Category: Korea

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)

Pilot (파일럿, Kim Han-gyul, 2024)

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“You can’t say things like that anymore,” the men of Pilot (파일럿) are fond of chuckling but still they think them and on a baseline level are unable to understand what’s wrong with what they see as merely offering a compliment. Adapted from the 2012 Swedish film Cockpit, Kim Han-gyul’s non-romcom takes its cues from films like Tootsie and Mrs Doubtfire to explore the inherent sexism and misogyny at the heart of contemporary Korean society if perhaps problematically doing so through the means of a male redemption story.

In any case, Han Jung-woo (Jo Jung-suk) is mindless more than anything else later claiming that sometimes it’s better “to say yes and go with the flow” than risk creating unpleasantness. Seemingly excelling at everything, he graduated top his class at the Korean Air Force Academy and was fought over by several large airlines becoming a minor celebrity and apparent pilot influencer. But behind the scenes, he’s somewhat false and self-involved as evidenced by his attempt to show off a video of himself tearfully paying tribute to his mother for raising him and his sister alone but refusing to answer a telephone call from her at the same time. His celebrity fame comes back to bite him when a video of team dinner in which he rejected his boss’ comment about the new intake of stewardesses not being pretty enough by referring to them as a beautiful bouquet is leaked online. The clip goes viral with his boss getting the brunt of the abuse and while he is not visible many are able to identify him by his voice. The airline soon goes bust and unsurprisingly no one else is willing to hire him. 

The issue is that neither his boss nor Jung-woo understand what was wrong with what they said. They just parrot back that what they said was nice so they can’t see the problem with it but fail to understand that their comments are demeaning because they belittle women’s talents and reduce them to objects for male appreciation. Hyun-seok (Shin Seung-ho), who attended the Air Force Academy with Jung-woo, gets him an interview at his airline but it’s run by a female CEO (Seo Jae-hee) who happens to be the sister of his old boss and is apparently on a mission to make her company more egalitarian by having at least 50% female pilots so she’s only hiring women. Nevertheless, she also asks sexist questions at the interview looking closely at a female candidate’s age and asking her if she is married or in a relationship, whether she intends to have children and when. The female candidate fires back a pre-prepared speech that she’s uninterested in marriage and is not planning to have her eggs frozen or anything like that so she can devote herself fully to the job. 

Hyun-seok expresses sympathy, echoing Jung-woo’s earlier comment that all that matters in flying is skill and people should be hired for their merits not their gender. But it’s impossible not to read into his words that he thinks women are inherently not as capable as men and wouldn’t be getting the job at all if it weren’t for this affirmative action, which is to say it’s all about gender after all and only men are suited to the job. He says as much later on when the plane he’s piloting runs into trouble while he’s unwittingly co-piloted by Jung-woo in his female persona Jung-mi, having posed as a woman in order to pass the interview. “Men should step up during times of emergency, not women,” he screams while losing the plot as the plane plunges and refusing to hand over the controls to his female co-pilot until Jung-woo takes them by force. 

Despite being slightly younger and believing himself to be a modern man, Hyun-seok is still incredibly sexist and openly flirts with Jung-mi to the point of sexual harassment even while she bluntly tells him that she isn’t interested. Jung-woo had been flattered and overjoyed the first time someone called him “miss” on the street and alluded to his unconventional, broad-shouldered beauty but quickly discovers that that gets old and becomes aware of how “annoying” or even scary some men can be in their entitled treatment of women, and by extension the various ways in which his own treatment of women may not have been appropriate. Becoming Jung-mi allows him to become himself, rediscovering his love of flying no longer so hung up on the external validation of internet fame and more interested in and considerate of those around him in the absence of the kind of toxic masculinity that infects men like Hyun-seok.

