Category: London Korean Film Festival 2025

Red Nails (홍이, Hwang Seul-gi, 2024)

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A not quite middle-aged woman watches as her mother takes an aerobics class with other similarly aged people at a nursing home. The attendant turns to her and remarks that it can’t have been an easy decision, leading us to think that she has reluctantly decided her mother may be better off living where she can be properly looked after. But Hong (Jang Sun) has actually arrived to take her mother home. Not because she’s had a change of heart, and not exactly because she’s having a hard time and can’t afford to pay for the home any more, but because she’s realised her estranged mother’s a cash cow and the only one she has left to tap.

Hwang Seul-gi’s complex drama Red Nails (홍이, Hong-i) never shies away from its heroine’s flaws even if it tries its best to empathise with her. Hong is clearly irresponsible with money. The piled up boxes in her living room hint that she may have fallen victim to a multi-level marketing scam, but whatever the root causes are, she’s pretty much bankrupt with the bailiffs about to be sent in to seize her goods due to her phenomenally large debts. Even so, we later see her going on shopping sprees as if she were trying to fill some sort of void through guilty consumerism that is really just punishing herself by making her situation even worse. 

Hong’s borrowed money from an ex-boyfriend who has since married someone else but continues to sleep with her while badgering Hong for his money back, claiming his wife’ll throw a fit if he doesn’t get it. Meanwhile, she’s engaged in a fantasy romance with a man from an app, Jin-woo, whom she misleads about her financial circumstances and later uses when she needs a free ride. Hong has a habit of taking advantage of people, including her mother’s old friend Hae-joo who agrees to watch her in the day. Hong often messes her around, staying out late without calling and just expecting Hae-joo is figure something out. Hae-joo eventually confronts her about her unreasonable behaviour while taking advantage of her free labour, but Hong tries to give her money as if that was the problem. Hae-joo is insulted, and bringing money into the equation only threatens to change the nature of the relationship. It makes Hae-joo feel cheap and used when she had been doing this as a friend because she cared about Seo-hee. 

Seo-hee, meanwhile, seems ambivalent about her new living standards and, at times, berates Hong complaining that she wishes she’d never been born. It’s not clear what happened in Hong’s childhood, but they evidently did not get on and still don’t now. Seo-hee wants to go home, complaining that there’s a thief in the house though whether or not she knows that Hong has been dipping into her savings to pay off her debts, she’s still aware that she brought home because she needed money rather than companionship. 

But then Hong is also lonely, and her romance with Jin-woo is an attempt to escape her disappointing circumstances. Her ex suggests she once dreamed of becoming a teacher, but is currently teaching a literacy class for a group of older woman at a local institute where she also cleans the toilets. She also has a second job directing traffic at a construction site where the foreman hates her, docking her pay for neglecting her duties by using her phone while on the job. She cannot her escape her debts through any legitimate means, though that hardly justifies stealing from her mother. 

Even so, it appears that on some level Hong wanted comfort and companionship along with her mother’s approval. As they live together, they begin to draw closer but at the same time it’s clear that they remember things differently, though whether Hong is right to blame Seo-hee’s dementia or has misremembered herself is destined to be an eternal mystery. Hong tries to fulfil her mother’s dream of lighting sparklers, but the pair are yelled by some kind of environmental officer and forced to put them out. Hong looks on forlornly as the glow fades away as if symbolising the flame going out of the relationship between the two women. Despite their growing closeness, there are some things that it seems can never really be made up and all Hong really has is a frustrated memory of a longed-for closeness that can never really be.

Red Nails screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

YMCA Baseball Team (YMCA 야구단, Kim Hyun-seok, 2002)

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Kim Hyun-seok’s sporting comedy YMCA Baseball Team (YMCA 야구단, YMCA Yagudan) opens with sepia-tinted scenes of Korea in 1905 in which most people still wear hanbok and live little differently than their distant ancestors. Modernity is, however, coming as evidenced by the streetcar that runs through the centre of town even if it’s surrounded on both sides by unpaved ground. Reluctant scholar Hochang’s (Song Kang-ho) father (Shin Goo) complains that the cranes no longer stop in Seoul. Too many scholars have picked the wrong side, he says, but Hochcang counters him that these days you can get to Incheon in hour by train. Maybe the cranes are saying there’s no need to emulate them anymore. 

