Category: Korea

The Roundup: Punishment (범죄도시 4, Heo Myeong-haeng, 2024)

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There’s a moment in the fourth instalment of the Roundup series when monster cop Seok-do’s boss asks him what good his fists are in the age of cyber crime. More so than in previous episodes, Punishment (범죄도시 4, Beomjoedosi 4) seems to lean hard into the idea that Seok-do iMa Dong-seok) is a dinosaur stuck in the 1970s and unable to understand the modern world. He’s a bruiser cop in an era of supposedly compassionate policing, a thug sent to catch a thug. Yet he’s also presented, as is actually said by his superior officer, as everything a good cop should be in his determination to nail the bad guys to keep a promise to a murder victim’s devastated mother.

But as in the previous films, the victim largely gets forgotten until the very end when Seok-do and his colleagues pay a visit to his grave. Set in 2018, the film is apparently inspired by a real life case and in an echo of the kinds of explanatory title cards seen at the end of Chinese films, ends with a reminder that the government began cracking down on cybercrime in that year. Reminiscent of anti-gambling drama No More Bets, the victim here is also a computer programmer effectively enslaved after being lured to the Philippines on a promising job offer only to be forced to work on casino websites by organised crime. Seok-do is mostly concerned with catching the bad guys rather than exposing this nefarious practice or its effects on those who fall victim to its addictive gambling scam. 

In any case, a running joke sees Seok-do once again cast as a dinosaur apparently unable to grasp simple concepts of modern technology. “Right, we’ll go get it before it closes, then,” he replies when informed the villains used “open source software”. He thinks syncing to the cloud means a crowd of people will come help you set up your phone and he never replaces his because it’s a bother to put in all those numbers into your contacts again. The team end up having to recruit a new team member from cybercrime, the only woman in the room which comes in handy when they need her to pose as the girlfriend of familiar comic foil Jang Yi-soo (Park Ji-hwan) who is tricked into thinking he’s been deputised with a shiny badge that looks like it fell out of a serial packet and has the telltale letters FDA at the top which Seok-do convinces him stands for Police Dark Army.

Despite all the thuggery, there’s something essentially childlike about Seok-do’s roguishness that sees him delight in playing a trick on Jang Yi-soo. After wrecking the first class cabin of a soon to depart plane, he walks off sheepishly like naughty little boy ignoring his boss’ frantic calls to come back and explain himself. In this instalment, we get less of the overt references to police brutality with one brief scene of Seok-do putting a motorbike helmet on a suspect and beating him over the head while his colleague keeps watch outside as we peek in through the widow. To remind us he’s still the good neighbourhood cop, we see several scenes of him visiting a restaurant run by the widow of a colleague killed in the line of duty and secretly slip his teenage daughter wads of cash to buy something nice for herself. 

What it all amounts to is a slightly awkward advocation for the police who are directly stated to be always there to protect the citizens and catch criminals who harm them even if they do It abroad. To this extent, Seok-do is a good cop literally smacking some sense into bad guys because it turns out his giant fists can fight “digital” crime after all and there’s no denying that it does feel good to see Ma Dong-seok smack bad guys. The action scenes this time around are visceral and surprisingly bloody not to mention loud with the sound of Ma’s thunderous fists flailing around. The film’s distinctly retro sensibility is echoed in the ‘70s score which seems to hark back to an era of maverick cop movies about men like Seok-do who keep order on the streets while Seok-do himself seems increasingly like a man out of time, a throwback to a bygone era perhaps uncomfortably romanticised in the quasi-authoritarian sensibility which seems to underpin it.

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

Nothingness (無, Kim Gap Sik, 2024)

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What are we without our violent impulses? In Kim Gap Sik’s sci-fi-inflected noir Nothingness (無, 무, Mu), a shady corporation has produced a new drug that inhibits the tendency for violence with those unwilling to take it exiled to the “City of Dreams”. But what does it mean to live with inhibition, and can we really call ourselves free if we are prevented from acting on our baser instincts?

At least, it seems to be slowly eating away at former policeman Young-il (Kim Yeong-taek) who has been placed on suspension and forced to take drug R-3 after dispatching violent serial killer and former childhood friend Jong-ha (Hwang Sung-woo). Young-il is now in a relationship with Jong-ha’s former girlfriend Yeon-jeong (Shim Areum-byul) but lives a depressed and aimless life devoid of purpose or meaning. Dangling the prospect of reinstatement, his former partner informs him that Jong-ha’s DNA has been found at a crime scene hinting that he is alive and has escaped from the City of Dreams to return to Seoul to enact his revenge.

Through his investigations,Young-il comes to discover that Jong-ha is part of a group that apparently intends to cast the world into “nothingness”. Jong-ha claims that he is now someone who has no name, hometown, or nationality and has transgressed the borders of what is considered to be a meaningful life. Young-il meanwhile struggles with himself, gravitating towards suicide while his doctor ignores his complaints. Resentful that he has been unfairly cast out of the police force he obsesses over the idea of reinstatement in part as a bridge to a happier life with Yeon-jeong but also finds himself conflicted.

