhabitants” are “ghost owners” who bought the apartments as an investment but do not live there, nor do they rent the apartments out due to the rundown nature of the building. Despite having pushed her to invest by implying that the city had virtually already agreed to go ahead with the redevelopment, Eun-jin’s estate agent is surprised that she actually intends to live there given the building’s reputation, yet later revelations suggest she may have sold this unit before. She has definitely sold others in the building to people who were financially ruined by their decision to buy and in some cases took their own lives.

Yet Eun-jin is proud of her new status as a homeowner, as if reaching a new level as a fully-fledged member of society. She cleans and redecorates it herself, peeling off the layers of lining on the ceiling and clearing away the mould assuming it’s only caused by the fact the apartment had been empty. Yet as a doctor later explains, you can’t get rid of that kind of mould by papering over it, just as Eun-jin cannot get over the familial trauma from her childhood by creating a superficially happy home of her own. In some ways, the film ultimately takes a turn for the conservative in its messaging as most of the problems are attributed to paternal absence, even if that absence was also caused by the economic conditions of the society which forced Ji-chul (Lee Jong-hyu) to live separately from his family in order to provide for them while Eun-jin works in a local factory to make ends meet.

In the opening stretches of the film, one almost wonders if Ji-chul is a ghost himself as Eun-jin only talks to him on the phone through which he offers words of kind support that might as well be Eun-jin talking to herself, while he is able to offer little in the way of practical help. Though his absence obviously increases the strain on Eun-jin as she has to care for the family alone while also working, the doctor frames it in more patriarchal tones as if things like this happen when women live without men. On one level he is blaming Ji-chul for failing as a man by leaving his family undefended, but also suggesting that women are incapable of protecting themselves. Eun-jin repeatedly states that she will “protect” her family, but ends up endangering them as her reality becomes ever more fragmented and confused. In the end only Ji-chul’s return can save the children from her mania, though he cannot cure her of her delusions alone.

It soon becomes apparent that Eun-jin has been experiencing reality differently to those around her, frequently seeing centipedes in the house while others seemingly don’t react to potentially life-threatening situations. At one point, she arrives at work wearing a very old-fashioned, purple wraparound dress and with a makeup and hair style that seems reminiscent of an earlier era, suggesting that she may have been possessed by something more than just fear and fury that her investment is not actually going to pay off and she won’t even be able to afford to continue living in this moribund building where the lifts don’t work and no one has noticed the little boy from upstairs has been living alone so long he’s turned feral. Homeownership seems to have turned Eun-jin into a selfish and suspicious person, instinctively fearing the homeless as if now afraid either to become one or that they will somehow steal her space. She stops her son playing with the other boy, complaining that people like that will become stuck to you if you let them get too close while making no attempt to help him. Perhaps this is also a reflection of her own childhood trauma as are the visions she begins to see of a malevolent presence out to destroy her family. “I just wanted to do better,” she says, but it seems this society doesn’t really want to let her even as it dangles a vision of future happiness that is destined to remain far out of reach.

Home A Loan screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Time of Cinema (극장의 시간들, Lee Jong-pil, Yoon Ga-eun, Jang Kun-jae, 2025)

Posted on by

Made in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Cinecube cinema in Seoul, Time of Cinema (극장의 시간들, Geugjang-ui Sigandeul) is an anthology film featuring three segments and bookended with a sequence set in the venue as a young woman takes lessons from the projectionist while classic films such as Ozu’s Late Spring play in the background. As such, each of the films has a kind of meta commentary on the nature of film, the industry and buildings as well as the impact it can have on people’s lives even if they happen to fall asleep during the movie.

This kind of reflexivity is evident in the opening segment, Chimpanzee, which features its protagonists recreating the dance from Godard’s Bande à part. This segment also is set across two time periods and is revealed to be “a film” based on the recollections of the director’s youth in which he spent time watching movies with two close friends while in the military. This sense of loss for shared experiences of the past is something that echoes through the other sequences and in the last seems as if it could in some senses be returned through unexpected reunion. In any case, the director appears to reclaim them through imprinting his memories in the film as a means of reliving them. Its protagonists also have a kind of truth revealed to them that something they assumed to be merely a legend was perhaps true after all.

The second sequence, meanwhile, directed by Yoon Ga-eun plays with the nature of film itself as we’re show several scenes that turn out to be in progress shots from the filming of another movie in which a collection of little girls are asked to repeat the same scene in a frustrated attempt to make it seem more “natural.” At the end, they all sit down to watch the film they’ve made, but this is also a part of the “film”, while we have also already been watching them, leading us to ponder on these many levels of refection within the video footage. Well known for her films featuring children such as The House of Us, Yoon gets the most from her young cast while at the same time demonstrating how difficult it can be work with child actors even if what she mainly does is to leave them to their own devices, capturing their spontaneity and enthusiasm in the most natural way possible.