Hochang doesn’t want to be a scholar or take over his father’s school. His father wanted his brother to do that anyway, but he’s run off and joined the resistance to the Japanese. Just as Hochang discovers the new sport of baseball thanks to a pair of American missionaries and the pretty daughter of a diplomat, the Japanese further increase their dominance over Korea by forcing it to sign the Eulsa Treaty in which they effetively ceded their sovereignty and gave additional provisions for Japanese troops to remain in their nation.

Hochang had been playing football alone as his friend practised reading English before he kicked a ball into Jungrim’s (Kim Hye-soo) garden and found a baseball instead. The early scenes see the local population adopting this Western game in makeshift fashion, using paddles and tools as bats while putting festival masks on their faces in weaponising their culture to make this sport their own. In baseball, Hochung finds the vocation he hasn’t found in scholarship or anywhere else. As a child, he wanted to be a King’s Emissary, but the Korean Empire is drawing to a close and the position no longer exists. His battle is in part to be able to live the life he chooses rather than simply continue these ancestral traditions and be a teacher like his father. In a cute public event unveiling the team, children sing a song in which little boys sing about how they don’t want to be an admiral as their fathers wanted them to be but want be something else, while the girls don’t want to marry a powerful man as their mother’s advised, but would rather marry someone else. The joke is that they both want to be or be with the YMCA Baseball Team, which has, in its way come, to represent a new modernising Korea that is keeping itself alive by embracing the new.

To that extent, Jongrim herself comes to represent “Korea” in that Hochang uses his scholarly skills to write her a love scroll in beautiful calligraphy, but it somehow gets mistaken for her father’s will and read out at his funeral after he takes his own life to protest the Eulsa Treaty. Hochang’s heart felt and rather florid poem is then reinterpreted to reflect her father’s “love” for Korea which has been stolen from him by the Japanese. Jungrim and her Japanese-educated friend Daehyun (Kim Joo-hyuk) are secretly in the Resistance and later forced into hiding when Hochung’s friend Kwangtae (Hwang Jung-min) figures out that it was Daehyun who attacked his politician father for betraying the nation by letting the Eulsa treaty pass. 

The baseball team becomes another resistance activity, with Jongrim admitting that the people “became one and felt proud” every time the team won. When they discover that their training ground has been commandeered by Japanese troops, they end up agreeing to play them to reclaim their lost territory. But the Japanese still have superiority over an underdeveloped Korea as seen in the opening footage as they started playing baseball 30 years earlier. Just as Hochang didn’t want to be a scholar, general’s son Hideo (Kazuma Suzuki) didn’t want to be a soldier either, but in a world of rising militarism he had little choice. His father thinks baseball’s a silly waste of time too, and like Hochang’s father is secretly proud of his son when he’s doing well, but is very clear that this game cannot be lost because the great Japanese Empire cannot be seen to lose to the nation it is currently in the process of subjugating. The day is saved, ironically, by Hochang’s royal seal, given to him by Jongrim, who seems to have returned his affections even if she had a greater cause. The baseball team even allows a snooty former nobleman to accept that class divisions no longer exist and he can in fact be friends with a peasant, especially when they’re uniting in a common goal like kicking out the Japanese. Sadly, the Japanese turned out to be not such good sportsmen after all, and predictably sore losers, but Hochang has at least found a way to resist and fight for a Korea that is free of both onerous tradition and colonial oppression.

YMCA Baseball Team screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Commission (커미션, Shin Jae-min, 2025)

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What is it about art that conjures such frustration? Dan-kung (Kim Hyeon-soo) is consumed by resentment and deep-seated feelings of inferiority while certain that she will forever be trapped beneath the shadow of her sister, Ju-kyung (Kim Yong-ji), a popular webtoon artist. Dan-kyung dreams of being a webtoon artist too, but she’s convinced herself she isn’t good enough, mainly due to a childhood incident when she won first prize in a competition but only after her sister had made her mark on her painting. 

