Category: Festivals

Mash Ville (매쉬빌, Hwang Wook, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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The Hwaseong of Mashville (매쉬빌), a far out rural backwater, is a kind frontier town drenched in moonshine and melancholy where the local pastime is loneliness. You can almost see what attracted the murderous cultists at the film’s centre to their strange conviction that a convoluted ritual will save a world that’s fallen into chaos with “pure love”, were it not that one of them also remarks on how foolish he feels remembering himself as man who once believed all were equal before the law. 

The law in these parts is a laughing policeman who doesn’t like it when things happen outside of his jurisdiction, but actually does not very much at all to prosecute the “pseudo-religion” he later tells a colleague he’s been tracking while arriving to clear up their mess. Otherwise, there are two other concurrent crimes that should probably be pressing on his time including the deadly moonshine pedalled by liquor entrepreneur Se-jeong and his two bearded brothers, and the strange case of a young woman charged with acquiring a fake zombie corpse for a movie shoot only to turn up with what she suspects is an actual dead body. A rather strange set of events brings them all into the same orbit while preventing them from leaving Hwaseong where the cultists, who are all male but dress in female hanbok for otherwise unexplained reasons, are still on the prowl looking to complete their zodiac of sacrificial victims. 

Then again, the cultists may be victims too. Their former leader soon turns up in town apparently regretting his life’s work while explaining cryptically that the darkness is in his bag, which turns out to be full of money. We sees the eyes flash of Hyun-man, a local man, when he opens it as if he were corrupted in one instant though this day of being targeted by religious extremists already seems to have taken its toll on him. In the opening sequence, he’d celebrated a kind of birthday with two friends, asking only for a hug but both men refused him. He’s also one of the few villagers that didn’t leave on a trip to the hot springs which lends Hwaseong a lonelier air than it might otherwise have had. 

Even the brothers are longing for someone, yearning for the return of their mother who abandoned them many years ago and if Se-jeong’s dream is to be believed sending them the incredibly inappropriate gift of Wild Turkey whiskey when they were just kids waiting for her to come home. Se-jeong feels he can’t leave Hwaseong because a part of him’s waiting for his mother to come back, but the other half is perhaps just afraid to do so. In any case, a mistake by his strange brothers seems to have turned his whiskey into poison, so his hand’s been forced even if it weren’t for all the other weird goings on.

The irony maybe that pure love really does save the world, Se-jeong reflecting that he might have been in love for the first time in his life while finally gaining the courage to move on from Hwaseong in acceptance of the fact his mother likely won’t be returning anyway. His brothers almost got inducted into the cult, mistaken as fellow priests and strangely captivated by the weird ritual movements the killers perform of over the bodies acknowledging that there is something relaxing in thrusting their hands up into the air while curious enough about the ritual to see it through despite its grimness and moral indefensibility. 

Like the cult’s beliefs, not much makes a lot of sense though Hwang lends his strange small town enough crazy vibes to make it all hang together in a place in which whiskey itself appears to be close to a religion and as much of a salve for the world’s unkindness as anything else. “You need to quit drinking,” one his brothers ironically tells Se-jeong when he tries tell him about his recent emotional experiences though in another way he may actually have been saved by an unexpected miracle provoked by the ritual which didn’t work in the way it was intended but may have banished darkness from Se-jeong’s life at least, freeing him from a life in “mash ville” and the kind of the liquor that causes the dead to rise.

Mash Ville screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Retake (リテイク, Kota Nakano, 2023)

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What if life were like a movie and you could simply go for another take when things didn’t turn out like you planned? That’s the way it works out for the hero of Kota Nakano’s Retake (リテイク), a young man editing in realtime in an attempt to fix his mistakes and engineer a happier outcome while preparing to meet the end of his youth. Part summer holiday movie, part meta take on storytelling and the movies, the film is most of all about moving on whether things work out or not.

To that extent it’s telling that the film the teens are making is about a couple who attempt to go to a place where time does not flow. For the flighty Yu, the film’s architect, the desire seems to reflect her own anxiety about growing up and entering a new world of adulthood. “I wish this time would go on forever,” she sighs while discussing with her cameraman Kei how the film should end. Nakano plays with this scene, repeating it several times as if it itself were a land where time does not flow and Kei were playing out a memory in his head envisaging how something should have gone rather than how it did. Eventually the conclusion that they come to is that they should continue their journey instead of staying here, trapped in an eternal loop of dead time with no past or future. 