The third sequence meanwhile is more firmly rooted in Cinecube and explores the less glamorous side of filmmaking in taking a leaf out of Goodbye Dragon Inn’s book as the cleaning lady walks up and down the aisles collecting rubbish even if, as they mentioned in the first segment, this place is too fancy to sell popcorn. Though the cleaning lady rarely has time to watch any films, she ends up running into an old friend who’s just come in to use the bathroom and pressures her into seeing whatever’s playing which happens to be a special screening of a movie with a director Q&A. The old friend’s name also has the same pronunciation of the word for “film”, and though she and everyone else in the cinema falls asleep, her time spent there seems to return something precious that she had lost while she also reunites with her old friend.

In this way it paints cinema as an interactive experience and all the more so when visiting a cinema rather than watching passively, or inattentively, though a TV screen. By the same token, it shows the cinema staff working hard from the put upon box office lady trying to tell a desperate cinephile that he’s arrived too late to enter the auditorium and, in any case, has booked his ticket for the following day, to the cleaning lady and projectionist who meticulously keeps an eye on everything, both digital and analogue, to ensure that the film is being projected as intended. Cinemas are in that sense social spaces in which people share experiences with both strangers and friends while in some ways unaware of the relationship that’s arising between themselves and the screen and the images that may also be changing them in ways untold.

Time of Cinema screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Good Neighbors (兩相好, Li Hsing, 1962)

Posted on by

Known as the godfather of Taiwanese cinema, Li Hsing started out as an aspiring actor before making a string of incredibly popular Taiwanese-language films despite the fact that he himself was from the Mainland and could not speak a single word of Taiwanese. Language barriers are very much at the centre of his 1962 comedy Good Neighbors (兩相好, liǎngxiāng hǎo), which, in its way, marks the beginning of Li’s transition into Mandarin-language cinema, later becoming a proponent of “Healthy Realism”, in its subtly propagandistic insistence that everyone is really just one big Chinese family.

The Chens are Mandarin-speakers who migrated from Mainland China in the wake of the Chinese Civil War and have just moved in next to the Ngs, who are Taiwanese and do not understand Mandarin very well. Mr Chen is a traditional medicine practitioner, while Mr Ng is a Western-style doctor. Mr Chen insists they’re not in conflict with each other because their patients are looking for different things from each of them and might even use both kinds of medicine at the same time or turn to one kind of doctor over another depending on their symptoms. That will prove to be not quite true as the Chens struggle to attract clientele after opening their business while Ng’s clinic is always busy, leading them to consider poaching their patients by temporarily offering free consultations.

This sense of division is seen in the fact that Ng speaks some Japanese and claims to have studied medicine in Japan which links him with the colonial past rather than what might amount to a different colonial present represented by the KMT government who favoured Mandarin and in fact suppressed Taiwanese Hokkien and the indigenous languages of the island. In a roundabout way, the film uses Ng’s status as a Western doctor as a means of criticising Westernisation while never suggesting that one kind of medicine is better than another. Chen is always seen in traditional Chinese dress and seems to represent the essence of Chinese culture that the Ngs may have lost but can recover through their eventual intermarriages with the Chen family.

The funny thing is that neither Mrs Ng nor Mrs Chen subscribe to their family’s respective medical philosophies with each declaring that they don’t trust their husbands and would rather turn to the other kind of medicine without letting them know. Chen and Ng, meanwhile, are actually much the same with each reminding their wives that medicine’s about saving lives and shouldn’t be thought of as “a business” while the wives are much more practical and actively participate in the trade war that briefly develops between them. The main problem is that, as they cannot understand each other’s languages very well, they encounter many minor misunderstandings that lead to unnecessary conflict and suspicion on both sides.

Tellingly, the younger they are the more of each language the children seem to understand with the youngest two largely bilingual and at times acting as interpreters for their older siblings. Predictably, each of Chen’s sons falls for one of Ng’s daughters, while Ng’s son, recently returned from military service, falls for a cousin of the Chen family. This is a problem in part because Mrs Ng had adopted A-kiok with the intention that she would marry their son Bu-hiong. She has been training her up to take over the administrative side of the clinic and for that reason is put out by the idea that she may marry out of the family, while also worried that If she marries a Mainlander he may take her back to the Mainland with him. Bu-hiong is not interested in marrying A-kiok, mainly because they have been raised as siblings, and in fact declares that he prefers “spicy” Mainland girls to “soft” Taiwanese ones. Their decision to marry people of their own choosing is then is a kind of rebuke of local filial customs which are shown to be old-fashioned in contrast with the otherwise “modern” environment of the Western medical clinic where the cure for everything seems to be an injection.