The tragedy might be in a way that it never seems to have occurred to the sisters that they could simply have worked together and that even if someone else helps you, that doesn’t mean that the work is any less your own. After all, most manhwa artists have assistants who do the bulk of the actual drawing. Ju-kyung has them herself, as does the kindly Mok, a former master taking his first steps into a new digital world. Mok sees potential in Dan-kyun, even if her colleagues haze and bully her and she only got the job thanks to Ju-kung’s connections. He’s working on a space epic titled Ozymandias that’s an attempt to make up for a project that never got to see the light of day having been suppressed during the authoritarian era. 

Dan-kyung uses the title of Mok’s lost manhwa, Taiji, as her username on a Japanese dark web forum that her sleazy colleague introduces her to where people pay vast sums to commission extreme artwork. The most obvious meaning of “Taiji” in Japanese is “foetus” (胎児), though it can also mean “extermination” (退治) as in of pests or demons, or “confrontation’ (対峙). It’s not clear that Dan-kyung would know this, nor that Mok intended the title of his manhwa to be read as Japanese or what he might have meant by it if he did. There is however, something in the idea that Dan-kyun still taking shape, as yet unborn just like Mok’s never released manwha. She defines herself in confrontation with her sister, as if she were the unborn twin forever languishing in darkness. Ju-kyung’s hit manhwa is titled Day and Night, and might itself hint at the contrast between them. While Jun-kyung enjoys the trappings of success, Dan-kyung finds the key to her art in her internal darkness, producing her best work drawing images of vile and sickening things for the benefit of her online fans. Her success mirrors Ju-kyun’s even it’s underground where only those in the know can see.

It gives her a new sense of confidence that would allow her to make progress in the mainstream world too, if her self-destructive actions didn’t have a habit of ruining things. Ju-kyung has a point when she describes Dan-kyung as a kind of jinx who ruins everything and everyone around her. Her biggest fan online is calls Hannya (Kim Jin-woo), which is the name for a demonic noh mask representing a woman who has become consumed by her jealousy. As Dan-kyun gets deeper into the online world, it becomes more difficult to tell if any of this is real or merely a symptom of her delusions. Hannya talks to her in a mix of Japanese and Korean, their androgynous quality inviting some uncomfortable readings but also echoing Dan-kyun’s nature as something as yet incomplete or a part of a separated whole. 

Another teacher at the art academy where Dan-kyun had been working bluntly states that some of the students aren’t worthy of teaching because they’re afraid to push themselves in case they find out that they’re not good enough. Ju-kyung initially seems sympathetic, telling Dan-kyung that understanding your limits is also a “talent” while seemingly encouraging her by getting her the job with Mok, but Dan-kyung later wonders if it isn’t Ju-kyung who is afraid and actively standing in her way because she can’t bear the thought that Dan-kyung might actually be better than her. Mok tells that “perseverance” is a “talent” too, though his frustrated apprentice who lost out to “genius” Ju-kyung, speaks of it more like purgatory. He knows deep down that he doesn’t have what it takes to make it, and doesn’t think Dan-kyung does either, but they keep at because of that vague hope that just maybe it’ll happen one day. But Mok described Ju-kyung’s talent as curse too, correctly predicting the paralysing fear and self-fulfilling prophecy that one day it’ll just abandon her and she won’t have anything to say any more.

The irony is, however, that every time Dan-kyung makes one of her bad decisions, something good would have happened anyway. The harsh teacher whom she wronged after they won an award she wanted, mellows once she gets used to success and apologises to Dan-kyung for “overreacting”. Dan-kyung discovers she’s actually getting a job she thought she lost a little while after plotting revenge and ruining the opportunity. Things would have worked out for her, if only she’d had a little more patience and self-confidence. It’s true enough that she’s motivated by spite and resentment, pettily striking back at those that have what she wants or have caused her to feel humiliated, but not really thinking through the consequences and assuming that everything will go the way she wants it to once she’s removed this one piece of the puzzle or replaced it with one of her own.