Though his wife divorces him when he loses his job if more because of his persistent emotional neglect than disappointment or financial worry, he becomes more aware of and sympathetic towards his son who, just as he had says yes and goes with the flow by saying a toy aeroplane was fine despite having been engrossed in the Barbie aisle seconds before but presumably afraid of disappointing his father if he told him he’d rather have a doll instead. Nevertheless, the film strangely refuses to engage with ideas of gender and sexuality and becoming Jung-mi does not really unlock Jung-woo’s femininity even if it evidently makes him a better and more considerate person, while his sometime love interest Seul-gi (Lee Ju-myoung) is more or less queer coded and her attempts to stand up for herself as a woman and an equal are not always well respected by the film. Even so the betrayal of CEO Noh who is revealed to be a ruthless businesswomen perfectly willing to exploit other women and throw them under the bus if necessary highlights the ways in which entrenched patriarchy pits women against each other. 

Thus the underlying misogyny of the present society is fully exposed, if ironically by a man experiencing what it is really like to live as a woman which is to be ignored and disrespected, judged by appealingness to men and obedient temperament while skills go undervalued or worse are viewed as a threat to often fragile masculinity. Though the film largely avoids making Jung-woo’s cross-dressing a joke in itself, it does find humour in the absurdity of the demands of performative femininity in a rigid and conformist society in which a woman is rarely permitted to sit in the cockpit of her own life.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese & English subtitles)

Between the Knees (무릎과 무릎 사이, Lee Jang-ho, 1984)

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“We are all suffering from this Westernised lifestyle and way of thinking. They are not really meant for us,” according to a sympathetic doctor, played by the director himself, at the end of Lee Jang-ho’s erotic melodrama, Between the Knees (무릎과 무릎 사이, Muleupgwa muleupsai). The heroine does indeed find herself trapped between the Korea of the past and the modern society, but the film often seems confused in its central messages in its own use of the woman’s body as metaphor for that of the nation despoiled by foreign influence. 

This is most obviously the implication of Ja-young’s (Lee Bo-hee) flashbacks in which she is quite clearly molested by her flute teacher who is a bearded white man. When her mother walks in on the abuse, she blames Ja-young beating her and shouting what we would assume to be unpleasant words branding her as a seductress though she is a clearly a child. As is later explained, Ja-young’s mother is carrying her own baggage in that her own mother was the mistress of a married man and fearful of the same fate befalling her daughter, she has brought her up with problematic notions of bodily purity that have caused Ja-young to develop a complex surrounding her sexuality in which she is unable to process her desires as a young woman. 

She later says that through her “immoral behaviour and desire to sin” she has found “freedom” as if sexuality was her way of rebelling not only against her mother’s tyranny but social conservatism in general. However, she also characterises it as the extreme opposite, blaming her mother in insisting that her treatment of her has left her with no control at all over her sexuality. In the film’s problematic framing, she essentially allows herself to be raped by a series of men partly as an act of self-harm, partly as rebellion, and partly because she has no other way of permitting herself to satisfy her sexual desires. This is of course dangerous, portraying a woman who says no as one who is really saying yes but resisting out of shame, but there is also a completely paradoxical criticism of Korean men all of whom are rapists except for Ja-young’s sort of boyfriend Jo-bin (Ahn Sung-ki) who is so obsessed with traditional Korean culture that he has earned the nickname “antique”.

Jo-bin lives in a Korean-style home and spends his time playing the flute, training in traditional martial arts, and watching pansori in comparison to the pursuits of other young people such as Ja-young’s brother Ji-cheol who mimics Michael Jackson and spends all his time in discos. Towards the beginning of the film is seems that Ja-young will be torn between Jo-bin to whom she originally says “if you’re so old-fashioned I may have to run away with you” and an incredibly unpleasant fellow student who refuses to take no for an answer and in fact eventually rapes her during an expressionist rainstorm that violently awakens her sexuality. The battle then really becomes whether or not Ja-young will be able to accept it, despite the realisation that she is “no longer the kind of virtuous bride that Korean men expect.”

This hints at the pernicious double standard of the contemporary society in which men largely behave like animals, treating women like trophies to be conquered and then discarded while insisting on a “pure woman” for a wife. The discord in Ja-young’s home stems from patriarchal failure, not only that of the man that made her grandmother a mistress and not a wife, but her father’s in having fathered a child with a 17-year-old Korean War orphan he took into his home. Resentment over his betrayal has further embittered Ja-young’s mother and caused her to double down on her sexual conservatism while fiercely resenting her husband’s other daughter. Yet in the film’s final stretches, a degree of female solidarity arises between the women that largely excludes the father with Ja-young’s mother accepting Bo-young as another daughter and inviting her to live in their home now her still young mother has remarried. 