But moving forward is scary, after all it means leaving the past behind. Kei snaps images of the world around him as if he were trying to steal a moment, freeze it and take it with him. The hero of the film, played by his friend Jiro, is an artist who similarly tries to capture motion through the medium of sketching and constantly finds himself frustrated. He likes to sit still and concentrate, but he meets a girl who likes dance and move in the free flow of time. Kei is much the same, a natural observer yet sometimes blind to circumstance as in his decision to invite Allie, a girl they meet by chance while raiding the school broadcasting club for equipment, oblivious to the awkwardness that seems to exist between herself and Yu. 

The film teases the conflict, eventually settling on a disagreement if not exactly over a boy than surrounding him though for the rest of the runtime seems as if it may more have been more about the tension between the girls themselves. Nevertheless, Kei quickly fixes on the idea of repairing their friendship to prevent the film collapsing when his own attempt to confess his feelings is seemingly the straw that breaks the camel’s back prompting Yu into a petulant conviction that no one cares about her film and there are only ulterior motives among her crew. But paradoxically, what Kei learns is the importance of speaking up in the moment, shaking off his diffidence to support Allie when her suggestion is treated with callous indifference by Yu and thereby building bridges.

Though those same bridges may ironically leave him feeling left out and isolated as a peripheral figure on the team while the others all seem to pair off leaving him alone. He tries different approaches, and retakes his mistakes looking for the perfect ending while otherwise buoyed by the warmth of the summer and company of his new friends wishing like Yu and the protagonists of the film that this moment would never end, symbolically repeating and reliving it as if himself trapped in the land where time doesn’t flow. Nakano signals the unreality of his environment by allowing Kei to approach the unseen camera and turn it off, announcing a new take with a clapperboard and then editing in real time in search of perfect answers. In some senses, it’s the operation of nostalgia but also an adolescent desire to find the right path forward along with the courage to take it. But what the teens discover is that in the end you just have to go, frustrated by the boredom of being trapped in an external limbo of stagnant time and eager to see what the next scene will bring in a continual flow of isolated moments that somehow constitute a life.

Retake screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

August in the Water (水の中の八月, Sogo Ishii, 1995)

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How does the world, or perhaps the cosmos, attempt to communicate with us? As Douglas Adams once did, August in the Water (水の中の八月, Mizu no naka no Hachigatsu) suggests it maybe through the dolphins who here at least seem to be quasi-mystical beings existing in what is really the lifeblood of humanity. In the film’s opening scenes, we’re told that the hero, Mao (Shinsuke Aoki) whose name means “true fish” and his friend Ukiya (Masaaki Takarai) have taken part-time jobs at a marine part to learn how to communicate with dolphins, but it’s the heroine Izumi, whose name means “spring” who eventually claims to have learned to do so. 

At least, her final words are that the dolphins have taught her “the perfect balance” which has allowed her to open the floodgates both literal and metaphorical to return water to an arid land. We’re repeatedly told that there’s been a lengthy drought and a water shortage leading to rationing and locked pipes though the marine park remains open and the local festival goes ahead  hinting at the ways in which we do and don’t value our natural resources. Izumi’s science teacher tells the kids that humans don’t contribute to the Earth and waste the resources that it gives us which might help to explain the gradual ossification of the planet including a mysterious condition known as the Stone Disease which causes people to collapse in the street as their organs harden. 

Izumi’s sister Yo later remarks that she thinks humanity came from a distant planet long ago and yearns to go home but to do so we must become stone because water is a substance that exists only here on Earth. Turning to stone is however seen as quite a bad thing and also echoes a millennial distrust in increasing technology with TV pundits positing that if human brains were replaced with computer chips we wouldn’t need to worry about water shortages anymore. In Yo’s dream, after people’s brains have become computer chips they become connected to the universe and can transport their minds to the moon enabling them to communicate with anyone anywhere at any time. 

But then despite the potential for communication that computers were only just beginning to offer in the mid-90s, Izumi warns her sister to stay away from them as they leave you vulnerable to the Stone Disease. The boys’ ultramodern friend, Miki (Reiko Matsuo), is a computer addict and it’s she who eventually manages to unlock parts of the mystery but paradoxically as if she were some kind of seer correctly predicting that an accident will befall Izumi on 23rd August and discovering a prophecy that in the year humanity neglects the water god two meteorites will fall in close proximity and drought will follow. Only a ritual conducted by the chosen one under a full moon will be able to cure it. Two child-like old men also warn that nothing’s been the same since they moved the old shinto shrine over which there have also been sightings of UFOs.