In unmasking herself, she reclaims her identity from Ju-kyung and finally becomes whole while echoing Mok’s words that Taiji needs readers, as if her art would remain forever unborn if no one ever got to see it. The pain in her wrist hints at the physical labour of creation, one that a more successful artist may no longer need to endure, while in other ways she is in the process of giving birth to herself. But Dan-kyung’s vision of art may also be flawed in her need for other people to see it, fixating on the fame and acclaim, even the money that comes with it, rather than in the simple art of creation in which it wouldn’t matter if her art sat in a desk drawer for the next 40 years because she had made it and made it for herself. Hannya has their “art” too, as grim as it may be, though aside from their first piece, they seem to hide the results. Another tortured artist, Dan-kyung has turned inward in bitterness and resentment, but wreaks her vengeance externally while otherwise continuing to dream of a mainstream success that may in itself be merely artifice.

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hero (영웅, JK Youn, 2022)

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An Jung-geun is a key figure in modern Korean history whose story has been dramatised numerous times and given rise to its own legend. JK Youn’s Hero (영웅, Yeong-ung) is, however, the first movie musical devoted to his life and adapted from a stage hit that has been running since 2009. It has to be said that structurally the musical owes a fair amount to Les Misérables with a dramatic first act closer that is more than a little reminiscent of One Day More, while a number about meat buns echoes the kind of comic relief provided by Master of the House, though the rhythm might hint at Sweeney Todd’s meditation on pie making.

It is certainly out of keeping with the intensity surrounding it as the focus is, after all, on an attempt to stop the Japanese colonising Korea and practising even more cruelty. An Jung-geun abandons his family in the early part of the film, but this isn’t seen as a moral failing or irresponsibility so much as evidence of his devotion to the cause that he sacrifices a peaceful life as a husband and father. His revolutionary activity is furthermore filial because his mother encourages it, later writing him a letter while he is imprisoned urging him not to appeal his sentence but accept his death as a martyr. To appeal would mean accepting the Japanese’s authority in begging for his life. Jung-geun had wanted to be tried not as a murderer, but as a soldier fighting a war and therefore sees his trial as illegitimate. He insists he is a political prisoner, a rousing number outlines 15 reasons why the man he assassinated, Ito Hirobumi Japan’s first prime minister and resident-general of Korea, deserved to die which include dethroning the Emperor Gojong, assassinating the Korean Empress Myeongseong (Lee Il-hwa), lying to the world that Korea wanted Japanese protection, plunder, and massacring Koreans (all of which the Japanese had done). 

It’s the assassination of Empress Myeongseong that motivates the film’s secondary heroine, Seol-hee (Kim Go-eun), a former palace made now operating as a resistance spy in Japan under the name Yukiko. Seol-hee’s impassioned songs have curiously homoerotic quality and take the place of a central romance which the piece otherwise lacks except in the tentative relationship between Jin-joo, sister of one of An’s closest men, and the youthful recruit Dong-ha. Even if “Myeongseong” is effectively “Korea”, Seol-hee’s passionate intensity is quite surprising while her motivation is more revenge for her murdered mistress than it is saving the nation and eliminating Japanese influence. In this, her arc might not quite make sense in that her final actions almost derail Jeun-guen’s mission in putting the Japanese on high alert. 

But at the same time the film leans in far harder on Jeun-geun’s religiosity than other tellings on his story in which his faith presents only a minor conflict as evidenced by his offering an apology to God for killing Ito while justifying his actions as those of a righteous man in the courtroom. While placing him at odds with the left-wing ideology of other Independence activists, his religiosity is aligned with his humanitarian decision to release Japanese prisoners rather than execute them, abiding by the commonly held rules of war while his men are eager for blood. The decision backfires, but is depicted more favourably than in the narratively more complex Harbin and Jung-geun is otherwise an uncomplicated hero who makes no wrong decisions and never fails even if he is at the mercy of the Japanese.

