Category: London East Asia Film Festival 2025

Kokuho (国宝, Lee Sang-il, 2025)

Posted on by

What does it mean to commit yourself so entirely to your art that you become it and effectively cease to exist? Playing the role of Ohatsu in Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Kikuo (Ryo Yoshizawa) asks if Ohatsu’s lover Tokubei is really resolved to die for their love. The scene is intercut with his brother and rival Shunsuke leaving the theatre, led away by Kikuo’s girlfriend Harue (Mitsuki Takahata), just as Ohatsu leads Tokubei towards their mutual fate, as if Shunsuke were agreeing that he is not resolved to give his all to art in the way Kikuo evidently feels himself to be, at least in this moment.

The roles between them are reversed several times before they eventually perform the play again, but each of them are, in effect, in a love suicide with the art of kabuki, though kabuki itself is destined to live on. In any case, the “kokuho” of the title is a living national treasure and one who has indeed embodied their art. We’re introduced to one early on, Mangiku (Min Tanaka), an ageless onnagata, or player of female roles, who has a quasi-spiritual quality and warns the young Kikuo that though his face maybe beautiful, it could also be a barrier to his art and, in the end, consume him. It is said of Mangiku that all he will leave behind him is his art. The words are spoken with pity, but this is really what it means to be a kokuho and the highest compliment that might be paid to an artist. Mangiku himself would likely approve, casting an eye around his spartan room and declaring himself unburdened. 

But Kikuo is only half-joking when he says he cut a deal with the devil to make him the best kabuki actor in Japan. As a woman he abandoned later scolds him, all his sacrifices were made by others. Actors are greedy, another laments, and it’s true enough that Kikuo feared little in his need for success. The irony is that he too was an heir, only to a yakuza dynasty to which he could not succeed. His was father was gunned down in front of him while preparing to draw his sword, while Kikuo’s rebound tattoo does him no favours in the end and his attempt to avenge his father’s death apparently fails. Nevertheless, he vies for the approval of his surrogate father and kabuki master Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe) who values his skills above those of his biological son Shunsuke (Ryusei Yokohama) who alternately resents having his birthright stolen from under from him and acknowledges that Kiku has an innate talent with which his bloodline can’t compete.

Nevertheless, there’s a genuine and enduring brotherhood between the two men that never quite slips into hate or acrimony even as circumstances conspire against them. They both want what the other has. In the kabuki world, bloodline is everything and Kikuo is viewed as a interloper usurping Shunsuke’s rightful position, while Shunsuke wants the raw talent he knows he lacks and no amount of training and commitment can buy. Yet it is in a way about resolve, or at least the willingness to give your life to the stage and die in the pursuit of art. Kikuo’s signature piece is the Heron Maiden, in which a heron falls in love with a young man and becomes a young woman. But her love is unrequited. She goes mad, and can only show her love for him by dancing until she dies. This is, in effect, Kikuo’s dance with kabuki, a waltz to the death as he yearns for the “scenery” he as been searching for and eventually finds the apotheosis of his art in the moment of the heron’s demise.

Like Lee Sang-il’s previous films Villain and Rage based on a novel by Shuichi Yoshida, the film is a poetic meditation on the price of the pursuit of art that revels in its sumptuous production design and the intricacies of the kabuki world. With shades of Farewell, My Concubine, it frames its central dynamic not quite one of straightforward rivalry but a brotherhood between two halves of one whole who each know that neither of them can really win, while becoming a kokuho is an endless pursuit of artistic perfection in which one must be resolved to kill the self and die on stage in a lover’s suicide with a forever elusive kabuki.

Kokuho screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Girl (女孩, Shu Qi, 2025)

Posted on by

Taiwan may be emerging from martial law, but the cycles of patriarchal violence and oppression prove much harder to escape in Shu Qi’s touching directorial debut and portrait of a disrupted childhood, Girl (女孩, Nǚhái). Inspired by her own memories and set in the late ’80s, the film is unflinching in its depiction of mundane, domestic horror, but equally even-handed in extending understanding even to the most flawed of its protagonists who are themselves locked into a cycle of violence and self-loathing.

Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-Ying) doesn’t quite understand how her sister can be so cheerful even the other children at school make fun of her. Hsiao-lee is often criticised for looking “sullen,” and even her new friend Li-li (Lin Pin-Tung) jokes that on the rare occasion she smiles, she still looks “bitter”. But Hsiao-lee has plenty of reasons to be sorrowful and has perhaps already internalised the idea that there is no escape from her dismal circumstances. Finding a hole in the wall behind the school quite literally shows her another world, one that she later passes into in the company of Li-li who convinces her to ditch her classes and hang out with her at a sleazy video booth that is not really an age-appropriate environment for the two young girls. 

Li-li is Taiwanese-American and has recently moved to the island following her parents’ divorce. The fact that Li-li’s parents’ marriage has ended, even if she wistfully wonders if her father will suddenly jet in to repair the family, shows Hsiao-lee that the prison that is her family home has a door that could be unlocked. It’s clear that Hsaio-lee is terrified of her father (Roy Chiu) who is a violent drunk and may also be sexually abusing her. She zips herself up in a tent at night and cowers in terror as his hand presses down on the canvas, though he doesn’t like closed doors and flies into rages when he encounters them, which explains the large dent next to the handle to the door of her room. Hsiao-lee’s mother, Chuan (9m88), seems to take most of her frustrations out on her even if she tries to intervene and distract her father from further harming her.

Hsiao-lee doesn’t understand why her mother seems to resent her while doting on her sister, though we soon come to wonder if she blames her for condemning her to this kind of life. Shots of Chuan’s adolescence in rural Taiwan hint at a still more patriarchal world in which her father told her there was no need to study and if she had free time to hang out with friends she should spend it helping her grandmother instead. It’s implied that Chuan may have been assaulted while finally embracing the simple freedom of spending time with other people her age, while her father disowned her on her pregnancy declaring himself ashamed and telling her to leave and never return. Even now, she earns a meagre living as a hairdresser’s assistant and is groped by the male customers which the salon otherwise has little option other than to court. Her boss fusses over the air conditioning whenever they come in, and though Chuan may have taken a liking to Mr Chen, he is already married and only ever a symbol of the life that has eluded her. 

Chuan’s boss also tells her of a woman in Taipei who left an abusive husband and is now living happily with someone who treats her better, but Chuan continues to stick with Chiang possibly as an act of self-harm in her deep-seated self-loathing. Chiang doesn’t always seem to have been that way, but he’s otherwise someone who can’t fit into the contemporary society and is only employed thanks to a very understanding friend of his late father. Having gone too far and realised that Chuan may leave him if he continues to beat and rape her, he tries to reform, but it doesn’t last long and he’s soon back to drunkenly riding his scooter through town in the middle of the night. He too may feel hard done by, but it can’t excuse his behaviour nor the authoritarian terror of his home in which he takes out the frustrations of his fractured manhood on Chuan and Hsiao-lee. 

Chuan is imprisoned within the house and can find no escape from it, even when Hsiao-lee directly asks her to divorce him. Hsaio-lee might, however, be able to get out but only be accepting exile from her family and leaving her mother and sister behind at her father’s mercy. Given the omnipresence of male failure, there’s something quite heartening about the female solidarity that arises between Hsiao-lee and Li-li even if their circumstances are quite different from each other. Li-li is mired in the collapse of her family and longs for its repair with her father’s return while resentful of the unfairness of being exiled to an unfamiliar country where she’s looked after by her grandmother whom she can’t understand, presumably because she speaks Taiwanese rather than the Mandarin her mother made her keep up in America, while Hsiao-lee is trapped and looking for a way to free herself from her father. On a trip to the local shop, she ominously eyes up the rat poison while Li-li buys some sweets.