After the diving accident in which Izumi plunges meteor-like into the pool, she herself feels as if she’s been split in two almost like the world itself which is divided between these ancient beliefs and modern advancements that have perhaps blocked the flow that once allowed us to communicate with each other and with the universe. A psychiatrist suggests that Izumi may be suffering with sudden onset schizophrenia as a result of her accident and that all of her talk about secret messages from dolphins and mysterious aliens who want to turn the world to stone is nothing but confused delusion though in the film’s closing scenes she herself takes on a supernatural quality as a kind of etherial saviour figure who realises that she may have been dead ever since the accident and is now something different, different and distant as her sister puts it, charged with the mission of rejuvenating a human spirit long since dulled by mechanisation.

In contrast to Ishii’s earlier films which brimmed with punkish energy, August in the Water unfolds at a leisurely pace with eerie yet nostalgic mood music and a new age sensibility speaking to millennial youth with a sense of turn of the century anxiety and human remorse that perhaps we’ve already poisoned our futures. Nevertheless, despite his youthful heartbreak, what Izumi bequeaths to Mao and humanity itself is seemingly the ability to live in the abundant fullness of existence until that existence is done and we return once again to water and the comforting embrace of the Earth.

August in the Water screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)

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“Even if someone kills you, you wouldn’t die,” a drunken husband somewhat sarcastically replies having pledged to come back and haunt his wife if he died and she married a man who didn’t drink. His words take on a prophetic quality given that the heroine of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Ningyo Densetsu) takes on a quasi-supernatural quality as an embodiment of nature’s revenge after someone tries, and fails, to kill her having already killed her husband for witnessing their murder of another man who’d tried to resist their plans of buying up half the town to build a nuclear plant. 

By the mid-1980s, Japan’s economy had fully recovered from post-war privation and was heading into an era of unprecedented prosperity which is to say that the coming of a power plant was not welcomed with the same degree of hope and excitement as it may have been in the 1950s when it was sold not only as a new source of employment for moribund small towns but an engine that would fuel the new post-war society. Several industrial scandals such as the Minamata disease had indeed left those in rural areas fearful of the consequences of entering a faustian pact with big business, which is one reason why the guys from Kinki Electric Power sell it as an amusement park project though even this has the locals wary not just of the disruption it will bring to their lives and potential ruin of their livelihoods which are dependent on the protection of the natural environment but that what is promised simply won’t be delivered. Fisherman Keisuke (Jun Eto) says as much when lamenting a previous aquaculture programme which didn’t pan out and caused lasting damage to marine life. 

In any case, as others say there’s no money in going out to sea anymore and its clear that the old-fashioned, traditional way of life practiced by Keisuke and his newlywed wife Migiwa (Mari Shirato) is no longer sustainable. Migiwa is an abalone diver working without modern equipment but using heavy weights to dive deep enough to reach the shells. As such she’s dependent on her husband to pull her back up to the boat when she tugs the rope. She must put her life entirely in his hands though in truth, he does not seem to take his responsibility all that seriously. The couple bicker relentlessly and not even she really believes him when he says he witnessed a murder which might be understandable given the extent of his drinking. All of which is further evidence against her when she manages to escape from the assassination plot and runs straight to the nearest policeman who thanks her for turning herself in implying he believes she is responsible for Keisuke’s death. 

The possible collusion of the policeman hints as a further sense of distrust in authority which has become far too close to corporate interests. Shady industrialist Miyamoto (Yoshiro Aoki) ropes in both the mayor and the head of the fishing association in his talks with Kinki Electric Power along with Shimogawa from the local tourist board who evidently opposes the plans as he is the man Keisuke witnesses being murdered. As Miyamoto says “sometimes your hands get a little dirty” though he never “directly” involves himself matters such as these. The situation is complicated by an unresolved love triangle between Miyamoto’s spineless son Shohei (Kentaro Shimizu), a sometime photographer, who is resentful of Keisuke and in love with Migiwa complaining that Keisuke always outdrinks him and gets the girl too hinting at his sense of wounded masculinity. Isolated by his class difference, he appears not to approve of his father’s actions but later does little to stop them and eventually sides with corporate interest over his feelings for Migiwa who in any case seems to have become more attached to Keisuke following his death which she vows to avenge. 