As such, the musical sticks to the familiar beats of Jung-geun’s story from the Japanese counterstrike to his talent for calligraphy and the letter from his mother instructing him to go bravely to his death. Anchored by an incredibly strong vocal performance from Chung Sung-hwa who originated the role on stage, the film portrays Jeun-geung as the hero of the title, defiant to the end and thereafter wronged by the Japanese who buried his body in an unknown location and prevented him from ever returning home to a free Korea. It also glosses over the possibility that Ito’s assassination may actually have accelerated the course of Japan’s annexation which it failed to prevent and otherwise had little lasting effect. Nevertheless, despite its overt patriotism, the film does present the rousing spectacle of Jung-geun’s embodiment of the good son of the nation who fought hard for a liberated Korea he never got to see.

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

SAVE (생명의 은인, Bang Mi-ri, 2025)

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There’s an old adage that if you save someone’s life, you become responsible for it, but equally perhaps some have come to expect reciprocity and the act of being saved places you into a debt you can never hope to repay. There are definitely different kinds of salvation on offer in Bang Mi-ri’s empathetic maternal drama Save (생명의 은인, Saengmyeong-ui eunin), but each of them comes with a cost both literal and spiritual in trying to draw lines in the complex interplay of guilt and gratitude.

As the film opens, Se-jeong (Kim Pureum) is being interviewed for a television programme about young people leaving care. The interview is being film at the hair salon where she has been working for the last few months in the run-up to graduating high school to prepare for “self-reliance”, but it’s obvious that one of her colleagues resents the intrusion and does not want to appear on camera with her. The young woman later rolls her eyes, claiming that she understands her circumstances but that’s she’s causing too much inconvenience, while her boss is unsympathetic when she’s distracted by the difficulties she’s facing and burns herself on a pair of curling tongs that she subsequently drops to the floor. 

Se-jeong’s friend from the children’s home gives up on studying at a university in Seoul because of the cost and goes to one locally instead, using the settlement money they’re given on leaving to buy designer clothes and telling her new classmates that she’s from a wealthy family to avoid the stigma of having no parents. Se-jeong has no such recourse, but it’s obvious that she’s bright and conscientious. She often has a notebook with her to jot down advice and instructions and is very thorough when searching for an apartment that’s within her means but ticks all of her boxes. Nevertheless, she is naive and has no one to help her, so it’s no wonder that she gets scammed out of her money by accepting an offer that’s too good to be true and falling for a landlord’s false reassurances that it’s fine to rent privately rather than through an estate agent because scammers only go for high value apartments. All of that does, however, leave Se-jeong even more isolated with no money or place to stay forcing her to rely on a woman who approaches her claiming to be the person who saved her from a fire at a home for single mothers in which her birth mother died.

Se-jeong wants to believe her, even if her friend advises her not to. Eun-sook (Song Sun-mi) too is after her settlement money, she claims for an operation to treat her lung cancer. “Can’t you save me this time?” She manipulatively asks, as if she meant for this debt to be repaid in kind. But Se-jeong has to wonder if she’s really telling the truth or is also trying to con her. Isn’t it a little too convenient how her “saviour” resurfaced in her life at just this moment?  Eun-sook can also be quite scary and knows a suspicious amount about how to manipulate social media and root out someone who values their reputation in the eyes of others and is on some level ashamed of making their money by deceiving people. In any case, Eun-sook offers the source of maternal warmth that Se-jeong has been craving while dropping hints about her birth mother and early life that further add to her credibility.

But on one level at least, Eun-sook doesn’t really want “saving” and isn’t looking for the same kind of salvation as Se-jeong who is looking for a new home while otherwise presented only with “self-reliance” and no other way to anchor herself in a society which is hostile to people like her and offers very little in the way of support. When she graduates high school, Se-jeong and her friend look on as the other girls take photos of their families with no one there to celebrate with them, except for Eun-sook who unexpectedly arrives to fill this vacant space. What she may be trying to do is save herself spiritually in saving Se-jeong, repaying an old debt and giving her the roots she needs to establish herself in adulthood. Her constant coughing is a symbolic reflection of her trauma from the fire that suggests she never really escaped it. Yet what she tells Se-jeong is that there’s no need for her to feel guilty. Her survival, just like their meeting, is just something that happened like fate or destiny, and she has a right to live her life to its fullest. Poignant in its implications of maternal sacrifice and intergenerational healing, Bang’s moving drama is infinitely forgiving of its flawed antagonist and suggests that, in the end, salvation is found only in saving others. 