On the other hand, Chen objects when Mrs Ng brands him “a charlatan”, but the film does at times portray them as akin to snake oil salesmen with their various cure all pills they sell at a permanent discount. Nevertheless, despite their falling-out, the Ngs and Chens eventually come to understand each other and are united by their shared Chineseness. The film’s title then takes on a greater meaning in portraying the two nations as “good neighbours” while otherwise insisting that they are bound by a single culture. Though the film hints at the tensions between the newly arrived waishengren and the already present benshengren, it neatly resolves them simply through the eventual intermarriages of the children that literally make everyone one big family. Perhaps surprisingly, the film never suggests that the Ngs should just learn Mandarin, but leaves space for the continued co-existence of both languages with each sometimes mixed in a single sentence as if symbolising the new cultural integration that the film envisages as an idealised future for a new Taiwan.

Good Neighbors screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Accordion Door (아코디언 도어, Son Kyeong-su, 2025)

Posted on by

A young man with an apparently prodigious talent for writing comes to doubt himself when past trauma provokes what may either be a strange delusion or a very real exit of the muse in Son Kyeong-su’s supernaturally tinged exploration of the pressures of the contemporary Korean society, The Accordion Door (아코디언 도어). Constantly berated by his overly demanding mother as a small child for not being good at anything, Ji-soo (Moon Woo-jin) lives in fear of being labeled “a dummy” but has simultaneously become almost entirely detached from the world around him.

This is partly because he has no memories of himself before the age of nine when he went temporarily missing. In the opening sequences, the young Ji-soo is taken around an exhibition explaining the precipitation cycle by his parents who are each too busy sniping at each other to pay much attention to him. His mother blames his father’s lack of effort for Ji-soo’s apparent inability to fill in a worksheet demonstrating that he’s understood that water from the river becomes clouds and that clouds become rain. Crying on his own in the toilet, he poetically wonders if he too has become a cloud only for a cloud-like, or perhaps wormlike, being to enter his brain through his ears, turning him into an apparently different person who is addicted to chocolate and can perfectly articulate his thoughts in writing.

But as good a writer as Ji-soo might currently be, having recently won a national competition, he carries a strong sense of inferiority and worthlessness that’s largely caused by the seemingly conditional nature of his mother’s love which may be withdrawn if he were to become “a dummy”. His mother has separated from his father under the rationale that this will help make Ji-soo a better writer and is constantly pressuring him about winning more competitions. In a way, her determination is self-reflective in that she does not want her son’s mediocrity to make her look like a mediocre mother. When Ji-soo asks what he was like as a child, she tells him that he was “ordinary” and now he’s “brilliant”. When she replaces the expensive phone he had that got broken after he finally agreed to have one, she remarks that it’s just the kind that “ordinary” boys have, in case it gets broken again thereby presaging the fall from grace he undergoes believing that his talent has left him and migrated into Hyeon-joo (Lee Jae-in), the football-playing transfer student that Ji-soo has developed a crush on.

Hyeon-joo was the reason Ji-soo agreed to get a phone, but he’s equal parts attracted and threatened by her. He doesn’t know much about football, but it seems like she might not be all that good. When she starts to get better all of a sudden, his jealousy manifests in the paranoia that his talent left him for her, and he desperately wants it back so that he won’t be a “dummy” even if it ends up ruining his relationship with Hyeon-joo. Hyeon-joo, meanwhile, is much more laidback if just as alienated as he is. For her, it doesn’t matter if she’s any good at football as long as she enjoys it. She tries to encourage him that it’s the same with his writing. It shouldn’t really matter whether or not he wins any prizes, it only matters if he felt good while he was doing it. Her poet mother is the polar opposite of his own, encouraging Hyeon-joo to do what she likes doing and be happy even if there is nothing more to be gained of it than that. Becoming ever more insecure, Ji-soo tries to ask her for writing lessons, but all she tells him is that writing is an art that can’t really taught by one person to another. He must simply learn to teach himself. After all, he didn’t follow any rules when was writing something he was later proud of.

His science-obsessed friend Jong-yoon is similarly cheerful, rejoicing in his curiosity rather than thinking about what it might lead to or be worth to him in the future. Ji-soo’s mother had also been preoccupied with height, taking him to a doctor who seemed to be giving growth hormones, only for his growth spirt to begin as soon as he thinks his talent has left and bits of the past, or his imagination of it, start coming back to him. In a way this literal growth maybe a sign that he has begun to unpack some of his trauma and is experiencing a breakthrough that is destructive in the moment but also allows him to move forward. His mother lets up and finally divorces his father formally, while he no longer needs to be constrained by the idea that whatever talent he had was given by some mysterious parasite that took root inside him, but perhaps came from himself if only he could learn to embrace his love for it rather than be scared into silence by his fear of not being good enough. The implications of Ji-soo’s dreams maybe rather melancholy if lending an elliptical quality to his existence, but Son’s quietly empathetic, abstract film, does for a time at least allow him to find solace in his art in a sometimes unkind and judgemental society.