There is there is something quite strange in the prophetical quality of Keisuke’s words also predicting the “black sweat” of the Jizo on the beach and the mystical storm which does eventually sweep everything clean destroying the signs for the new nuclear power plant already installed on the beach. In this way, Migiwa becomes a vengeful force of nature taking up arms against those who wilfully ravage and pollute the natural environment while damaging the lives of those who lived on its shores such as herself and Keisuke. She takes revenge not only for the murder of her husband by corrupt capitalists but against that corruption itself even as she laments that “no matter how many I kill, they just keep coming.” “Don’t worry, maybe all this was just a dream,” Keisuke once again prophetically intones though it’s difficult to know if it’s defeating the capitalist order that is a fantasy or the maintenance of the idealised rural life to which Migiwa seemingly finds her way back swimming into an unpolluted sea surrounded by the floating barrels of ama divers and clear blue skies, a creature of nature once again.

Mermaid Legend screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Motion Picture: Choke (映画（窒息）, Gen Nagao, 2023)

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Humans place themselves above animals precisely because of their ability to communicate and work together to create complex plans that allow them to overcome their circumstances. Robbed of our speech, would we still say the same? Gen Nagao’s dialogue-free drama Choke (映画（窒息）, Eiga Chissoku) takes place in a world in which language appears to have disappeared. Humans communicate only through gesture and are therefore prevented from explaining themselves fully, able to rely only on the vagueness of feeling to convey their thoughts and intentions. 

Yet we might not quite grasp this at first, because the heroine (Misa Wada) lives a solitary life in which she rarely needs to talk to anyone anyway. Shot in a crisp black and white, this appears to be some kind of near future, post-apocalyptic world in which even ancient technologies have largely been forgotten. The woman lives in a concrete structure, presumably a disused factory which is dotted with broken machinery that the woman largely ignores as she lives her simple and repetitive life of waking, fetching water, hunting, cooking and eating. We have no reason to think that she is unhappy for besides the occasional sigh, she simply gets on with her daily tasks and then goes to sleep seemingly unafraid of external threats.

But it is indeed male violence that punctures her world when she’s set upon by three men, seemingly an older man and his grown-up sons one of whom holds her still while the middle-aged man rapes her after breaking the magnifying glass she’d bought off a cheerful pedlar enraptured by the wonder of instant fire (well, while the sun shines at least). Her world becomes darker and she finds herself haunted by a shadowy figure that hovers over her as she sleeps. But then, her trap catches a young man (Daiki Hiba) whom she at first seems as if she’s going to kill and eat but later reconsiders and lets him go presumably calculating he poses no threat to her. The young man has a goofy grin and cheerful disposition, returning to bring the woman gifts and follow her around doing odd jobs before the pair develop a relationship and start living as a couple. The young man even devises a system of bamboo pipes to bring water from the brook so the woman won’t need to carry buckets back and forth anymore in a seeming rediscovery of technology born of his desire to make her life easier.

This more nurturing, protective kind of masculinity brings a new a dimension to her life but their harmonious days do not last long before male violence intrudes once again and proves a corrupting influence for the young man who seemingly becomes cruel and vengeful, though not toward the woman even as she begins to reconsider her relationship with him and if this kind of inhumanity is something she can tolerate in the idyll she’d crafted for herself before he arrived. Then again, in trying to deal with it is there something that becomes cruel or violent in herself in that wasn’t that way before even if doing so also makes her sad and leaves her lonely?

Until then she’d found only wonder in the natural world, repurposing the disused, man-made structures of the factory to make music in the rain and more problematically filled with childish glee when something wanders into her trap. But nature holds its dangers too even if there don’t appear to be any predators here besides man in the form of poisonous mushrooms easily mistaken for the edible kind. Even so, it’s violence that finally poisons her world. A senseless kind of violence that doesn’t seem to be about competition for resources, but only an animal lust and craving for dominance. If only they could communicate in a more concrete way perhaps it could be avoided, but then that doesn’t seem to have worked out that way for us who face such threats every day with words often ignored. 

In any case, Nagao finally heads into a more abstract space as the woman seems to react to the abrupt halt of the film’s soundtrack followed by the removal not only of speech but sound from her world as is if she had lost her hearing. Her reality fractures and we can’t be sure she hasn’t just imagined anything that went before or that she has been targeted by some unseen supernatural or spiritual force for her transgressions leading to her exile from a disintegrating paradise. Obscure and haunting, the film nevertheless has a kind of cheerfulness in its innate absurdity captured in the lunking physicality of the actors who move with a cartoonish strangeness and exaggerate their facial expressions in a strenuous attempt to communicate in the absence of words. The message seems to be that in the end we ruin things for ourselves, either through violence or simply doing what we think is right but in the end may really be no different nor any better.