After all, he’s told Jong-ha wants to “turn the world into nothingness”, but arguably so do those who invented R-3, reducing him to a zombie-like state of numbness and despair out of fear that he may at some point commit an act of violence. The creator of R-3, for whom Yeon-jeong works, explains that the people have traded freedom for security though she is becoming convinced that what he cares about is lining his own pockets indifferent to the side effects of his wonder drug including the suicidal ideation that plagues Young-il. Young-il suggests taking a trip back to their hometown, but Yeon-jeong is against it, certain that everything there has changed. A fugitive from City of Dreams he encounters tells him those like him who refuse to take the drug have lost their hometowns or perhaps never really had one in this harsh and judgemental world from which they have already been exiled for insisting on their freedom over the enforced authoritarianism that revokes their power to resist. 

The man also warns him that his former partner and other officers routinely collect protection money in the area and if he’s reinstated as a policeman he probably he will too robbing him of a position of righteousness in his quest to neutralise serial killer Jong-ha who is now targeting employees of the company that manufactures R-3. Accusing her boss of wanting to turn the world into obedient dogs, Yeon-jeong begins to reconsider her commitment to her work pleased by the “violent” sight of a child stomping in the park and no longer able to go along with the kind of side effects that plague Young-il or the wilful suppression of human nature.

As the threat of a nuclear strike hovers in the background, Kim conjures a sense of existential dread caught between those attaining a zen-like sate of emptiness and those like Young-il unable to escape their own despair. Seemingly inspired by Blade Runner and classic noir cinema, Kim uses voiceover and a jazz synth score to bring out the neo noir themes while often filming in an intense darkness that echoes the murkiness of the world inhabited by Young-il, a lost soul searching for himself in a world of decreasing autonomy. Meanwhile, his mirror image Jong-ha takes on an almost mythical quality as an embodiment of nothingness and destructive nihilism that in itself becomes means of resisting a corrupt society. Making the most of its modest budget, Kim’s elegantly lensed noir presents a bleak vision of a near future world coloured only by despair and emptiness in which there is no freedom or safety and as Young-il is reminded cares little for men like him.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Wild (더 와일드: 야수들의 전쟁, Kim Bong-han, 2023)

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Who’s fault really is it? The hero of Kim Bong-han’s The Wild (더 와일드: 야수들의 전쟁, The Wild: Yasoodeului Jeonjaeng) goes to prison for seven years after the guy he was fighting in an illegal boxing match dies. But later he discovers that his friend and gang boss Do-sik (Oh Dae-Hwan) drugged his opponent first to assist in their match fixing scam, leaving a question mark about who was finally responsible for the young man’s death. It’s this confusing web of causality which damns each of the protagonists each in their own way seeking an impossible escape from the past. 

The first thing that Woo-cheol (Park Sung-Woong) says when he gets out of prison is that he wants to lead a quiet life, refusing Do-sik’s offer to give him a bar in compensation for his long years inside. Yet Woo-cheol is quickly pulled back into the gangster underworld after bonding with a young sex worker, Myung-joo (Seo Ji-Hye), who also happens to be the former girlfriend of the man he killed. This brings him into conflict with corrupt cop Jeong-gon (Joo Suk-Tae) who is working with Do-sik to take out the middle man in their smuggling operation which is largely handled by North Korean defectors. 

There may be something in the positioning of Gaku-su (Oh Dal-Su) and Woo-cheol as outsiders trapped by circumstance, yet the North Koreans otherwise depicted are all worst than the gangsters knowing only violence, recrimination, and rapaciousness. Putting up with them tries Woo-cheol’s patience and puts him at odds with Do-sik while disrupting the power play that has emerged between him and his underling Yoon-jae (Jung Soo-Kyo). Later in the film, another man calls them fools for being so obedient when the facts is that dogs never abandon their owners but are often abandoned by them. With so many concurrent schemes in motion, relationships are generally a weakness and it becomes impossible to know who can be trusted or what side anyone is on. 

That’s a dilemma that strikes right at the heart of Myung-joo who is attracted to Woo-cheol’s manly nobility but also conflicted and later pursued by her late boyfriend’s younger brother who blames her for his brother’s death insisting that he only participated in the fight because he wanted money to move out so they could live together. Then again perhaps it was the mother’s fault for refusing him the money when he asked for it. Everything that happens is really everyone’s and no one’s fault, just a fatalistic motion towards an unstoppable end game. Do-sik prides himself on being able to make his own fate, but even he is carried along by forces outside of his control never quite as much in charge of his destiny as he’d like to think. 