The Accordion Door screens as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Journey to Gyeong-ju (경주기행, Kim Mi-jo, 2025)

Posted on by

You know what they say, if you’re going to seek revenge, you’d best dig two graves. In a way, that’s what the bereaved mother at the centre of Kim Mi-jo’s familial vengeance comedy The Journey to Gyeong-ju (경주기행, Gyeongju gihaeng) ends up doing, but really what she wants is to repair her fracturing family which has been torn apart in the wake of her youngest daughter’s brutal abduction and murder. The killer was caught, but as the judge saw something in him that suggested he might be a candidate for rehabilitation, he handed him a comparatively light sentence that Ok-sil (Lee Jung-eun) in particular feels provides no sense of justice for her daughter.

For that reason alone, she decided to accept a cash settlement rather than press charges knowing that the killer, Sang-hyun (Byun Yo-han), would be released relatively quickly so she could kill him herself with the help of a shady underground fixer she met at a support group. To pull this off, she enlists her three surviving daughters, most of whom have their doubts about this plan, not only the morality of it but whether a group of four ordinary women who’ve never done anything like this before can really hold a brutal killer captive and torture him to death. They are, though, largely unable to directly defy their mother and are therefore looking for other ways to stop her from going through with this by pretending to play along. Ok-sil, however, feels like this is the only way that she will be able to move forward with her life.

The irony is that they frame this as a family trip to honour Gyeong-ju’s birthday, all of them piling into the now beaten up camper van father Mu-il (Kim Hak-sun) bought when Gyeong-ju was born hoping they’d take a lot more family holidays. The age gap between the sisters, however, meant that they only took one all together and that was, like this trip, impromptu and rolled in with a business obligation, or maybe the other way around. When oldest daughter Jang-ju’s (Gong Hyo-jin) husband and young daughter turn up announced, in a way, it’s like the family is restored with Seok-man (Kim Young-sung) taking Mu-il’s place while Yun-ji takes that of the absent Gyeong-ju. Waking up in the middle of the night at the remote villa they’ve rented, Ok-sil does a quick head count, realises someone’s missing, then looks over at Yun-ji and acknowledges there are the right number of people after all. They took this trip for the purposes of murder, but also ended up having a nice family holiday while creating “alibis” at various local tourist spots and posting pictures on social media.

What did they didn’t really know was that Sang-hyun had figured out they probably took the settlement money with the intention of killing him, and so is actually intent on killing them first. There is something bestial about him in the way that he can’t be subdued and immediately begins a crime spree after managing to escape. It’s difficult to see why the judge felt he might have a chance at reform given the nature of his crime and the probability that Gyeong-ju was not his first victim. The fact that Sang-hyun is actively trying to kill her lends a kind of moral justification to Ok-sil’s plan that might not otherwise be there, even as he pleads and wheedles, suddenly playing the mild-mannered fool who made a mistake, is very sorry, and is not going to do anything like this ever again.

Still, Ok-sil’s determination is born from a desire for vengeance rather than by the fact that Sang-hyun will go on creating more victims as long as he walks the earth. Confronted by her daughters, she has to face the ways in which her grief has caused her to shut out those who are still living while meditating on the dead. Killing Sang-hyuk won’t help her put her family back together in the way she thought it would, while strangely going on holiday together seems to have done the trick. Despite the absurd humour of the film’s early stretches as these very ordinary people try to get their heads around the practicalities of killing while largely trying to ignore the psychological pressure and affects of taking another person’s life, there is a genuine poignancy to its scenes final scenes in which Ok-sil realises she will finally have to let her daughter go.

The Journey to Gyeong-ju screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂, Zhang Yimou, 1991)

Posted on by

“Isn’t that a woman’s fate?” 19-year-old Songlian (Gong Li) tearfully asks on defiantly agreeing to drop out of university and become the “fourth mistress” of a wealthy man (Ma Jingwu) in Zhang Yimou’s seminal 1920s-set drama Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂, Dà Hóng Dēnglong Gāogāo Guà). It’s as if she wants to make clear that she has chosen this fate for herself even if, in reality, she has little other choice. She had, in any case, been dependent on her father who has now died. Her step-mother either cannot afford or does not wish to continue paying for her university education, welding her own newfound power and cutting off Songlian’s only possibility of independence.

Even so, it’s clear that she made this decision in temper and has no real idea of what kind of life she has committed herself to. She continues in defiance, declining the palanquin and walking into the master’s house carrying her own suitcase. Encountering the sullen servant girl Yan’er (Kong Lin), she owns her new position as the Fourth Mistress and in someways bends herself to this system by insisting on her superiority, demanding that Yan’er be the one to carry her suitcase into her new home. But it’s after this that she loses all delusion of power. Songlian is encircled by female servants who swarm around her performing various tasks they assure her are “family traditions” which she must now learn to obey.