Motion Picture: Choke screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

All Shall Be Well (從今以後, Ray Yeung, 2024)

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There’s nothing that breaks a family apart as quickly as an inheritance. As a cynical lawyer points out, even mothers and sons fall out when it comes to money, so there’s nothing like it to to focus minds with an us and them mentality to clearly define who is and isn’t included under the umbrella of family. But why is it that meaningless pieces of paper hold so much sway over us when we ought to by be governed by the emotional truths that until a moment earlier ruled our lives?

Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) had been fond of saying “because we’re family.” She never doubted her place in that of her partner who all appear, at least outwardly, to love her and accept her relationship with Pat in the way they’d accept any other marriage. But when Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) suddenly passes away in her sleep after one last family celebration the situation changes. Well-meaning family members step in to help with the work that must be done when someone dies, but perhaps unwittingly begin to take over slowly erasing Angie from their lives as not really one of them after all.

Her problems are two-fold. The biggest being that Pat never got round to making a will, nor did she think to put Angie on the deeds to the apartment they shared together or leave her financially provided for seeing as she’d managed all the money they’d made when they owned a factory and ran it together. The secondary problem is that Hong Kong does not recognise same sex marriage and so their relationship was not legally recognised. Had Angie been legally married to Pat, she should have inherited everything anyway because she was her spouse even without a will but with things the way they are she’s at the mercy of Pat’s brother Shing (Tai Bo). She never thought this would be a problem, because they’re family, but slowly realises that perhaps they don’t actually see her that way and with Pat gone no longer feel the need to include her.

Her sister-in-law Mei (Hui So Ying) insists on using a feng shui expert to plan the funeral who quickly puts the kibosh on Angie’s desire to have Pat buried at sea as she’d requested. Leaving aside the possibility that the feng shui master is conning them and receiving financial incentives from the people who run the columbarium, the family quickly begin to ignore Angie’s concerns swayed by the claims that interring her ashes will be more beneficial for her descendants which are Mei and Shing’s children seeing as Angie and Pat had none of their own.

A little disappointed in her kids, Mei at one point insensitively remarks that Angie is lucky not to have any though we’re also told that she almost gave in to parental pressure to marry a man in order to become a mother. Daughter Fanny (Fish Liew) makes lowkey racist remarks about her Indian neighbours as a way of expressing her frustration with her moribund marriage and unsatisfying living arrangements, while son Vincent (Leung Chung Hang) struggled to find employment and now works as an Uber driver thanks to the gift of a car from Angie and Pat which allows him to earn a living. He’s originally upset with his family’s suggestion of kicking Angie out of the apartment, but is also in a difficult position himself when his girlfriend becomes pregnant and they can’t find anywhere habitable to live on the kind of salary an Uber driver can earn. Though in her 60s, Mei is still doing a physically strenuous job as a hotel maid while Shing has taken a position he finds degrading as a nightwatchman at a carpark following the closure of his restaurant some years previously. 

The implication is these socio-economic pressures encourage them the abandon their responsibility to Angie as the beloved aunt they’ve known all their lives. But then there’s also the mild homophobia that rears its head, introducing Angie as Pat’s “best friend” and not allowing her to stand in the front with family at Pat’s funeral as if their relationship wasn’t really real because they were both women. Of course they may have behaved the same way had Pat been a man, squeezing Angie out because she had no legal claim as a common-law spouse, but it certainly seems to make it easier for them to abandon her and take everything she worked so hard to build with Pat as if they were really entitled to it. Shing justifies himself that he has to look after “his” family, which doesn’t include Angie, while cruelly implying that it’s what Pat would have wanted. 

In the end, Angie is left with no other option than to sue for her “rightful” share as a ”dependent” in an effort to force the family to recognise the legitimacy of her relationship with Pat. Thankfully she has another family in her community, though her own still living parents only partially accepted her relationship with Pat again referring to her as a “best friend” and making cracks about how she never married. But her family was Pat, and Pat is gone. Yeung paints a touching picture of grief as Angie reacts all the things she did with Pat but now alone, accompanied only by a sense of absence and comforted by her memories while otherwise exiled from a world that had seemed until then filled with familial love.

All Shall Be Well screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Brave Citizen (용감한 시민, Park Jin-pyo, 2023) [Fantasia 2024]

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There’s an intentional irony in the mantra teacher Si-min (Shin Hae-Sun) is fond of repeating that “If you do nothing, nothing will happen,” in that on the one hand it means that until people decide to act a dissatisfying status quo will continue, but on the other it may also seem threatening implying that if only you keep quiet nothing will happen to you. The main thrust of Park Jin-pyo’s webtoon adaptation Brave Citizen (용감한 시민) does seem to be that abuses of power take place because so few people are willing to challenge them or indeed to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.