But even as Taiwan emerges from the authoritarian superstructure of the martial law era, patriarchal violence refuses to die and it’s only through an act of maternal sacrifice, framed as rejection and a continuation of that same cycle of violence now enacted by her mother, that Hsaio-lee finds a more literal kind of escape. Only once her father is gone does light return to the house and the possibility of healing the disrupted relationship with her mother become a reality. Beautifully written and elegantly directed, the film has a very genuine sense of place with its busy alleyways and bustling streets. The kids at school might cheerfully sing that there’s no place like home, but for Hsiao-lee home might be the scariest place of all and the one it’s the most difficult to escape.

Girl screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Yakushima’s Illusion (たしかにあった幻, Naomi Kawase, 2025)

Posted on by

When is it that you can say someone is really dead? Grief-stricken paediatric organ transplant co-ordinator Corry (Vicky Krieps) finds herself pondering just this question while in Japan exploring differing attitudes to transplant surgery in Naomi Kawase’s latest, Yakushima’s Illusion (たしかにあった幻, Tashika ni Atta Maboroshi). Returning to her roots, Kawase includes several documentary-style sequences in which Japanese medical staff discuss traditional notions of life and death along with those relating to organ transplantation which remains taboo even in an otherwise advanced medical society.

One doctor relates that his own child had a transplant and they were plagued with harassment for “stealing” people’s organs. There’s a kind of ghoulishness in play, as if this practice were unholy in some way or were taking on a debt that can never be repaid. But from the perspective of the parents of children waiting for matches, there is indeed an undeniable sense of guilt involved given the knowledge that for their child to survive, another must have died and another parent just like them has suffered a loss. When a match finally comes up for one little boy, his mother feels conflicted knowing that a little girl that was ahead of them in the queue didn’t make it  and now it’s like they’ve taken her slot. Meanwhile the parents of the child that died battle their grief and confusion but decide to allow his organs to be made made available so that he will in some sense at least on. 

In this case, it was a heart transplant which presents the most complicated of existential questions given that traditionally death is marked by the cessation of the heart beating. Even when brain death has occurred, the body is considered to be living which obviously makes something like organ harvesting difficult if the patient is still considered to be “alive”. But on the other hand, it also means that death is infinitely postponed when the cessation of the heartbeat cannot be confirmed. Corry is haunted by the memory of an lover who disappeared without a trace and later discovers his family are trying to have him declared dead to smooth over an inheritance issue, though she objects because to her Jin is still alive even he’s not around.

It’s on Yakushima that Corry first meets Jin (Kanichiro), and one could say that he’s the illusion of the title. Indeed the Japanese title hints at his ethereal quality in translating as something like “the apparition that was really there”. He has an otherworldly quality and seems to exist outside of time with his old-fashioned camera and impish personality. Part of the film is set around Tanabata which is rooted in the tale of the Cowherd and the Weaver, Orihime and Hikiboshi, who were separated by a river and permitted to meet only on one day a year. This mythical quality adds to the sense that perhaps Jin was more ghost than man, a figment of Corry’s memory or a manifestation of her desires who was nevertheless himself consumed by loneliness. In a phenomenon known as “johatsu” in which people suddenly disappear without warning, Jin leaves her life as abruptly as he entered it leaving her with a series of regrets and lingering questions. 

It’s this shifting sense of dislocation with which the film plays in moving, as Jin describes it, through the shifting moments of the heart exchanging linear time for emotional chronology. Having lost her mother in childbirth, Corry is consumed by a fear of abandonment and incurable loneliness that is compounded by the fact that people really do disappear from her life with alarming frequency which is perhaps why she is so invested in saving the lives of these young children. Bonding with a couple who lost their son to illness and now operate a bento stand supporting other parents, she searches for a way to let go without letting go which she perhaps finds in the serenity of nature now captured with sweeping drone shots such as that which takes us inside a tree in search of the self. Frequent cameos from former Kawase collaborators such as Machiko Ono and Masatoshi Nagase in small roles add to the elegiac feeling even if the final message seems to be that life goes on in the image of a still beating heart giving new life and new hope even in the midst of death and loss.