Violent male sexuality also rears its head in a subplot in which a mute man who had developed feelings for Bo-young’s mother while they were being raised in the same orphanage attacks Ja-young’s father for ruining her life, as he undoubtedly did even if he tried to take at least some responsibility for his transgression. Bo-young later says that her mother hated the mute man and did not want to be in a relationship with him anyway, though he too it seems could not take no for an answer. In any case, it is only the traditionalist, Jo-bin, who is willing to accept Ja-young for who she is. He knows all of her ordeal and does not reject her for her sexually active past, rather scoffing when she had described sex as being a sin with the perhaps mistaken implication that such things were not regarded as taboo in the Korea of the past even as, paradoxically, it appears that Jo-bin is drawn to Ja-young’s old-fashioned modernity in rejecting his mother’s constant attempts to set him up with an arranged marriage. 

Of course, all of this is also very much informed by the climate of contemporary Korean cinema which had descended into an era of softcore pornography deliberately supported by the Chun regime as part of a bread and circuses social policy designed to distract the people from their democratic desires. Lee opens with sexually charged closeup of Ja-young’s lips on her flute, a phallic symbol also present in Ja-young’s forbidden fantasises as she idly fondles it after hearing heavy breathing on the telephone and experiences another moment of sexual crisis. Perhaps that’s paradoxical itself in that it’s learning to play this Western instrument that has led to her corruption in an allegory for a nation’s pollution by Western culture. In any case, Lee seems to imply that sexuality can be an act of resistance towards oppressive social codes but is otherwise unsure if that represents liberation or merely another form of oppressing one’s self.

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)

Alienoid: Return to the Future (외계+인 2부, Choi Dong-hoon, 2024)

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Choi Dong-hoon’s hugely entertaining sci-fi-inflected fantasy adventure Alienoid ended with a classic cliffhanger promising resolution only in an as then unscheduled sequel. Part two arrives almost two years later and thankfully opens with a brief recap before delving straight into the ongoing drama as the older Ean pursues the Divine Blade that will allow her to stop humanity from being wiped out in a toxic gas attack by fugitive aliens.

Thus the majority of the first half takes place in the 14th century past as various parties vie over the blade in the manner of a wuxia serial. Ean is also on a quest to recover Thunder and get back to the crashed spaceship in order to get back to the future and stop the world being destroyed. But in some ways, she’s also now an orphan of time. She’s spent half her life back in the feudal era and will return to 2022 ten years older than she should be. Reuniting with Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol), she finally figures out his identity and is more well disposed towards him, but also decides it would be better for them to head in different directions given the possibility that Muruk is a possible host for the missing Controller, the leader of a resistance movement among the alien criminals who have been imprisoned in the minds of humanity. 

Once again, the key to salvation lies in the past as we discover that Gae-lin (Lee Hanee) is a descendent of a blind swordsman who left very specific instructions for what to do during the alien attack. Ultimately, the aliens can only be defeated by a perfect integration of past and present as the Joseon team end up in 2002 complete with their magical weapons to fight a decidedly scientific threat. Though it’s true enough that the lines between science and magic are often thin and defined by a perspective on knowledge, it’s clear that Joseon magic continues to work in our world as the two bumbling shamans fight back with minor and pipe and Muruk pulls an incredibly heavy sword out his fan. 

Ean tells him that no matter if he may have a monster inside, Muruk is still Muruk guiding him on his journey towards an acceptance of himself as someone useful with genuine talent rather than just a hack. Choi throws in a series of twists and turns over who may be hosting the Controller at any given moment along with the true identities of several others as Ean attempts to handle her own baggage while tracking down Thunder and attempting to restore his energy levels so they can get back to the future and save the world. In order to defeat the aliens, they must all be united, past and future, coming together to defeat an alien threat.