As the new mistress, and a very beautiful young woman, she enjoys an unusual level of privilege but currently lacks the experience to realise that this holiday period will be short-lived and in reality she has very little currency to bargain with. Introduced to the other mistresses, Songlian begins sizing them up as if she meant to hang on to this crown, but soon realises that they are much more experienced in plotting than she is, and that she has crucially misunderstood the ways in which this world, ruled by arbitrary “tradition”, may work. First Mistress (Jin Shuyuan), an older woman and the mother of the master’s grown up son Feipu (Chu Xiao), is polite but distant, resigned to the fact she can no longer attract the master’s attention but with little to occupy her time. Songlian had thought her major rival to be Third Mistress (He Saifei), a formerly a famous opera singer who tries to leverage her power by interrupting their wedding night claiming that she is ill and calling for the master, little realising that Second Mistress’ (Cao Cuifen) kindness is all strategy and masks a devious heart.

In this way, the master’s compound plays out as an allegory for the wider society. The master himself is never seen clearly and acts merely as a distant authority. With no power of their own, the only currency the women have lies in their proximity to men. These “traditions” pit them against each other to win the master’s favour. Only the chosen mistress has lanterns lit for her in this gloomy environment, receives a foot massage, and gets to decide the menu for the day. But even within this largely female world, there are other divisions in play. Songlian comes to learn that the reason Yan’er took against her, was that she has become sexually involved with the master and hoped that he would make her his official mistress instead. Her hope was an unrealistic as Songlian’s that she would be able to exert control over her life in this environment. The master will never marry a servant girl, and after all he has no need to when she is already sexually available to him, which is the only interest that he has in any of these women outside of their absolute obedience. Wandering around on the upper floors Songlian finds a locked shed ominously referred to as the “death room” where she is told women of past generations hanged themselves, only later coming to understand its grim significance as a symbol of the authoritarian power she now lives under.

In fact, Songlian’s naivety and childish defiance lead to unforeseen consequences including the death of other women trying to navigate this system just as she is. With his trademark use of colour, Zhang opens in the honeymoon period of the summer in which Songlian’s world is illuminated by the warm glow of the red lanterns, only to transition towards autumn and winter in which their light becomes increasingly hellish. White is a colour that has a strong association with death in Chinese culture, and the arrival of the snow enveloping the compound only serves to reinforce the idea of Songlian’s spiritual demise as she comes to realise that there is no escape from this world nor any freedom within it. The fate of the First Mistress presents the very best that she could hope for, leading the dull life of a discarded toy devoid of possibility or emotional fulfilment while otherwise enjoying a fairly basic level of material comfort in return for compliance with the many “traditions” of this world.

The Third Mistress had found a kind of freedom in music, but even Songlian’s flute is taken from her by the jealous master. Eventually she is replaced when the inevitable fifth mistress arrives. The only way in which she can continue to exist in this world is to go mad, wandering the prison-like environment in ghostly fashion wearing the clothes she arrived in and having reverted to a hairstyle only worn by children and very young, unmarried women. In this way the master’s estate becomes a metaphor for the patriarchal superstructure and authoritarianism of the contemporary Chinese society in which there is no such thing as solidarity, only those scrabbling over each other to survive and others so broken they have simply stopped trying.

The 4K restoration of Raise the Red Lantern opens 6th November in UK cinemas courtesy of Central City Media.

Rerelease trailer (English subtitles)

Double Vision (雙瞳, Chen Kuo-fu, 2002)

Posted on by

After a series of inexplicable murders strike Taipei, a mentally distressed local cop finds himself working with an American FBI agent while all the clues seem to point towards a mysterious local cult in Chen Kuo-fu’s supernaturally tinged thriller, Double Vision (雙瞳, Shuāng tóng). A co-production with Columbia Pictures, the film pits Eat and West, believer and non-believer against each other as dejected detective Huo Tu (Tony Leung Ka-fai) battles his own demons in having failed to protect his daughter during a hostage crisis.

It seems that, as an earnest young policeman, Huo Tu tried to blow the whistle on police corruption, the corrupt officer, in this case, being his wife’s cousin. Not only was Hu too shunned by the other officers who regarded him as a snitch, but his wife’s cousin took their daughter Meimei (Huang Wei-han) hostage. Frozen with fear, Huo Tu was unable to do anything very much to help her while attempting to talk the hostage taker down. His wife’s cousin eventually fired his gun at Meimei, though luckily it only scraped her scalp, while Huo Tu’s fellow officer took care of the hostage taker. Meimei has been mute ever since and is taking medication for behavioural issues. Blaming himself, Huo Tu has largely stopped going home, sleeping in his office instead, but is put out when his wife attempts to file for divorce.