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

Silver Apricot (은빛살구, Jang Man-min, 2024)

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Money ruins everything. It eats away at even the most fundamental of human connections, rendering them all, in their way, transactional. But you need it, in the same way a vampire needs blood and it might be that the only way to get it is to suck it out of someone else’s neck. Or at least, that’s how it is for Jung-seo (Na Ae-jin) in Jang Man-min’s familial drama Silver Apricot (은빛살구, Eunbitsalgu). 

At 32 years old, she’s still being held on a temporary worker contract with her sleazy boss, who is low-key sexually harassing her, using the prospect of full, salaried employment to manipulate her working life. She works “overtime” making posters to advertise other exploitative jobs, such as gig economy delivery driver, with the cheerful slogan “anyone can do it” which she later acknowledges is probably “insulting” to those who do actually do it and are fighting for proper pay and recognition. Secretly, however, she’s working on a webtoon about a vampire, which is how she works out her anxieties and what she actually wants to do and would be doing if money wasn’t getting in the way.

The particular way it’s getting in the way right now is that she’s won an apartment lottery and urgently needs to get the money together for a deposit. Jung-seo plans on going halves with her fiancée Gyeong-hyeon (Kang Bong-sung), but he seems reluctant to put the money in and is clear he won’t make up the shortfall when she’s turned down for the permanent position and won’t be earning as much as she hoped. All that’s left to her is the bank of mum, but her mother’s fed up with her always asking for money and claims she’s saving too with the hope of opening her own restaurant despite the fact that Jung-seo suspects the owner of the place she works at now is romantically interested in her. Perhaps like Jung-seo, she’s lost the ability to trust anyone after having a bad experience with Jung-seo’s father who left them for another woman and still lives in their home town with a new family. 

Jeung-seo’s father Young-joo may also have had artistic dreams in that he was once a saxophonist but gave his sax to her mother as security for a loan he never repaid. Her mother suggests she ask him for the money back instead, but that means opening old wounds that may be better left unresolved. Young-joo (Ahn Suk-hwan) is like a vampire himself, draining those around him of their cash to fund one harebrained scheme or another from stock market speculation to spurious property investments that he swears will pay off but almost never do. Gyeong-hyeon may not be much better in this regard, himself dabbling in stocks despite Jeung-seo making him promise he wouldn’t in a way that makes it hard for her trust him and suggests that men are always hung up on potential future gains rather than what they have concretely right now. 

Predictably, Young-joo doesn’t really want to pay up and insists on meeting Gyeong-hyeon first in and old-fashioned bit of patriarchal nonsense which makes even less sense considering how little of a father he has been to her for all these years. Gyeong-hyeong, meanwhile, is instantly taken in by him and has all but fallen for one of his scams. Maybe it makes sense on paper to abandon the city and live in an area with a lower cost of living doing a less prestigious kind of job like running a cafe which would lessen your financial burden and allow more “free” time to practise your art even if would still be a side hustle, but Jeung-seo knows better than to believe her father’s lies and knows full well that he’s only changed his tune because he overheard how much profit they could make with the apartment and thinks he’s entitled to some of it if he gives them the money.

But it’s not even like Jung-seo is asking for money from him. She’s only asking for money that actually belongs to her mother. Money ruined their relationship too, and it even interferes in her connection with her younger half-sister Jung-hae (Kim Jin-young) who idolises her but also frames her for stealing her mother’s savings after asking her to secretly sign a lease on an apartment she could use for her own art, music, and as a safety net in case her mother really decides to leave Young-joo this time when his plan to redevelop a building in a nearby town inevitably goes belly up. Joo-hee (Choi Jung-hyun) may have this in the back of her mind herself, which explains her coolness toward Jung-seo, fearing her sudden need for the repaying of old debts will destabilise their family and mess things up for Jung-hae. 