Meanwhile, he takes out his sense of futility on those around him. An intensely homosocial tale about the corrupted brotherhood between a series of men, the film has an unpleasant streak of deeply ingrained misogyny with strong depictions of sexualised violence and rape. Aside from Mrs Han, the feisty boss in charge of the girls who is later punished for her attempt to stand up to the men’s bad behaviour, the women are afforded little agency with Myung-joo reduced to little more than a tool used and manipulated by various plotters while like Woo-cheol longing to live a quiet life. Life him, she is dragged down by her guilt and trauma unable to escape her past. Do-sik, meanwhile, dreams of leaving this small-town world for the bright lights of Seoul but perhaps makes too great a calculation and finds himself outmanoeuvred by unexpected betrayal.

The film’s Korean title dubs the conflict between the men as a war between beasts, while it’s true enough that each of them is embroiled in a fiery hell preemptively looking for revenge before the threat has arisen. Romance and loyalty lead only to death and disappointment. A melancholy Do-sik asks Woo-cheol if they’re still friends and though it’s unclear if the question is genuine, seems to be harbouring a degree of regret in the coldness of his plotting either willing to sacrifice lifelong friendship or sure that those bonds are too secure to be broken. In any case, you cannot outrun fate nor find refuge from its ravages, only attempt to embrace its bitter ironies.

The Wild is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Cat Kiss (고양이 키스, Hwang Soo-bin, 2022)

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A widowed single father’s life is suddenly thrown into disarray when his son’s decision to take in a local stray cat forces him to confront the trauma of his wife’s death in Hwang Soo-bin’s light-hearted drama, Cat Kiss (고양이 키스, Goyangi Kiss). Less a study in the inertia of grief than an empathetic tale of how caring for others can reopen a heart that was closed, the film leans in hard to its cat-themed metaphors of finding comfort and support in expected places. 

In any case, since his illustrator wife passed away Young-hee’s (Oh Dong-min) been unable to venture into her drawing room without having a panic attack. That might be why his son, Jae-in (Shin sua), decides to hide a kitten in there that he claims followed him home from a school trip. Unfortunately, Young-hee is allergic to cats and immediately wants to get rid of it but is convinced not to by Ro-un (Ryu Abel), an energetic and cheerful woman who runs a local repair shop and comes to fix their leaky roof.

Fixing the roof is partly what she carries on doing, bonding with the family and trying to help them move on with their lives through turning the drawing room into a cat room in a kind of compromise with Young-hee’s allergies only it’s as much the emotional connection that he’s allergic to as the feline itself. The same might be said of his odd relationship with his neighbours, a family of three who live across the way that includes a little girl Jae-in sometimes plays with. Finding Young-hee collapsed after a panic attack, the neighbours tell him he can always come knock on their door if he has a problem but he isn’t really ready for that kind of connection yet. 

Young-hee’s grief-stricken inertia is plain from his expressionless face and generally melancholy aura. Even Jae-in remarks that he’s always sad a little moody. Ro-un’s mission is to make the family smile again though she has an uphill battle but equally, Young-hee does not try to deflect her attentions which some might see as overbearing given that she’s more or less forced him to erase the last traces of his late wife from their home, but as if responding to a cat kiss slowly allows her into their lives and hearts as a more positive influence amid their melancholy.

She meanwhile is carrying a heavy burden of her own which goes a little beyond the loss of her cat which closely resembles that rescued by Jae-in. They are all in a sense stray cats looking for someone to take care of them and restore some of what they’ve lost. Even the family across the way which Young-hee had so envied has its sources of tension stemming from the unfulfilled desires of the parents with salaryman dad dreaming of becoming a dancer and the mother looking for more things to do outside the home now her daughter’s a little older. The daughter meanwhile has a hangup of her own in regards to traditional femininity, resentful that people have said Jae-in is prettier than she is despite being boy, and criticising her being “strong”. 

Another strong woman, Ro-un tells her not to be afraid of her physicality though her choice of words somehow backfires. A kind of runaway herself, she too is trapped in a state of inertia by a traumatic past she hasn’t fully dealt with while remaining upbeat and relentlessly cheerful as a kind of coping mechanism for the blows life has dealt her. Focussing on the cat provides them with a roundabout way of communicating and an opportunity for developing a shared intimacy that gently guides them back into the world. 

Despite the melancholia of the situation, Hwang keeps the tone light and adds a little quirky, down to earth humour including small instances of animation echoing Young-hee’s late wife’s occupation as an illustrator. Somewhere between offbeat romcom and grieving drama, the film is a kind of testament to the healing power of cats along with their tendency to find good people to take care of them just as those who become cat butlers slowly begin to open their hearts while generally making the world a slightly less unfriendly place.

Cat Kiss screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

My Favorite Love Story (어쩌면 해피엔딩, Lee Won-hoi, 2023)

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Robots aren’t programmed to love autonomously according to Oliver (Shin Joo-hyup), a helperbot seemingly abandoned by his long lost owner, or as he terms it, friend, James in Lee Won-hoi’s quirky musical romance, My Favourite Love Story (어쩌면 해피엔딩, eojjeomyeon happy ending). It’s an odd thing to say in a way, what does it mean to love “autonomously”? Or perhaps he is simply alluding to the fact that there must obviously be some robots who are programmed for love even if “love” is as good a word as any to describe the way he’s bonded to James that causes him to wait by the window like a wife willing her husband back from the war. 