That’s something Si-min discovers when a student comes to her and says he’s being harassed by notorious bully Su-kang (Lee Jun-Young). A former boxer/martial artist, Si-min is on a temp contract and evidently waited quite some time to be offered a position so takes it to heart when her boss, Mrs Lee (Cha Chung-Hwa), warns her not make waves and jeopardise her hopes of being hired full-time. Somewhat cynical she tries to talk herself out of standing up for him, talking herself into turning a blind eye to injustice as nothing to do with her but at the end of the day she isn’t someone who can just sit by and take it nor watch as others are harmed while Su-kang goes unchallenged. 

He’s unchallenged largely due to the socio-economic conditions of contemporary Korea in which the wealthy and well-connected are able to live above the law. When one of Su-kang’s victims tries to report him to the police, they are the ones who end up accused of making a false report while Su-kang gets off scot free because he counts judges and prosecutors among his relatives while his mother is a prominent lawyer. His family apparently also donate large amounts of money to the school, which has won a series of “anti-bullying awards,” which is why he can’t be expelled. Si-min’s predecessor took her own life because of Su-kang’s bullying while pretty much everyone is scared stiff of him.

It’s for these reasons that Si-min turns to violence in the hope of giving Su-kan a little “off-site education” and perhaps you can’t blame her when faced with such intransigence from compromised authority. Yet standing up for the students is also a way of learning to stand up for herself, not to succumb to turning a blind eye to injustice simply because it’s more convenient. It’s this wilful suppression of one’s rage towards the persistent injustices of society that ends up spreading them, a continuous chain of abuse in which people take out their frustrations on those unable to defend themselves like the drunk man who yells at Si-min in the street and comes to realise he’s picked on the wrong person. 

Then again, when questioned why he behaves this way Su-kang only answers that “it’s fun”. It’s difficult to believe he would be insecure in his status, yet he persistently mocks those he sees as socially inferior, “nobodies” and ”hobos”, as opposed to elites like himself. The suggestion is that he and his friends have become this way because of a lack of boundaries and a sense of invincibility, which is partly what annoys him so much about an intervention from an authoritarian figure such as Si-min over whom he has no authority because she has decided not to grant it to him. 

This might be what makes her a “brave citizen,” the name of an award granted to ordinary people working in favour of justice that her father had once won after otherwise ruining his life through unwisely guaranteeing a loan and being left on the hook for paying it back. Embracing the absurdity of the webtoon, Park goes big and bold painting the inequalities of the contemporary society in stark relief while injecting a sense of catharsis into Si-min’s attempts to smack some sense into the bullies while rediscovering her own desire to challenge injustice rather than remain complicit with it even if it is personally inconvenient. Her rebellion encourages others to do the same while robbing the bullies of their privileged position and exposing them to the consequences of their actions. Of course, fighting violence with violence may not be the best solution but does at least allow Si-min to make the most of what she has and to recover the self that had been beaten down and defeated but is now capable of fighting back both for herself and others.

Brave Citizen screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Sin (씬, Han Dong-seok, 2023)

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According to the opening title card of Han Dong-seok’s genre-hopping horror, sin is like a lost child that will one day come looking for its parents. The film’s ostensible heroine at times hears voices suggesting that someone or something will eventually come looking her, and later says that she is ready for their arrival, but before that we have to wonder what it is she means and what if anything that is happening is actually real or at least in keeping with our assumptions.

There are many reasons why we begin to feels we can’t trust Si-yeong’s (Kim Yoon-Hye) perspective. Not only is she already somewhat distant and preoccupied on her arrival at a disused university in the mountains but we also later learn that she’s taking a large amount of medication apparently for migraines and PTSD stemming from a barely remembered accident. She also seems less than pleased to encounter former colleague Chae-yoon (Song Yi-Jae) who brings up memories that seem unpleasant to her while there’s a kind of frostiness between them that’s only exacerbated by the fact Si-yeong was not even aware she’d have a co-star in this experimental dance movie directed by a man known for being “unkind” to actors. 

In any case, strange things do indeed begin befalling her from a body dropping right in front of her feet before she enters the building to the eventual murder and suicide of her colleagues who then return as zombie-like creatures. The film cycles rapidly through a series of genres beginning as a slasher with a Suspiria-like sense of eeriness as dancer Si-yeong’s mental state starts to unravel before drifting into the undead, cults, and shamanistic folk horror with the weird symbols dotted around the campus. 