Yet like the first film, we can see that this moment is both ending and beginning. Following a surprisingly poignant closing sequence the possibility of a new opportunity to set the past to rights is raised if on a more personal level that would allow orphans Ean and Muruk to unite in new time thereby closing a circle which otherwise remains open. In any case, the looping, elliptical quality of the cycling narrative eventually becomes clear and we understand where each of these disparate heroes belongs in the grand plan apparently orchestrated by Thunder and the now absent Guard. That’s not to say the rich lore underpinning the intricate world building is completely exposed and there is a sense that there are many other stories to be told in this madcap universe of scientists and magicians in the high tech present and feudal past.

In any case, Choi ups the ante with large scale sequences including a train chase that culminates in a derailment, while in the Joseon era the heroes leap from rooftop to rooftop and run through idyllic forests while pursued by mystical forces. Every bit as charming as the first instalment, the film builds on the existing relationships between its vast list of characters and generates a sense of warmth and familiarity that also has its melancholy as er really these two worlds cannot remain bridged forever but must eventually separate whether the alien threat prevails or not.

Alienoid: Return to the Future is out now on DVD & blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

House of Sayuri (サユリ, Koji Shiraishi, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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An excited family discover the perils of buying a “used” home in Koji Shiraishi anarchic haunted house horror House of Sayuri (サユリ, Sayuri). Unlike many other nations, Japan does not really have a comparable housing market as, given changing building regulations etc, it’s common to demolish the original structure and build a bespoke home in its place rather than move into one someone else has vacated. That obviously means that opting for an existing property can be a little bit cheaper, which is presumably how the Kakimis have finally managed to move into what they describe as the dream home, escaping a cramped city apartment for a spacious rural mansion with room enough for grandma and grandpa too.

Of course, this particular home is probably cheaper because something untoward once happened there, though the Kamikis probably don’t know that, and everyone who’s lived there since has moved out a short time later. In a way referencing Shiraishi’s previous work, we can’t really tell whether the malevolent spirit wants the family out or is merely trapped in a loop of revenge on the family that badly betrayed them. In any case, it makes its way through the Kamiki family unit starting with daughter Keiko and causing all manner of strange events in the house. Sensibly, older son Norio begins to ask why they don’t just move but the parents are so committed to their dream of homeownership that they can’t bear the thought and remain determined to hang on to it at whatever cost. 

In any case, some wise words from grandma advance a more positive way of battling the ghost, that they should fight it with the force of their lives. They laugh in its face and shout vulgar phrases that send it scuttling away in outrage. The best way to fight the darkness, grandma says, is to live well. Like the house itself, it seems grandma has a well hidden secret that makes her the film’s key asset, a hilarious force of nature and eternal wise woman otherwise ignored because her dementia undermines her credibility. Meanwhile, Norio makes an unexpected friend at school who just happens to be a psychic and is keen to warn that a little girl ghost has latched on to him and it would obviously be better if he could just move out on account of all the evil emanations that appear to be coming from his home.

But as grandma says, it’s the grudges of the living they ought to be afraid of. The house of course holds its secrets and its labyrinthine, multilevel structure is perfect for concealing them. Unfortunately the Kamikis have bought into this poisoned legacy and slowly start seeing their familial bonds fracturing while the ghost takes advantage of their vulnerabilities, their negative emotions and insecurities. In a sense it becomes a question of whether they can endure a place of trauma to maintain their dreams of homeownership or are prepared to make the more sensible decision of ceding ground and moving somewhere less toxic while Norio tries to reclaim his place in his family and protect what remains of it. 

Truly heading in some unexpected directions particularly in its unpredictable send half, the film takes on an absurdist quality but also returns to classic genre tropes of the legacy of child abuse and the betrayal of a parent who saw and did nothing perhaps because, like the Kamikis, they were prepared to accept this this kind of toxicity to maintain a happy family home and be seen as a model upper-middle class family living in a country mansion. It turns out, the only way to exorcise this much more literal ghost is by directly confronting the traumatic past and attempting to find accommodation with it be that through violence or forgiveness. But as grandma had said, the best weapon is love and life, throwing back at the ghost what it no longer has in a defiant expression of being alive and that joy contains which is also of course as grandpa had said a way of honouring the dead resolving to make the most of one’s remaining time in their memory. In any case, Norio discovers that you do not have to continue living in a haunted house but unlike a ghost are in fact free to leave the scene of trauma and seek new happiness in a less upsetting place.