Oliver rarely leaves the apartment and enjoys conversation only with a handful of potted plants and the postman who delivers vintage copies of Life magazine, jazz records, and repair kits daily. We can see that Oliver’s word is small and frozen in time, though he looks out on a Seoul that seems to him a paradise while we’re told that it’s so polluted people have started evacuating to Jeju Island. It’s because of the pollution that production of helper robots has been stopped along with that of repair kids. There is something quite poignant about the forced ageing Oliver undergoes having been abandoned by a society that valued him only for his usefulness and now prevents him from being able to repair himself as if he were suddenly denied basic medical treatment and regarded always as a lesser being. On the road trip he eventually takes with the more cynical Claire (Kang Hye-in), he encounters signs that reads “no robots” while doing his best to act human despite his obvious awkwardness. 

While Oliver is upbeat and content to wait for James certain that he’ll one day return, Claire is carrying heavier baggage stemming from her treatment by her former owners that convinces her humans are all bad and ready to discard them at any moment. Needing to borrow his charger, she bamboozles her way into Oliver’s life and convinces him to go on a trip to Jeju to look for James and unexpectedly finds herself falling in love along the way. But as Oliver says, love isn’t something that’s in their programming. After all, love causes lots of problems so why would we code it into machines we’ve built solely to serve us?

In any case, the discovery they make is that love is sad and also impossible in the knowledge that will someday inevitably end. Claire’s needs for repairs are more urgent than Oliver’s, while the world around them also seems to be crumbling and not least because of human negligence. They consider simply editing their memories to remove the new discoveries they’ve made about themselves and the world not to mention love in order to return to the state of inertia in which they existed before each just waiting for something while quietly falling apart.

Adapted from a one act fringe musical, the score has a contemporary Broadway feel which perhaps isn’t surprising given that it was written by an American musical theatre composer and sparked for the book writer by a chance encounter with the Damon Albarn song Everybody Robots in Brooklyn. Thematically, it asks whether it’s worth paying the price of love given that every romance has an expiry date even if theoretically a robot to could live forever were it not for humanity destroying the planet and then callously abandoning them. The original title translates as the more apt “maybe happy ending” hinting at the sense of inevitability in the pair’s constant reunions and desire for reconnection though they still seem reluctant to place their faith in love alone even as the world around them continues to improve and the skies above Seoul are clear once again. With its retro aesthetics and cineliteracy, the film ads a degree of timelessness to its quirky tale of robots finding love while attempting to deal with their abandonment issues in a world of human indifference and in fact settles for a different kind of inertia in the cycle of a tentative romance that might one day result in a happy ending.

My Favorite Love Story screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Exhuma (파묘, Jang Jae-hyun, 2024)

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The vengeful ghost of Japanese imperialism rises to take its revenge on its forgetful children in Jang Jae-hyun’s eerie supernatural horror, Exhuma (파묘, Pamyo). As in The Wailing, the supernatural threat is in this case not of Korean origin which causes a problem for otherwise powerful shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun). As a Korean exorcist, she is apparently not best placed to defeat an alien spirit while insisting that Japanese ghosts are more dangerous because they kill indiscriminately and cannot be reasoned with.

This is often true of ghosts in Japanese folklore. Their grudges become all-consuming. Revenge is often taken against society or humanity in general rather than a specific target and can even affect those the ghost once would not have wished to harm. In this case, it appears the supernatural entity in question has retained some of his selfhood while screaming for a hundred years having been sealed away in what one person describes as the worst burial plot in Korea. The ghost’s newborn great grandson won’t stop crying, apparently a family affliction, and so they want to do something about this apparent curse. But that requires digging into the past and unearthing its unpleasantness such as the fact the family’s immense wealth is thanks to the great-grandfather’s questionable politics as a full on militarist committed to the furthering of the Japanese empire. 

Meanwhile, the other ghost that haunts them is that of a giant samurai who was killed at the battle of Sekigahara, which of course means he could also have participated in Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea only eight years previously. The film hints at backstories, never explaining why it is that Hwa-rim speaks fluent Japanese or what it was that happened in Japan except that she apparently found out that Korean shamanism doesn’t work that well on the average Japanese ghost. It all goes back to some kind of mad monk and fox diviner who did some black magic on the peninsula as a whole though it’s not clear exactly what it’s been doing for the last 70 years or so. 

These different kinds of spiritual practice and folklore beliefs jangle together seemingly without border or conflict. The funeral director (Yoo Hae-jin) who works with Hwa-rim and her geomancer friend (Choi Min-sik) is a Christian but apparently has no objection to witnessing shamanic rights nor disbelief in their power as if his twin belief systems simply sat next to each other. Even so, there does seem to be something entirely distinct about Hwa-rim’s practice that is different from Japanese Shintoism despite it its superficial similarities to the extent that her abilities have no effect on a Japanese spirit. 