Yakushima’s Illusion screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

96 Minutes (96分鐘, Hung Tzu-Hsuan, 2025)

Posted on by

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, as the famous goes. Prioritising saving lives where you can rather than risk spreading yourself too thin and not helping anyone as a result may be a sensible decision. But what if you or a loved are among those who’ve been deprioritised? Like many things, now it’s not just theory but here right in front of you and victims are real people not just anonymous numbers, it looks quite different.

At least, that’s how it is for A-Ren (Austin Lin), a brash bomb disposal expert. Though he disarmed a bomb in a cinema, another one went off across the road in a department store. The bomber had warned them that might happen, but A-Ren’s commanding officer Liu (Wang Bo-Chieh) convinced him they were probably bluffing. They were told there were two more bombs, one located in their command centre, and the other in the department store, and given a choice. Save the people in the department store by heroically blowing themselves up, or choose to save themselves even though this time they’re in the minority. 

Three years later, A-Ren has never forgiven himself, or Liu, for the bomb going off. He’s quit the police and though he’s married fellow officer Huang Xin (Vivian Sung), they never had a wedding and still haven’t been on honeymoon. His guilt is compounded by the fact that he’s been feted as a hero even though he knows he’s directly responsible for everyone who died in the department store. He gets a shot at redemption when the train he’s travelling on returning home after a memorial service for victims of the bombing receives a bomb threat, but at the same time he fears the eventual exposure of what really happened three years ago and is too ashamed to get his mind fully on the job.

On the other hand, it’s true that, ironically, no one on the train has been able to move on from the incident. All of them are mired in their grief and confusion, while looking for someone to blame. Needing to solve the case quickly, the police named a random victim with a criminal past as the bomber rather than admit they didn’t know who did it, making the police themselves a legitimate target for the resentment of the victims’ families given their cavalier attitude to life and death. Liu reminded A-Ren that the policemen in the command centre had families too, as if the people in the department store didn’t or that having a family made their lives weigh more, while Huang Xin was there too further influencing their decision and feeding into A-Ren’s guilt wondering if he was just selfish and made a choice to save her at the expense of the lives of a large number of people he didn’t know.

The bomber essentially gives him the same choice again, putting two bombs on two trains and leaving A-Ren with a binary choice of choosing to sacrifice one or the other to see if he will make the same hypocritical decision again in opting to save the minority because he is among them. Of course, they try a number of other high-risk strategies to disarm both bombs and/or evacuate passengers, but the bomber leaves them with little choice other than to accept the fact that one of the bombs has to go off. A-Ren and Liu can either blow themselves up figuratively by admitting that they chose to sacrifice the lives of the department store victims, or they can save themselves by blowing up the other train.

During a train derailment incident, Liu had cited his greater good philosophy in prioritising passengers who remained outside the tunnel rather than those trapped in the carriages inside, but he perhaps he was wrong to do so and should either have made more of an effort to help everyone or refrained from announcing his decision to let some of the victims die live on television. But then again, the victims’ families are also torn now they are directly involved with some leaning towards saving themselves rather the passengers on the other train whom they don’t after all even know. A-Ren, meanwhile, is in a race against time to restore his sense of integrity by disarming the bombs inside his mind to cure the lingering trauma of the department store bombing as the train rockets forward with only him between it and certain destruction.

96 Minutes screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Ugly (얼굴, Yeon Sang-ho, 2025)

Posted on by

Poets and philosophers have long debated the true nature of “beauty”. “Living miracle of Korea” Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo) has spent most of his life pondering it, not least because he is blind and is often told that the figures he carves on name stamps are “beautiful”. For his customers, “beauty” is rooted in the visual, and for those reasons it seems to them impossible for Yeong-gyu to experience it. It doesn’t occur to them that he may experience “beauty” in other ways or that beauty is not necessarily as connected with vision as they assume it to be. 