Which is all to say Huo Tu is already at the end of his tether. He’s been demoted to the Foreign Affairs squad, of which he appears to be the only member, pulling people in for immigration irregularities which is how he ends up at the first crime scene, that of a CEO who apparently drowned in his 17th floor office in the middle of a heat wave. And then, a young woman apparently hallucinates a fire in her apartment and displays signs of having died from exposure to extreme heat despite there being no external evidence of fire breaking out. The reason the FBI is brought in is because one of the victims was a Catholic priest who was also, apparently, some kind of middleman for arms sales from the US.

Nevertheless, there is some local pushback regarding a perceived lack of sovereignty and the possibility of an American law enforcement officer pursuing a Taiwanese suspect in Taiwan. Richter (David Morse) is an acclaimed profiler, but is willing to accept that he may have been wrong in the past. His presence irritates the local cops, whose resentment towards him only grows once he discovering evidence they originally missed. Charged with being his interpreter, Huo Tu finds himself conflicted on once again being placed on the “wrong” side and alienated from those around him, while having to explain Taoist culture to Richter who refuses to admit the possibility of the supernatural playing any part in the killings. “I don’t understand why you can’t see all the evil in your country,” Huo Tu remarks after Richter questions his use of Taoist amulets, unable to understand the wider cultural context of Taoism in Taiwan.

An awkward friendship gradually arises between the pair as Richter also tries to save Huo Tu’s marriage, seemingly having had his own break down due to his dedication to his work. Through entering a kind of dream state born of the fungal spores that seem to have been integral to altering the victims’ perception of reality, Huo Tu is able to process some of his trauma in symbolically saving his daughter from a similar threat, yet it’s unclear how far his actions have any effect in the “real” world. The killings appear to have been committed as part of a Taoist ritual said to confer immortality after one passes through several different “hells” which echo the ways in which the victims died, though Huo Tu can’t get a handle on whether or not Taoist immortality is “real” and whether that actually matters in terms of the case at hand.

Chen generates an uneasy atmosphere throughout with a sense that evil is an ever-present background threat just as Huo Tu insists when trying to explain the cultural importance of Taoism to Richter. From the creepy room at the hospital with its foetus in a jar and collection of isolated body parts to the grisliness of the crimes and the mysterious fungus with which they were committed, darkness is everywhere, yet the force that plagues Huo Tu may be more earthly in his own sense of guilt and unworthiness in been having unable to protect those closest to him from the consequences of his own actions.

Screened as part of the Garden Cinema’s Made in Taiwan.

My Soul is Slashed (咬みつきたい, Shusuke Kaneko, 1991)

Posted on by

Released at the tail end of the Bubble-era, Shusuke Kaneko’s vampire dramedy My Soul is Slashed (咬みつきたい, Kamitsukitai) is one of a series of films that seems to be filled with a prophetic sense of dread and the feeling that the good times are about to come to an end. Fiercely critical of the costs of the salary man dream along with the amoral capitalism that seems to have accompanied it, the film may also be drawing inspiration from a then recent contaminated blood scandal as haemophiliacs in Tokyo and Osaka sued the government in 1989 after contracting HIV through infected transfusions.

The hero, Ishikawa (Ken Ogata), works for a pharmaceuticals company that has been accused of engaging in corrupt practices and bribing the government to be able to sell unlicensed medical products. Ishikawa is not aware of this and does not believe the rumours, so is keen to find out what’s been going on at his company. After making some enquiries and attempting to get in touch with a friend in the media, however, Ishikawa is involved in a hit-and-run and taken to hospital where he receives a blood transfusion but eventually dies of his injuries.

A researcher at the same facility, Yuzuko (Narumi Yasuda), has secretly come by a pack of Dracula’s blood that was apparently lost during the recent revolution in Romania where deposed dictator Ceausescu had been experimenting with it. For reasons best known to herself, she decides to stash the blood in the “do not use” draw of the medical fridge, only for it to come to life and jump into the shelf below. Though there is some concern among the medical staff that the pack is not properly marked with a blood type or other information, other staff members become indignant on being questioned about it, so the operating team go ahead and use the unmarked pack without proper procedure being followed, which is how Ishikawa ends up receiving contaminated blood, in this case that apparently belonging to “Dracula”. A distraught Yuzuko attends Ishikawa’s funeral and tells his teenage daughter Saeko (Hikari Ishida) that, assuming she is a virgin, she can revive her father by sprinkling her blood on his ashes, which she does, though Ishikawa is not resurrected until a year later.