Then again, this evil is older and deeper than the original ghost apparently wailing for a hundred years about his imprisonment and keen to take down all his descendants in self-destructive revenge. A grave digger spots what seems to be a snake with the head of a person, while no one seems to take the warnings about opening the coffin seriously. Everyone talks about grave robbers, ironically looking for riches among the dead, though the what the team find themselves doing is unearthing the buried past, trying to free themselves from it and perhaps the oppressive yoke of the colonialist legacy.

Jang heightens the sense of anxiety with faced paced, rhythmic editing coupled with scenes of extreme eeriness. He hints at a world beyond our own filled with vengeful spirits and lurking evil while the threats are largely supernatural rather than human even if the ghosts themselves did originate as ordinary people who were also fairly problematic before they died. In some ways, the film might be saying that it doesn’t do any good to go digging up the past but also that if you don’t you may have to live with a slowly festering evil that will visit itself on your children and your children’s children. Still, like the little boy who secretly kept grandma’s false teeth because he wanted something to remember her by, the past can be a difficult thing to let go of and simply re-burying it in a nicer place may not be enough to free yourself from the long buried generational trauma of an almost forgotten past.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team (이장호의 외인구단, Lee Jang-ho, 1986)

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After finding huge success with his debut film, Lee Jang-ho soon became disillusioned with the film industry and was in fact temporarily banned after being found in possession of marijuana. After the assassination of Park Chung-hee in 1979, Lee returned with a new focus on socially conscious filmmaking only to be blindsided by the advent of an entirely new age of oppression following the coup of general Chun Doo-hwan in 1980. In contrast to Park’s regime, Chun’s embarked on a deliberate bread and circuses policy pushing sports, sex, and screen in which social commentary was out and softcore very much in. 

Lee had opened his nonsense film Declaration of an Idiot with a scene of himself committing suicide because no one cares about movies anymore, they only like sports which lends a note of irony to his incredibly strange and very of its time baseball film, Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team (이장호의 외인구단, Lee Chang-houi wingudan). Adapted from a popular sports manhwa, the film is ostensibly a much more commercial affair yet in its way is attempting to subtly attack the growing inequalities of the Chun era as its poor mountain boy hero, Hye-seong (Choi Jae-sung), squares off against posh boy rival Dong-tak (Maeng Sang-hoon) not only for sporting glory but the hand of his innocent first love Um-ji (Lee Bo-hee). 

As Dong-tak joins a top-rated team and is interviewed on television, Hye-seong returns to the mountains to train and is trying to dodge the train fare while travelling with his father to discuss joining a team. He eventually strikes a blow against Dong-tak by striking him out during a perfect game, but ruins his shoulder in the process with his baseball dreams then behind him, which is a problem because he’s devoted his entire life to fulfilling the promise he made to Um-ji when they were children to become a great baseball player. Hye-song repeatedly promises to do anything he can to make Um-ji happy even if it means accepting her relationship with Dong-tak, but Dong-tak openly laughs at him for being a nobody though there is something worryingly intense in his suddenly throwing all his letters from Um-ji, which he had in his bag, on the table describing them as written by a “goddess” and his “sacred place.”

As for Um-ji herself, she seemingly has little control over her life as the daughter of an upperclass family. She began dating Dong-tak before reconnecting with Hye-seong in Seoul and originally sticks to her class-appropriate match before being tempted by her innocent childhood connection and realising Dong-tak is an arrogant arsehole who didn’t show up to her birthday dinner because he forgot and went on a date with another girl. Even so, her family continue to pressure her into marrying Dong-tak despite his manly decision to ignore her until he’s accomplished his mission of achieving 100 consecutive hits at which point he’ll propose. Hye-song ironically makes a similar decision, taking off for a training session on a remote island which ends up lasting a whole year during which his completely insane mentor Coach Byeon-ho (Ahn Sung-ki) denies him permission to write to her. When he returns, Um-ji has ended up married to Dong-tak and is in a depressive state wandering through life in a daze of guilt and disappointment that she betrayed both herself and Hye-seong because of social pressure to conform and is now stuck in this emotionally unsatisfying relationship. Hye-seong rejects her on the grounds that the spark has gone from her eyes and she’s no longer the Um-ji of his youth though also accepting some responsibility for that. At the end of the film, Hye-song loses his sight which allows him to reunite with a changed Um-ji who has separated from the now loser Dong-tak, no longer able to see the change in her remembering only the Um-ji he fell in love with. 