But then again, in Yeon Sang-ho’s dark fairytale The Ugly (얼굴, Eolgul), the concept of “beauty” is itself inverted to become something eerie and uncomfortable in symbolising the forced harmony of an authoritarian society. In the present day, a TV documentary crew is interviewing blind stamp carver Yeon-gyu, though it’s obvious the producer is becoming frustrated with Yeong-gyu’s evasiveness while simultaneously hoping to tell an inspirational story about how he overcame adversity that is in itself a little exploitative. She gets an ironic lucky break when, midway through filming, the remains of Yeong-gyu’s wife and the mother of his only son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min) are discovered following her disappearance 40 years previously.

Yeong-gyu had told Dong-hwan, who was a baby at the time, that Young-hee had simply run away and does not seem to have made much attempt to look for her. Though this might seem odd, it was after all a time when people just disappeared without warning and asking questions would only put those left behind in danger, so perhaps it’s understandable that Yeong-gyu, a man marginalised by his disability, simply accepted the fact of her absence and chose to believe that she had left him even if it conflicts with his description of her as “kind”. Everyone describes Young-hee of having been a “kind” person even while they otherwise scorn her as “ugly”, describing her as a monstrous creature with an appearance they find gruesome though almost comical rather than frightening. 

When Young-hee’s estranged family turn up at the funeral, they too are embarrassed by her ugliness and crassly make a point of clarifying to Dong-hwan that they don’t want to share their inheritance with him. According to them, Young-hee left home as a young child after telling their mother she’d seen their father with another woman. Their mother beat and her and refused to believe it, while the other family members resented Young-hee for raising an inconvenient truth and fracturing the harmony of this “perfect” family. Young-hee encounters something similar while working at clothing factory where she challenges the boss after finding out that he has raped an employee, but is again ignored and then silenced. Years later in the present day, the former workers claim that it’s thanks to the boss that they survived, echoing the defenders of dictator Park Chung-hee who credit him with curing the intense poverty of the post-Korean War society and turning the nation into the economic powerhouse it is today no matter how many died in his pet construction projects such as the Gyeongbu Expressway. 

Young-hee too works under these exploitative conditions similar to those seen in A Single Spark. When her boss refuses her a bathroom break, she is too frightened to defy him and ends up soiling herself earning herself the unpleasant nickname “Dung Ogre”. Yet when she sees injustice she tries to combat it and refuses to back down even when others shun her. Gradually we begin to realise that the reason Young-hee is called “ugly” is because she speaks the truth and reflects the “ugliness” of those around her. Years later, the colleague who told her she’d been raped by the boss blames herself for her death, knowing that Young-hee was only trying to help her and probably didn’t realise that exposing the boss would kill her only resultiing in a quest to identify the victim. “My shame became his forgiveness,” she reflects, regretting that she too scorned Young-hee and that her failure to speak enabled him to go on abusing other women with impunity. Afraid of the factory boss’ violent thugs and desperate to keep their jobs, no one challenges him least of all Yeong-gyu who tells his wife to shut up and keep the peace.

But for Yeong-gyu, Young-hee’s “ugliness” has other implications in that it reflects his own insecurities and marginalisation. Along with using various derogatory terms to describe Young-hee’s ugliness, the interviews throw in a series of ableist slurs and it’s clear that they also consider Yeong-gyu to be “ugly” because of his otherness. Yeong-gyu resents that they look down him, and learning that Yeong-hee is considered to be “ugly” is consumed with a deep sense of humiliation as if he were being mocked and laughed at for having such an “ugly” wife while, paradocxically, she must only have been interested in him as a means of bringing about his degredation. 

But then, this visual notion of “beauty” is meangingless to Yeong-gyu who has been blind since birth so it ought not to matter to him whether Young-hee is objectively beautiful to the sighted. Notions of visual beauty are socially and culturally defined and shift over time, but at this time and in this society being “beautiful” is it seems important, not least because it implies conformity. Young-hee’s “ugliness” is then transgressive and empowering in its defiance of the code of silence that defines authoritarianism, but within it Yeong-gyu finds only the undermining of his masculinity and humiliation in being found unworthy. That he’s now called a “living miracle of Korea” for overcoming those hard times is a cruel irony and a comment on the state of the contemporary nation forged in dictatorship and tempered by a hyper-capitalistic disregard for human rights in the quest for prosperity. Confronted by these truths, Dong-hwan finds himself with a choice, but in the end may take after his father after all in his own desire to tidy away unpleasantness and avoid having to accept the “ugly” reality. 