House of Sayuri screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

FAQ (막걸리가 알려줄거야, Kim Da-min 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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The sad thing is that Dong-chun, the heroine of Kim Da-min’s charming if also searingly bleak exploration of a Korean education FAQ (막걸리가 알려줄거야), is full of questions the adults around her don’t want to answer. To be charitable, it could be because they want her to have the ability to solve problems on her own, but less so because in the adult world there really is only one correct answer and finding solutions that are entirely your own can make others uncomfortable. 

This is something Dong-chun starts to realise, remarking that she now understands why adults don’t like it when you ask questions when her two imaginary friends ask her how she’s going to explain that she got the winning lottery numbers from a bottle of makgeolli that communicates with her through morse code but in Persian. Even Dong-chun knows, she probably shouldn’t mention that part out loud but there’s something quite poignant about the fact that the makgeolli is her only real friend. Her tendency to ask questions, which is difficult for her because of he shyness, has already seen her labelled as weird as by several of her classmates including the obnoxious Na-young who pretends to get along with her because their mothers are friends but is really much more of a model child try hard already obsessed with being on the right track and getting in the best lane for the university application she won’t be writing for another decade.

That’s something else that’s difficult and inexplicable. The education system keeps changing so you can’t even try to game it because they constantly move the goalposts. The reason why the mothers enrol the girls in Persian classes is because they think top universities will be making special offers to people who speak Persian when they come to apply, but also they might not. Concerned that she’ll be disadvantaged by her short stature, Dong-chun’s mother Hae-jin starts injecting her with a growth serum and advises she go to bed earlier, but the girl points out that she needs to stay up to 11pm to finish all her homework. She has cram school and activities nearly every day including an art class that doesn’t even start until 9pm. No one seems to be asking what effects persistent sleep deprivation may have on her later life and mental health besides impacting her height. 

In short, it’s not surprising if her mind’s begun to crack under the constant pressure of being forced to conform to a very rigid sense of social success which begins in early childhood and largely disregards everything that makes Dong-chun interesting from her insatiable curiosity to her empathetic nature and bashful friendliness. We can also get a glimpse ahead by looking at the life of her mother, Hae-jin, who reveals that she suffers from depression in part because she won a full scholarship to a good university and had a high paying corporate job she was pressured to give up to become a housewife and mother. A therapist perhaps problematically told her that she had the wrong attitude because she was now doing the most important thing in the world by raising a child which is why she begins pinning all her vicarious hopes on Dong-chun as a vessel for her own success as a mother in submitting herself to the nation’s relentlessly patriarchal social codes. 

Dong-chun’s parents aren’t bad people, they love her and are actively supportive. They aren’t angry when she experiences stage fright at a speech competition and later tell her she can sit the next one out if she feels uncomfortable (genuinely, not out of a desire to avoid their own embarrassment). But they’re so focussed on her future they’re missing her present, which is why it takes Hae-jin so long to realise she’s fermenting makgeolli in her room. Later she reflects that perhaps they should move to another country, one where Dong-chun would be free to be herself but it may already be too late. In any case, we can see Hae-jin’s contempt for those who choose to live outside of Korea’s rigid ideas of social success in her reaction on finally finding her long lost brother who graduated from Seoul University and had a big corporate job but dropped out to be hippy living off grid. He doesn’t know it and neither does she, but he ends up forming an unexpected connection with his neice Dong-chun being one of the few people who actually listens to her. 

When it finally speaks, the makgeolli has the voice of her science teacher who was the only person who did actually answer one of her questions if only to explain that know one knows yet but he’ll be sure to pass on the information when they do. In a way, getting this cosmic message and focussing how to solve this great mystery at the centre of her life help Dong-chun find her direction even if it’s leading towards “fermentation” in the great black hole of adulthood. The ambiguity of the ending restores a kind of darkness to Kim’s quirky tale but in any case allows Dong-chun to escape through the imagination and free herself from the constraints of a rigid society in which asking questions, let alone answering them, is very much not the done thing. 