The men who were with him on the island where they underwent bizarre martial-arts style training regimes, were whipped and shackled, and almost killed their one-armed teammate have similar problems returning to situations that are less satisfying than they hoped. A wimpy pitcher despised by his son returns to find him unimpressed, while another discovers his wife had temporarily left him, and an incredibly short man, Kyeong-do, who’d been bothering a bank employee so much she switched branches to avoid him discovers she’s engaged to another man. Kyeong-do refuses to give up, arrogantly telling her that he’ll be replacing her groom on the big day while continuing to behave like a massive creep but actually successful in the end because of his sporting and financial success though it looks more like a case of her giving in than actually falling for him and sends some very mixed messages about a woman’s agency in this still conservative age. 

The players brand themselves losers and outsiders, each of them in some way compromised and locked out of pro-baseball from Kyeong-do’s short stature to Hye-seong’s poverty though the decision to include a mixed race man which may have been intended as a progressive gesture seriously backfires by having a Korean actor perform in blackface while insensitively mimicking racial stereotypes. The coach, Byeong-ho is also an outsider by virtue of walking with a cane and purposefully creates a team of others like himself he can train with his cruel and bizarre methods to take on the Dong-taks of the world. Even so, others brand them “inhuman”, “beasts trained with whips”, and continue to resent their attempt to subvert the contemporary class order. 

On the surface, however, Lee has simply made a baseball film about a group of outsiders who triumph over adversity. He fills it with the spirit of the times, throwing in several sequences accompanied by contemporary pop songs along with an atmosphere of ridiculous excess not to mention inconsequentiality as if he were actively mocking the current direction of Korean cinema despite the occasional moment of artistry such as the gothic scene in which Um-ji realises Hye-seong has returned but the pair are separated by a billowing white curtain. An oddity, but perhaps one that speaks of the oddity of its times. 

Heavy Snow (폭설, Yun Su-ik, 2023)

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“It’s obvious it was a romance, why did you pretend it wasn’t?” one wounded woman asks another while their connection seems to be frustrated by internalised shame and conflicting desires. Yun Su-ik’s frosty drama Heavy Snow (폭설, pokseol) does indeed seem to suggest that their love for each other can only exist in a kind of otherworld, eventually segueing into a metaphysical realm which simultaneously implies that this isn’t actually a romance but self-reflection and interrogation as a tomboyish actress searches for herself inside her various roles.

Indeed, Su-an (Han Hae-in) views Seol (Han So-hee) with a kind of awe which might be understandable given that Seol is a TV drama superstar improbably transferring to her rural arts school for a break from the world of showbiz. Or as Seol would later imply, because she’s become too difficult to manage and is rebelling against the emptiness of her ostensibly glamorous life through increasing acts of reckless self-harm. Su-an might wonder if that’s all her flirtation is, an attempt to flaunt a taboo while otherwise puzzled and jealous as to why someone like Seol would actually be interested in her. 

Yet Su-an’s interest is also in part idolisation, attracted to Seol because she fears she is everything she wants to be but isn’t, beautiful and talented. But Seol seems to doubt she’s either of those things while otherwise superficially confident in her sexuality and drawn to Su-an because of her ordinariness. Experiencing a moment of identity crisis, she’s looking for herself outside the frame yet also perhaps like Su-an caught in moment of self-idolisation. Noticing one of the giant billboards of her face that the litter the city she briefly touches it before walking away as if attracted to an image of herself she recognises and doesn’t. 

Yet it seems it’s less the awkwardness of too much intimacy that causes Su-an to pull away when Seol kisses her than shame. She tells Seol that she thinks it isn’t right, and perhaps goes on to regret that decision while continually pining for an idealised teenage love. The two women in a sense trade places. Years later Su-an is a famous TV actress, having in a way taken over the image of Seol, while Seol is evidently no longer acting but a depressed and defeated figure still resentful of Su-an’s rejection. The effects of their shifting fame deepen the gap between them with the teenage Su-an further nervous in her relationship with Seol knowing the danger that her celebrity presents. There is a suggestion that their creative desires conflict with the romantic, that they feel they cannot embrace their sexuality freely and remain in the entertainment industry because of the intense pressures a conservative society places on prominent people to be shining examples of moral purity. Each of them appear to become worn out by the demands of their fame, Su-an turning to drugs in attempt to mask her depression while the teenage Seol ponders quitting acting to become more her authentic self.

In the dreamlike third act which commences at the sea, a touchstone for each of the women connected to the innocence of their teenage romance, may suggest that in looking for Seol Su-an is really looking for herself or perhaps simply to recapture the person she was at the beginning of everything. At odds with each other, the two women become marooned in a snowbound land with no one else around. Finally repairing their relationship, it seems that they can only embrace their love in this barren place where no one else exists to judge them. The implication maybe that as Seol says the things Su-an wants to say to Seol she really wants to say to herself in a desire for self-acceptance, but equally that we can’t be sure that any of this “real” rather than dream or wishfulment.  In any case all that remains is a painful longing either for an unrealised love or the elusive self. 