The Ugly screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Project Y (프로젝트 Y, Lee Hwan, 2025)

Posted on by

The opening sequence of Lee Hwan’s Project Y (프로젝트 Y) seems to echo the iconic intro of Millennium Mambo as two women look back over their shoulders as they traverse a seemingly endless tunnel. Later we realise that the tunnel is their passage out of the underworld of the red light district towards escape and liberation, not only from patriarchal control and their impossible lives, but from a generational legacy of abuse and entrapment.

Indeed, Ga-young (Kim Shin-rok) the adoptive mother of Mi-sun (Han So-hee) and birth mother of Do-kyung (Jeon Jong-seo), is fond of asking who is saving who when we’re all the same, and insisting that your life is yours to save. It’s a message the girls have taken to heart, yet they remain devoted to each other in a relationship that also appears to be romantic or perhaps has already transcended romance in the depth of their connection. Mi-sun has been working as a karaoke bar hostess for a number of years while Do-kyung works as her driver and occasional courier for various shady types. They plan to leave the red light district now Mi-sun has saved enough money to buy a florist’s from its retiring owner along with a downpayment on a apartment, but it turns out half the girls in the red light district have been scammed by a dodgy estate agent at the behest of local kingpin Blackjack (Kim Sung-cheol).

It seems that Blackjack may have done this deliberately in a nefarious plot to increase the girls’ debts and prevent them from leaving. Blackjack’s callousness is signalled early on when he tells the girls’ manager to get rid of a drooping plant if she can’t manage it and space the others out to disguise the gap. But on the flip side, Blackjack has a young and very silly wife who has got into host clubs and has been spending all his money on a young man who is openly exploiting her. Though the men are ostensibly in the same position as the women, they still have a greater power in preying on female loneliness while the women, by contrast, may be indulging in this behaviour precisely because it gives them an illusion of control they ordinarily don’t have a patriarchal society. Blackjack’s wife throws expensive gifts at her favourite host in an attempt to persuade him to enter a deeper relationship while blabbing her husband’s secrets. The host doesn’t seem to have realised it might be a bad idea to be messing around with Blackjack’s wife, while stealing his secret stash is going to annoy him even more and Blackjack’s not the sort of man you want to be annoyed with you.

Blackjack watches a video of a dog drowning in a tarpit while he works out, and this particular tarpit acts as a kind of vortex drawing all the greed in the red-light district towards it. Hearing about the plot to rob Blackjack, the girls decide to rob him first and blame it on a local hoodlum. But after retrieving a bag with the exact amount they lost, discover a stash of gold bars. It’s taking them too that damages the integrity of their quest and sets them on a course towards a direct confrontation with Blackjack as they try their hardest to escape the red light district for good.

The implication seems to be that if they take the money, they’ll never really be free because it stemmed from the source of their exploitation. This might in a way be what Ga-young is trying to teach the girls in her otherwise hard to read behaviour, sacrificing herself to save them from their poor decision to cross Blackjack while trying to catapult them free of the red-light district though she knows she herself can never leave. Slick and stylish, Lee’s noir stays just on the right side of realism despite its recurrent grimness and larger than life characters such as the Blackjack’s icy female enforcer Bull and captures both girls’ desire for a “normal life” of working in the day and sleeping at night, along with the cheerful solidarity of the hostesses as they band together to take revenge on Blackjack and finally free themselves from this world of constant betrayal and exploitation.

Project Y screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The People Upstairs (윗집 사람들, Ha Jung-woo, 2025)

Posted on by

A moribund marriage finds itself haunted in the reflective image of the couple upstairs in Ha Jung-woo’s take on the Spanish film, Sentimental. A very ’70s sex farce, the film is, in other ways, a refreshingly modern examination of contemporary relationships that ultimately comes down on the side of sexual freedom and personal fulfilment rather than encouraging its unhappily married protagonists back into a socially conformist cage of merely settling for an unsatisfying existence.