Despite the familial tension, being back in her hometown where Gyeong-hyeong’s spineless pragmatism is all the more obvious forces Jung-seo to think about what the apartment actually represents and whether that’s what she wants. Once she signs, she’ll be locked into that very conventional life which is what everyone in Seoul strives for, but might not actually be right for her. Her friend in her hometown, Tae-joo, has joined the navy for the financial security and will be able to get a military apartment when he marries. He’s given up drawing webtoons, and possibly also on his romantic hopes for Jung-seo. When she makes overtures towards him, he replies that he’s not ready to give up on his civil servant girlfriend, suggesting that he isn’t brave enough to break out of this conventionality either. Jung-seo is essentially in a relationship of convenience with Gyeong-hyeon that is not based on love but solely on the ability to buy the apartment which is what he really wants from her. The question is whether she has the courage to get off this train or is willing to settle for a life of dull humiliation submitting herself to the whims of her bosses while gradually abandoning her hopes and dreams to live in an apartment that is itself not a home but an investment in a future that will never really be hers.

Silver Apricot screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hi-Five (하이파이브, Kang Hyoung-chul, 2025)

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If you suddenly developed super powers, what would you do with them? Would you start using them for good to save the people around you, or would you become obsessed with the power itself and try to amass more of it while your using abilities only for your own ends? Those at the centre of Kang Hyoung-chul’s superhero comedy Hi-Five (하이파이브) are firmly in the helping others camp, but they’ve seen enough movies to know that every hero needs a villain and there’s someone else out there who wants their power for themselves.

That would be ageing cult leader Eternal Young-chun (Shin Goo), New God Resurrected. Young-chun is just ripping his followers off and doesn’t believe in anything he preaches but has, on the other hand, started to believe in his own divinity. He’s been keeping himself in good health through frequent organ donations from less fortunate people to the extent that his body’s a kind of Ship of Theseus. His daughter’s fed up with his longevity and hoping he’ll finally snuff it so she can take over, which is why she’s after the five in the hope of taking them out before Young-chun can steal all of their transplanted organs too. It turns out that the pancreas he was given was taken from a superhero who took his own life and has not only rejuvenated his body but given him the ability to suck the life force out of other people to empower himself in a more literal way than he’s already feeding off his followers by exploiting their devotion to convince them to give up all their money and assets or else work themselves to death for free.

The other five commonly transplanted organs were given other people who are all marked with a tattoo and have been given powers of their own, though one of them hasn’t figured out what hers is yet. In contrast to Young-chun’s soullessness, each of the five seems to have had their own problems that are only impacted by their transplants rather than directly caused by them. Teenager Wan-seo (Lee Jae-in) received the heart and is frustrated by her overprotective father who constantly asks about her friends though she keeps saying she doesn’t have any because she was ill for so long and had to skip school for treatment which is why struggling to make any new ones. He won’t let her do taekwondo either, though that’s what she most wants to do and possibly why she ended up with the all powerful, super speedy fighter skills. Ji-sung (Ahn Jae-hong), meanwhile, is a struggling screenwriter with an interest in the superhero genre. He doesn’t have any friends either, which may be to do with a poor career decision that alienated him from his community. Though he’s the first one to want to get the group together, he’s soon consumed by cynicism. Ji-sung got the lungs and can blow things away, but struggles to convey his emotions with words and gets into an alpha male hissy fit with Ki-dong (Yoo Ah-in), a super-sharp guy who got the corneas and can manipulate electricity but is actually a bit of a loser with gambling issues and similar interpersonal issues to Ji-sung.

Middle-aged yogurt lady Seon-nyeo (Ra Mi-ran) got the kidneys and can’t figure out what her superpower is but becomes the force who holds the group together. Even so, she’s battling mental health issues and some guilt about something that happened in her past and caused unintended harm to another person. Factory foreman Heel-han (Kim Hee-won) is a devotee of the cult, but frustrated and conflicted by the obvious disregard for workers’ safety and wellbeing. He got the liver, and can heal minor wounds caused by recent accidents. The reason he has no friends is that he cut off all of his relationships when he joined the cult, which is one other reason he doesn’t want to make a fuss about the abuse of workers and is originally flattered by Young-chun’s attention.