Ishikawa had been a loyal salaryman who worked hard and believed in his company, which is why he was so shocked by the rumours and by the suggestion of his colleague Kitahara (Takero Morimoto) that the buck stops with the company president. As a consequence of his dedication to the firm, however, Ishikawa has neglected his family and become a ghostly presence within his own home to the extent that he hardly ever sees his daughter and has, in fact, forgotten her birthday, asking his secretary to pick up a dress as a present which turns out to be too small for her to wear. Saeko appears rather indifferent towards him while is alive and has also started rebelling by staying out all night with her queer-coded, motorcycle-riding friend. Though she misses him when he’s gone, Saeko is also in favour of her mother remarrying a much more attentive man, Tokita (Kazuyoshi Kushida), who brought her a cake for her birthday and seems to fill in with all the other paternal tasks that Ishikawa never paid any attention to because he was so focused on his career.

It’s his dedication to his company that Ishikawa most regrets on being resurrected. A year has passed and his family’s already moved on, doing just fine without him, while he was scapegoated for the bribery scandal at work and died in disgrace which might explain why both Saeko and her mother are working around the clock to support themselves. He realises that even though he’s come back, he is not the same person and he cannot simply slot back into his former life even if he’s been able to forge a new relationship with Saeko who declares that she doesn’t care if he’s Dracula, he’s still her father and a good person. At the same time, Ishikawa comes to accept his new Dracula persona as a potential means for good, insisting that there are plenty of bloodsucking people in the contemporary society and Dracula doesn’t seem too bad by comparison.

The interesting this is that Yuzuko’s attraction to him also seems to be bound up with his position as a father, having lost her own at a young age. Yuzuko’s father was apparently one of the foremost Dracula researchers in the world who also helped countless vampires return to being human, even if it didn’t work for everyone and some ended up as ashes once again. Though dating an age-appropriate colleague, she complains that he’s “too young” for her, and longs for the centuries-old embrace of Dracula which is also a reflection of her quasi-incestuous desire for her father whom she never really knew. On the other hand, Saeko comes to a new appreciation of her now anti-corporate dad and resolves that, though she may have his workaholic blood, she won’t sacrifice herself for a company and will earn a living doing something she likes while hanging out with her maybe girlfriend.

Which is all to say, Ishikawa is more alive now he’s “dead” than he ever was while his heart was still beating. Using his Dracula powers to expose the company’s wrongdoing and force his killer to confess live on air, he turns his back on culturally defined notions of corporate success and retreats to live a quiet life with Yuzuko, who has also become a vampire, in a travelling blood donation van. “Clean blood is rare these days,” Ishikawa reflects hinting at the various corruptions of the late Bubble society which itself heading for an implosion. The project apparently started because Ogata wanted to play a role completely against type, which he undoubtedly does, in embodying an incongruous source of vampiric paternal authority that is determined to live outside the system rather than chase corporate success.

Paradise Lost (실낙원, Yeon Sang-ho, 2026)

Posted on by

“I hope you can accept reality,” So-young’s (Kim Hyun-joo) well-meaning boss advises her on handing over a literal key to unlocking the source of her trauma, but for many reasons, reality does not seem to be something that So-young will ever be ready to accept. Less about AI than the pull of grief and the complicated relationship between a parent and a child, Yeon Sang-ho’s dark maternal drama Paradise Lost (실낙원, Sillagwon) asks if we can actually accept our children when they grow into something that we no longer recognise or cannot approve of.

Thirteen years previously, So-young’s young son Sun-woo was one of 13 children aboard a bus that was hijacked by its driver and abandoned in a former mining area. The body of their teacher was found close to the bus, with the bodies of five children recovered nearby along with evidence that the others, including Sun-woo, may have suffered a similar fate though their remains were not recovered as the abandoned mine in which the police suspected the killer had disposed of them was judged too unstable for rescuers to enter safely. As expected, the crime provoked national mourning leading to an AI company stepping in to help ease the parents’ grief by creating avatars of their children they could interact with in a virtual reality world.

This appears quite exploitative on behalf of the AI company which is clearly making use of the parents’ grief to promote their products. It’s later said that they deleted the avatar of one child when one of their parents was arrested for drink driving fearing bad publicity. But when So-young visits them later, they remind her that the programme was only supposed to be a temporary diversion to help her adjust to the loss of her child. Even they think it’s time she stopped using it so often, while other parents have apparently made the decision to give up the service or consented to their child’s avatar being deleted. But on the other hand, the virtual Sun-woo becomes sullen when So-young does not turn up at the usual time and tearfully begs her not to abandon him like the other parents, or at least not to do it without warning.