You can tell Jeong-ah (Gong Hyo-jin) is unsatisfied by the way she accidentally embarrasses the life model at the art class where she teaches part-time to the point he feels he has to cover himself up even though it defeats the purpose of him being there. Her work as a temporary art teacher is also a symbol of her defeated hopes having given up on her creative practice to focus on more practical concerns while her husband, Hyun-soo (Kim Dong-wook), is a struggling film director who is currently on the 48th draft of a project to turn an unsuccessful film pitch into a TV drama that he’s been working on for the last four years. 

Neither of them are getting much sleep because the rambunctious nightly lovemaking of the couple upstairs keeps them up at night, but these days Hyun-soo sleeps on a fold up mattress in his office which is full of empty boxes of instant ramen like some student bachelor pad. Though they’re only in adjacent rooms, they communicate through Kakao talk and are otherwise leading separate lives. That might be why Jeong-a is drawn to the self-help YouTube channel run by Soo-kyung (Lee Hanee), her upstairs neighbour, which assures that no one can cure the loneliness inside you and the fastest way to better relationships is to stop expecting too much from other people. 

But it’s clear that Jeong-a, at least, is looking for something more which is likely why she decides to invite the upstairs neighbours over for dinner. Hyun-soo isn’t keen on the plan and tries to force her to cancel, then only agreeing to stay an hour while making passive-aggressive comments and veering close to telling the Kims that they can hear everything that’s going on upstairs and they don’t like it. Soo-kyung and her husband Mr Kim (Ha Jung-woo) are, however, the inverse of Jeong-a and Hyun-soo in their hyper-sexualised relationship and apparently solid marriage. They’ve come with something to say too, but while Jeong-a is increasingly receptive to their entreaties and open about her dissatisfaction, Hyun-soo is rude and indignant, resentful of what he sees as a perverse intrusion into his otherwise very “normal” life.

Indeed, part of this is that Mr Kim keeps making subtle digs at his masculinity in needling him about his lack of career success and inability to get this TV drama off the ground after apparently working on it for four years. This is also the root of Hyun-soo’s own insecurities and withdrawal from Jeong-a, unable to see himself as a man in the wake of his dissatisfying career. But Mr Kim is also a contradictory picture of masculinity. A teacher of Chinese characters who really wanted to be a calligrapher, he cuts a fairly authoritarian figure, but is otherwise a modern new man who is domesticated and open with his feelings. The Kims bring a dish to the dinner that Mr Kim has made while he orgiastically tears into pomegranate and suggestively squeezes lemons. He fixes drinks, makes tea, and gets out of the way while his wife does her work. 

But at the same time, the film seems to dial back on the inherent queerness of the Kims’ sexual practice by eliding the homoeroticism between Hyun-soo and Mr Kim who is keen to recruit him because his apparently explosive essence. This internalised homophobia is also a manifestation of Hyun-soo’s conventionality and desire for middle-class properness to bring order to his life, if only superficially, by continuing to live in a simulacrum of a marriage that leaves husband and wife unhappy. The recently remodelled flat is full of the signs of aspiration from the posh china to elegant modern decor. But it’s a row about the curtains that most obviously signals the cracks in their relationship. Jeong-a doesn’t want any because she wants a more open and transparent marriage, while Hyun-soo can’t live without them because he craves repression and can’t understand a life without it.

In any case, during their incredibly weird evening with the Kims, the couple hit rock bottom that is also a kind of epiphany liberating them from their misconceptions and the inertia of their married life. Hyun-soo, finally, begins to realise that Jeong-a is right when she says he uses sarcasm to run away from his problems and if he wants to save his marriage, he’ll have to be a little more emotionally honest and open to compromise. Despite his squeamishness, the film seems to come down on the side of the Kims who are living happy and fulfilling lives in embracing their sexuality, while it is Hyun-soo, by contrast, who must learn to open up even if he’s not quite ready to get in the lift.

The People Upstairs screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (no subtitles)