Nevertheless, it’s becoming part of the group that allows them to save each other and themselves figuratively and literally in combining their strengths to battle Young-chun, who is after all also sort of a part of them and a member of their family as another recipient of organs from the same person. Kang imbues their somewhat clumsy heroism with a quirky humour, even giving the occasional use of CGI a comedic, comic book aesthetic to lean into what might otherwise be a minor liability though production design and values are top-notch. It’s a shame the film was held up for four years by Yoo Ah-in’s drug arrest which has severely hampered his career and led to most of his unreleased work being shelved at the time, otherwise this might have gone on to become a fun movie franchise with deepening lore led by a likeable cast of everypeople using their powers for good in small but important ways. Still, just this episode alone is plenty of warmhearted fun as the gang come together to expose Young-chun’s vain and selfish cult leader for the conman he is, saving themselves and freeing those like them who fell victim to his lies.

Hi-Five screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Frosted Window (흐린 창문 너머의 누군가, Kim Jong-kwan, 2025)

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The title Frosted Window (흐린 창문 너머의 누군가, heulin changmun neomeoui nugunga) refers to the film’s final segment, a meta meditation on grief and loss, but, on the other hand, it’s true enough that we sometimes look at the world through a blurred lens and meet each other through an imperfect abstraction. A three-part portmanteau film, each of the segments takes place in a different season, with the opening titles perhaps standing in for an otherwise unseen spring, and reflect the director’s flights of fancy in imagining the lives of those living in the quiet backstreets of Seochon in Seoul, which is known for its literary associations and historical architecture.

It may be its maze-like quality that gives rise to so many differing tales, but in the first segment, at least, it stands in as another place as a lovelorn artist tries to pick up various women by bothering them while they are minding their own business in public places. The first is in a German coffee shop, where he speaks to a woman in English assuming her to be a foreigner because she has international vibes and is reading a book in German, but she is actually Korean, if having lived abroad for many years, which is awkward. Nevertheless, he carries on trying to chat her up while she tolerates him. Eventually he gets the message and leaves, trying to pick up another foreign woman in the street before backing off when she’s joined by a foreign man. The artist seems to a romantic who finds inspiration in these quests for love and advises his friend, a blocked writer, to go for a walk in search of romance in order to reawaken his creativity.

But a man who is also a blocked writer played by the same actor turns up in the second part where he is both an observer and an object. A woman calls a man to an upscale bar and drinks expensive whisky with him. The man is clearly interested in her, though he has a girlfriend he’s become tired of but won’t break up with, but she seems uninterested in him even as she continues to behave flirtatiously. There’s obviously something else going on, but it’s not originally clear if she wanted to toy with him a while, is making fun of him by exploiting his attraction to her to get him to make a fool of himself (to which he gladly obliges), or has something against his unseen girlfriend, on whom this is all very unfair no matter which way you look at it. It is, however, a performance for the barman, who watches silently until the woman comes back later to ask him what he thought.

The woman, a local beautician, along with another from the florist’s who reunites with the artist in the October-set first tale, reappear in the last one echoing the sense of a fictional world that begins to take over as one story gives way to another. This time we have two artists, an actress who has been taking some time out, and a female film director she has worked with previously, who meet by chance in a cafe of which this area seems to have a lot considering its size. As the director outlines the story, we see the actress playing her role blurring the lines between the layers of “reality” present in this segment and the film as a whole. We have been, in some ways, like the barman passive observers with each of these tales performed for our benefit, but this last meta segment allows the actress to begin processing the weight of a loss which may be her own.

She is saved, in a way, by the friendly atmosphere of Seochon and the kindness of strangers that restore her sense of self-worth, both as an actress and person. The actress tells the director that though she had taken only a small break, people had already forgotten her and so her return to acting has been more difficult than anticipated with no offers of major roles, only smallish, walk-on parts. The encounter with a fan shows her that she had been missed and there are those who are waiting to see her again on screen, so her life and career had not been pointless and there is a path forward for her in the wake of her loss. This is perhaps testament to the frosty window of Seochon, home to a thousand stories, and a gentle warmth that seems to emanate even in the depths of winter. 

Frosted Window screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)