The film is pretty clear that it at least does not accept that virtual Sun-woo is a “real” entity that is capable of emotions such as sadness, and that So-young is delusional in believing that it is. She only does so because she cannot accept the reality of her son’s death, and the avatar is then more like a reflection of her grief, no different from a ghost and the AI company akin to spiritualists of dubious intentions. But on the other hand, the programme offers her a more convenient kind of parenthood or a maternal paradise in which Sun-woo will always be her perfect little boy, never growing older or changing in ways the displease or challenge her. When the flesh and blood Sun-woo (Bae Hyun-sung) reappears years later as a young man, he’s basically a stranger and she is incapable of accepting him, not least because she discovers that he himself has become a violent and sadistic killer who may be responsible for the disappearance of the adorable little boy next door who reminds her so much of the younger Sun-woo.

In some ways, what this might really be about is the kind grief a mother might feel for a child that’s grown up or a mourning for a family life she longs to return to that only exists in the past. This is a fairly extreme example, but the film attempts to paint the flesh and blood adult Sun-woo as an avatar of the demonic, and the perfect child Sun-woo in the app as that of the angelic. So-young must choose between the “reality” of what her flesh and blood son has become and the “fantasy” of a perpetual childhood in which he will forever be her lovely little boy who just wants to eat his mother’s omelettes and play hide-and-seek. In the end it seems as if she cannot quite find it within herself to move on and prefers to stay in this purgatorial existence with each of her sons, ending up in both heaven and hell simultaneously. Intensely bleak, Yeon’s drama likens the abyss of grief to the shaft of a disused mine, descending forever into the darkness with no end in sight, while its heroine, in the end, has no desire to climb out.

Paradise Lost opens in US cinemas Nov. 6 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Ghost (령, Kim Tae-kyung, 2004)

Posted on by

According to her university tutor, the anxiety of our present times stems from the identity crisis that we all feel, yet Ji-won’s (Kim Ha-neul) identity crisis is deeper than even she knows. Having lost her memory following an accident, she takes it as a good opportunity to start again, planning to leave her clingy, widowed mother behind to study overseas. Yet the unremembered past won’t seem to let her go as she’s haunted by a series of mysterious figures that push her towards investigating the person she may have been before.

This is not altogether welcome for Ji-won, as she begins to realise that prior to her accident, she may not have been a very nice person. She begins having visions of being told off by herself and comes to understand that she and her high school friendship group, who have now almost all been killed or gone mad, were involved with bullying another girl, Su-in (Nam Sang-mi), ostensibly because she was poor while they were all wealthy. Further flashbacks hint that she and Su-in may once have been friends, though Ji-won’s financial status improved markedly so that she could join the posh girl group and no longer wanted to associate with someone like Su-in.

Su-in laments that because of their poverty, neither of them had many friends besides each other when they were younger, and that now Ji-won is rich, she’s suddenly friends with everyone, hinting at the rather superficial nature of friendships and the snobbishness of the surrounding society in which relationships are often divided along the lines of social class. Ji-won, however, resents this, rejecting Su-in’s claim that no one was friends with her and insisting she’s nothing like Su-in in deliberately seeking to exclude herself from the ranks of the poor by suggesting she’s innately different. “I’m not who I was,” she ironically says, as if she had been somehow reborn following her parents’ financial success. But at the same time, Su-in has a similar mindset. When Ji-won asks her what she wants to be when she grows up, she replies only “you”, wishing this new future not only of financial comfort but friendship and acceptance for herself.

After joining the mean girl group, it’s as if Ji-won punished Su-in deliberately in order to make it clear that she is not like her and now belongs to this new elite class free of the stigma of poverty. Su-in meanwhile is willing to put up with a degree of mistreatment in order to be accepted by the group and remain “friends” with Ji-won, whom she still seems to care about. It does seem that college student Ji-won is a different, nicer person, who only has one friend in a boy a couple of years older who’s just returned from military service (Ryu Jin). Perhaps having lost her memories she’s essentially a blank slate who never learned these kinds of petty hierarchies as a child and as an adult has a better ability to see how arbitrary and unkind they really are. At any rate, she is not who she was, but is still targeted by a force she has not yet identified, just as she has still not identified herself.

The Ghost (령, Ryeong, AKA Dead Friend) seems to be drawing quite heavily from the J-horror phenomenon, though making its watery spirits and Ouija boards very much its own. The final twist is indeed quite ingenious and completely unexpected, proving that finding the ghost’s body doesn’t always lift the curse, especially if it’s not the one the ghost was after. The screenplay is extremely well constructed, lending a degree of psychological nuance and internal consistency in the constant mirroring of Ji-won and Su-in while hinting that the real terror here may be not just prejudice but what the fear of it will do to someone’s outlook and behaviour, causing them to act in terrible ways simply to prove that they are not the other but only one of us, which is to say someone worthy of respect. That kind of rage, it seems, is not cured by death. Kim Tae-gyeong’s eerie ghost story is drenched in a particular kind of loneliness that suggests all along they could have been friends if it weren’t for social exclusion and the arbitrary stigmas of a highly stratified society.

Trailer (English subtitles)