Hinting at the pressures of the contemporary society, the unrealistic expectations placed on those in entertainment industry and outward social conservatism the film never less presents its central romance with an evenhanded poignancy even in its continuing impossibility as the two women continue to look for the self in each other but seemingly struggling to see past the hollow images of their own self-projections.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Heavy Snow screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

A Bloodthirsty Killer (殺人魔 / 살인마, Lee Yong-min, 1965)

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Clearly influenced by the classic Japanese ghost cat movie and the work of Nobuo Nakagawa, Lee Yong-min’s nightmarish slice of gothic horror The Bloodthirsty Killer (殺人魔 / 살인마, Salinma) winds a tale of female revenge though somewhat incongrusouly positioning the vengeful spirit’s oblivious husband as the hero who must attempt to save his family by exposing the corruption at its centre. That corruption is intensely and exclusively female but informed mainly by entrenched patriarchy along with growing anxieties amid increasing wealth disparity. 

As in Nakagawa’s The Lady Vampire, a woman makes a surprise reappearance 10 years after being declared dead looking exactly as she had the last time her husband saw her while also featuring in a painting though this time not in the nude but melting as soon as the confused hero, Simok (Lee Ye-chun), picks it up for a closer look. Lee opens with an incredibly gothic, dreamlike sequence in which a creepy man watches Simok walking in the rain before taking him to a gallery that turns out to be entirely empty. A security guard informs him that the exhibition is over, the painting of Aeja (Do Kum-bong) the only one remaining. It also transpires that Simok has made his trip on the one day a year ghosts roam the earth, as the creepy taxi driver points out gesturing towards a field which appears to be full of white-clothed figures. Eventually he arrives at an eerie house in the woods where he meets the main who painted the portrait only to see him murdered by Aeja while the painter survives long enough to hand him the painting and explain that it contains “a secret”.

This secret will relate closely to Simok’s family which on his return home we can see is affluent and apparently happy. Simok lives in a large, Western-style house that is perfectly primed for gothic horror. When he tries to explain to his wife, Hyesuk (Lee Bin-hwa), what he thinks has happened, a cabinet door mysteriously opens on its own before the couple begin hearing the screams of Simok’s mother who claims a ghost tried to strangle her in her room. All things considered, it does not actually take them very long to agree that ghosts are real and they’re being targeted by one though the reason remains obscure to all, or perhaps to all but Hyesuk whose demeanour immediately changes. Despite having gone into a frenzy when her eldest daughter Mihwa was snatched by the ghost, she quickly makes her way to her hidden stash exclaiming that she’s still “young and rich” and plans to enjoy the rest of her life. The ghost can take her kids, but it won’t get her. 

This is of course entirely contrary to contemporary codes of motherhood especially as we realise that one of the causes of Aeja’s downfall was her childlessness. Three years into her marriage with Simok, she had born no children and earned the animosity of her mother-in-law (Jeong Ae-ran) who it seems did not really like her and felt that she did not live up to her traditional ideas of idealised femininity. Perhaps partly for aesthetic reasons seeing as she is a ghost, Aeja dresses exlcuvely in hanbok in contrast to Hyesuk who in flashbacks is seen in only Western clothing and declares herself jealous and resentful not only of the couple’s material comfort but of how happy they seem to be. A kind of poor relation, Hyesuk plots revenge on societal unfairness in wilfully disrupting Simok’s household by manipulating patriarchal social codes in causing Simok to believe Aeja has been having an affair during his lengthy business trips to Japan.

By the same token, she also takes advantage of the grandmother’s affair with a married doctor (Namkoong Won) which is taboo on several levels the first simply being the existence of sexual desire in a middle-aged woman. Later, once she has been possessed by the ghost cat, Simok’s mother will similarly manipulate him in claiming that she has spent all her life in his service clinging to the memory of her dead husband who left her widowed at 30 as an advocation of idealised womanhood. Though Simok has realised that she was no longer his mother but a ghost cat on catching sight of her reflection, he was unable to kill her because of all her reminders about her maternal suffering. It’s the desire to maintain this facade that encourages her to reject Aeja after Hyesuk engineers her walking in on her mother-in-law and the doctor, insisting that Hyesuk, who is pandering to her, would make a much better daughter-in-law than the righteous and wronged Aeja. 

Aeja’s revenge is also against all of these oppressive social codes that have contributed to her demise though it was other women who eventually brought it about in their enforcement and manipulation of the codes of femininity. Recalling a moment from Hajime Sato’s Ghost of the Hunchback in a which a shamaness drops in having spotted all the evil emanating from the house, another woman later turns up and seems to want to help giving Simok a magic talisman he eventually uses to save his kids who have been imprisoned, perhaps for their own safety, inside some Buddhist statues. In contrast to Aeja’s rage, Hyesuk’s greed, and the mother-in-law’s shame, the mysterious woman is gentle and self-assured if a little eerie. Just as a cross can stop a vampire, so a Buddhist rosary can fend off a ghost cat while it’s an appeal to Buddha that eventually helps to break the curse transforming the portrait into a lotus instead. 