Because things are very wrong on the outside too, Si-yeong even ends up running into a gang of murderous corrupt cops paranoid she’s found their stash of stolen drugs while otherwise pursued by riflemen apparently employed by a vengeful CEO. It’s true enough that we don’t know what’s going on for most of the film, and part of that may be that Si-yeong doesn’t know either because her mental state is unstable. We’re not even really sure if Chae-yoon is real or merely Si-yeong’s projection of her internal conflict, dressed as she is in the same outfit and with the same haircut to the point the two women are often barely distinguishable. Perhaps it’s this unpleasant memory that Si-yeong is trying to avoid, though it’s clear in very general terms that she’s running from something as much as she’s being chased and that her flight may be orchestrated to bring her to a specific location whether physical or spiritual.

What’s chasing her is the apparent “sin” of the title, though everyone might not see it as such or maybe believe their own sins were either justified or will be paid for later. For the purely evil, sin as a concept may not even exist if there’s no prospect of remorse though it’s hard to reconcile the docile, sweet and somewhat etherial Si-yeong with the fragmented memories of a past that may or may not be her own. “Thanks to you, we all became monsters,” she’s later told by someone about to something pretty monstrous but maybe they too were monstrous to begin with, or nobody was, and a well-meaning attempt to exorcise evil from the world has only produced more of it. 

Just when you think you have it all figured out, Han throws in a post-credits sequence pouring more fuel on the fire and hinting at even greater back story in a world ruled by dark and unseen supernatural forces. It doesn’t make sense, but wilfully so and frustrates in a positive way in our desperation to understand something that cannot be understood much as Si-yeong attempts to understand the rapidly disintegrating world around her. The concrete fact does seem to be that one must pay for ones sins, though those who do may not be the ones we’d expect. Gory and incredibly creepy, the film plays with our senses as much as Si-yeong’s, undermines our sense of reality, and finally leaves with the unsettling vision of a pervasive evil lurking in the mirror or the depths or the dark corners of a mind already shrouded in delusion. 

The Sin screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-, Tatsuya Oishi, 2023) [Fantasia 2024]

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A young man walks into an empty subway station already ominously strewn with blood and finds there the corpse of a woman shorn of her limbs. The corpse rises and begs him to have her life by sacrificing his own in allowing her to suck his blood and surprisingly the young man agrees. He does not, however, die but is brought back as something else, not quite human and definitely subservient to the creature he has saved. 

Running 2.5 hours, Tatsuya Oishi’s Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-) is in fact a compilation of three films released in 2016 and a part of the long running Kizumonogatari series which originated with Nisio Isin’s light novels and has gone to spawn an expansive universe of interconnecting spin-offs. This is technically a prequel, and in that sense begins with a black slate but also deliberately drops us into confusion with breakneck pace through the hero’s quest to recover himself and his place in the world after this rude awakening to the supernatural. 

Rude is in many ways a defining characteristic of Kiss-shot, the 500-year old vampire Araragi finds bleeding in the subway station at that point a blonde and alluring figure of forbidden desire. Araragi is drawn to her in an unconscious death wish linked with the sexual desire he struggles to understand, running into the subway minutes after buying a pornographic magazine from a convenience store after striking up a friendship with fellow student Hanekawa. But once he saves her life, Kiss-shot is transformed into a cheeky little girl who now tells him that he is her minion and he must recover her severed limbs from a trio of vampire in order to be restored to humanity even as the power dynamic between them becomes confused and distorted.

In his vampire state, Araragi becomes immortal, powerful and free of mortal jeopardy yet he remains uncertain and insecure while reliant on the support of Hanekawa who encourages him to reject his desire for death and remain alive. But this also presents a problem to Araragi who sees himself as self-sacrificing and is unwilling to accept the what he sees as a self-sacrifice from Hanekawa for whom he feels unworthy and inadequate. In some senses it’s a typically self-centred, adolescent male perspective that rejects any idea of her own agency and assumes Hanekawa performs these actions for him rather than considering that she performs them for herself and is simply doing what she wants to do which in the end is not really about him at all. He declares it a burden he’s too weak to carry, which might in some senses be fair but also again a mischaracterisation that is further evidence of his lack of self-worth.

It’s this sense of inadequacy that lies behind his desire to reclaim his humanity along with the concurrent disgust he feels in the degradations of vampirism. It genuinely comes as a surprise to him that Kiss-shot feeds on human beings and lost her own humanity so long ago that she no longer gives it a second thought. She is after all only being what she is, but like Araragi is drawn to death partly out of frustrated longing and lingering boredom with a relentless yet apparently uneventful 500 years behind her in which the only other highlight was her previous minion who rejected this life much more quickly than she ever expected.