In any case, Lee adds a playful irony to the genre as the grandmother in particular begins to take on feline mannerisms, hissing and pawing at the Buddhist statues while licking her granddaughter’s face in a way even her grandson Woong realises is “disgusting” and not something his grandmother was usually accustomed to doing. In a nod to Yotsuya Kaidan, Aeja’s metamorphosis into a vengeful ghost is accompanied by a loss of her hair, symbolising her loss of femininity, along with a large disfigurement over her eye that has become closely associated with that of Oiwa. Then again, he also has fun with a transformation scene as the grandmother is defeated and turns back into a cat complete with a tiny dress that shrinks with her. What he otherwise conjures is however an eerie sense of dread hanging over a superficially happy home with a terrifying secret at its centre, though what it does in the end suggest with its ambiguous messaging is that the father will eventually have to take responsibility for his family and play an active role in the domestic space if he is to escape this very particular curse of familial corruption.

The 8th Night (제8일의 밤, Kim Tae-hyoung, 2021)

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“But even the most trivial moments of our predetermined fate are meaningful as pieces of the whole” according to embittered former monk Jin-su having reached a moment of philosophical epiphany after bringing his karmic retribution full circle. Another in the recent series of Buddhist supernatural thrillers from Korea, Kim Tae-hyoung’s The 8th Night (제8일의 밤, Je8ileui Bam) once again turns apocalyptic as an ancient evil is set for accidental revival thanks, largely, to the wounded pride of a bitter old man. 

As the opening voice over explains, thousands of years ago the world was threatened by a powerful demon. Luckily, Buddha managed to vanquish him, tearing out his two eyes, one black one red, and burying them on opposite sides of the Earth in order to prevent them ever being reunited. Some people, however, just can’t resist chaos which is presumably why Professor Kim (Park Hae-joon) insists on retrieving the canister containing the Red Eye from its desert resting place, thereafter releasing its power when his discovery is rejected by both Buddhist and scholarly authorities. Sensing a disturbance in the equilibrium of the world along with the upcoming Blood Moon, priest Hajeong (Lee Eol) realises the prophecy of which he has been a guardian is about to come true. His big, somewhat unethical plan, is to kill off one of the seven pre-ordained victims of the Red Eye which he plans to possess in order to reunite with its partner in and stop it body hopping towards the apocalypse. 

You can make a case for greater good, but murdering an innocent person to put an end to a curse seems at best unfair, not to mention not very Buddhist. Hajeong sends young monk Cheong-Seok (Nam Da-reum) to track down his former pupil, Jin-su (Lee Sung-min) then known as Seonhwa to give him the instruction to assassinate the “Virgin Shaman” with a holy axe to stop Red Eye in its tracks. Jin-su is seemingly unconflicted about the murder but is carrying his own baggage, now living as a resentful construction worker. As it turns out, he and Cheong-seok are also linked by a karmic circle of guilt and trauma that the boy doesn’t remember and Jin-su has been running away from since leaving the temple. Meanwhile, he is also plagued by voices of departed spirits he for some reason refuses to help cross over to the other side. 

Meanwhile, over on the side of the rational, two policemen mirror the monks’ movements as they investigate the strange paper chain of mummified corpses turning up all over the city. Veteran cop Ho-tae (Park Hae-joon) feels responsible for his feckless associate Dong-jin, blaming himself for an accident which has left him physically impaired while resisting instructions from his boss to fire him. Yet the pair are entirely ill equipped to investigate this case of spiritual malevolence, confused by its religious connotations but perhaps filled with suspicion on realising that all of the victims belong to the same “meditation group” for people with suicidal thoughts which has been offering “free” blood tests and apparently paying for attendance. Described by one as more like a cult, the shady meditation group might be one kind of evil but what they’re currently facing is on an entirely different level. 

The irony is that it’s Jin-su who must learn to save the world by finding closure with his own traumatic past, generating a paternal bond with young monk Cheong-seok who is so excited by the world beyond the temple that he accidentally breaks his vow of silence and then can’t stop talking. Cheong-seok’s sense of wonder and confusion, unsure what to do about the meat he keeps finding in his food but also slightly bemused by Jin-su’s willingness to eat it for him, stands in direct contrast to Jin-su’s embittered cynicism as he attempts to resist his destiny only to receive a ghostly reminder that you can’t escape your fate and, in any case, his duty would simply fall on the successor, Cheong-seok. In order to save the world, he has to free not only himself but also Cheong-seok too from the cycle of karmic retribution which binds each of them in the “agony and anxiety” of the monster’s separated eyes, determining to set them to rest once again to restore a sense of balance in a destabilising world. A buddhist procedural, Kim’s supernatural horror may rediscover that hell is a place on Earth but eventually allows its heroes the possibility of escape if only in the willingness to free themselves from the shackles of the traumatic past. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)