Even so, Oishi lends their mutual dilemma a degree of absurdity in the expectedly comic sight of severed heads littering a sports filed or launching themselves in toothy attacks. Heavily inspired by the French New Wave, he breaks the action with sometimes barely legible title cards often reading a single world while his composition has a kind of jauntiness that is also bleak and melancholy. The world surrounding Araragi veers between the pristine entrance to the high school, and post apocalyptic devastation littered with crows emblematised by the depilated cram school in which Kiss-shot keeps him. Backgrounds often have a photo realistic quality that further sets the world at a kilter when matched with the more conventional character designs of the central players. The conclusion that Araragi is presented with amounts a sharing of the misery which is also akin the burden he didn’t want to carry but also perhaps symbolic of his path towards adulthood in acceptance of compromise and selflessness in being willing to carry a small part of others’ pain and despair and allowing them to carry a part of his own.

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Pierce (刺心切骨, Nelicia Low, 2023)

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What are the limits of unconditional love and is it always a good thing? The hero of Nelica Low’s intense fraternal drama Pierce (刺心切骨, cì xīnqiè gǔ) is desperate to believe that his older brother is innocent of a crime he’s been imprisoned for for the last seven years, but in another sense it seems like the fact itself doesn’t matter to him. What he wants is the emotional intimacy of authenticity which is something he doesn’t seem to get from his steely mother intent on crafting a protective bubble of fantasy that may be as much for herself as her son.

In any case, Ai Ling (Ding Ning) is convinced that Zihan (Tsao Yu-ning) was born bad. She needs no convincing that when he stabbed his opponent with a broken blade during a fencing competition he did so knowingly and it was an act of murder rather than an accident as he claims. Zijie (Liu Hsui-fu), her sensitive younger son, is not so sure and feels that his mother’s total rejection of his brother is unfair. He needs to believe in part that Zihan is innocent because he once saved him from drowning though according to his mother if she had not arrived when she did Zihan would happily have watched him die. Ai Ling also says that she suspected Zihan had harmed Zijie during their childhood, but if this is true then Zijie appears not to remember it or perhaps willingly suppresses his memories of cruelty because it would be too difficult for him to accept that his own brother tried to kill him. 

But objectively speaking, there is something not quite right about Zihan who seems to be a charmer with manipulative tendencies. He was once a three time national fencing champion, and as he says fencing is all about figuring out your opponent’s intentions without letting them see your own. Of course, the way he behaves could equally be because of the way his mother behaves towards him. In some senses he too is a broken blade, apparently craving his mother’s approval and affection and perhaps becoming what she believed him to be out of frustration and resentment. He lies all too easily, crashing a dinner party with Ai Ling’s wealthy suitor Zhuang and his family and leaning into her cover story that he had been away studying medicine in the US while adding a touch of his own in a tearful story of wanting to specialise in radiology having watched his father painfully pass away of cancer. 

Of course, even if he is a raging sociopath, that doesn’t necessarily mean he committed an apparently motiveless murder or that he has no feelings at all for his brother who dotes on and idolises him with almost incestuous intensity. Zihan instantly picks up on the fact his brother is gay and that a boy in the fencing club has a crush on him, offering nothing other than support and reassurance of the kind he’d never get from Ai Ling. When Zhuang tries to set Zijie up with a girl and he declines, he broaches the idea he might not be straight but Ai Ling immediately changes the subject implying that probably she already knows but it’s another thing she’s papered over perhaps afraid that it might damage her relationship with Zhuang who appears to come from a wealthy family though they may not be as conservative as she fears them to be. 

In contract to the intimacy Zijie craves, beginning to confess himself, Ai Ling protects and distances herself from others through deliberate misrepresentation. Zhuang seems at least that he would be more upset about the deceit than that Ai Ling has a son who involved in a high profile, violent crime and also appears not to care that Zijie maybe gay while otherwise attempting to bond with him and be a sincere father figure. His love may in fact be unconditional in a way Ai Ling’s clearly is not whereas Zijie finds himself wavering, confronted by contradictory evidence that suggests his brother may not be so innocent after all. Deciding into a Grand Guignol fantasy in its final stretches, Low fills the screen with an ominous red, the billowing curtains creating an artificial dreamscape of ambiguous reality in which the brothers, each of them, discover at least their own truth and the answers they were seeking which may in its way be all they really needed.

Pierce screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)