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

International trailer (English subtitles)

Christmas in August (8월의 크리스마스, Hur Jin-ho, 1998)

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The cruel ironies of life are visited on a lovelorn photographer nearing the end of his days in Hur Jin-ho’s understated melodrama, Christmas in August (8월의 크리스마스, Palwolui Christmas). Christmas in August was Hur’s debut feature though he’d become primarily known for similar material in coming decades even if the romance was rarely as subtle and achingly poignant as in his first film. In some ways about life’s unfinished business, the impossibilities of communication, and coming to terms with impending death Hur allows his melancholy leads to discover a kind of serenity even in the depths of their yearning.

We never really find out the nature of Jung-woo’s (Han Suk-kyu) illness, only that it does not ostensibly interfere with his ability to live a normal life, though unfortunately terminal. After learning that he has only a short time to live, he simply goes home and washes the dishes, continuing with the mundanities of his life as if determined to get on with it. When someone asks him about his health, he tells them that he’s fine or that it’s not really serious, drunkenly letting slip to a friend that he will die soon but making it sound like a joke. Aside from a single moment of drunken railing against his fate, he accepts it with dignity and continues living quietly much as he always has while making preparations for after he’s gone, painstakingly writing down instructions for his father on how to use the TV remote and use the more modern printing facilities in his photography studio. 

There is perhaps a certain irony in the fact that he’s a photographer which is after all about trapping a memory or a point in time and preserving it for an eternity. He himself cannot move on, apparently hung up on his first love who married another man only to return later seemingly unhappy and regretful though she only asks him to remove the photo of her from the display in front of his store as if the memory of her youthful self is too painful to bear. And then, a young traffic warden wanders in looking for an urgent enlargement. For Da-rim (Shim Eun-ha), despite her youth, everything seems to be last minute, making several visits to the shop with an order that must be completed as soon as possible before visiting with no order at all. 

The relationship that arises between them is diffident and tender. It is also largely unspoken, Da-rim simply remarking on having a friend that can get them free tickets to an amusement park without exactly asking Jung-woo if he would like to accompany her. From his side, Jung-woo is passive, happy to be in her presence but also wary in knowing there is no possible future for them. He obviously cannot tell her that he’s ill or this brief respite from the futility of his life would disappear while she takes his diffidence as a lack of interest. It’s a love story that never quite gets started but is deeply felt all the same even its chasteness. 

Then again, perhaps words are unnecessary in situations such as this, a single photograph explanation enough on its own. In essence a gentle character study of a dying man’s learning to part with life as mediated through his yearning for a young woman though knowing that his love cannot be fulfilled, Hur presents death as something warm to be accepted rather than feared. Jung-woo takes a final photo with his friends whose eyes are all moist with tears as they pull him to the centre though he, like always, meant to stand on the end. He simply continues living, doing the dishes, retouching photographs, drinking with friends or else quietly crying himself to sleep. 

Though employing many of the tropes of romantic melodrama, Hur aims for subtlety and the eternal heartbreak of life’s unfairness that what we most desire arrives as soon as we can no longer have it. Even so, Jung-woo accepts his fate with good grace and treasures the memory of an unexpected love even as it slips away from him, storing it safely inside a photograph and a letter he may not actually intend to send. “Thank you and goodbye,” he signs off, which might be as a good a declaration of love as any other.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Tenants (세입자, Yoon Eun-Kyung, 2023)

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“Think carefully. Think about why you can’t leave here, and what keeps you from leaving,” runs the opening and closing dialogue of Yoon Eun-gyeong’s elegantly lensed monochromatic dystopian drama The Tenants (세입자, Seibja) in which the citizens appear to be trapped in an abusive relationship with a toxic city that offers what it claims are attempts to help the struggling get back on their feet but which are really constraints to prevent them from leaving. 

At least that’s what Shin-dong (Kim Dae-gun), a hard-working if apparently average officer worker, discovers when his landlord, who appears to be a child who has taken over this role from his still living mother, informs him that he wants to remodel the building to attract higher quality tenants and effectively bamboozles him into the idea of moving. Only, in this near future society, moving isn’t an easy thing to do and Shin-dong is struggling to pay his rent already for an apartment he barely occupies considering all the unpaid overtime he does just to show willing in the hope of career advancement. His friend in a similar position informs him of a loophole, that ironically enough as other kinds of tenants have rights, if he sublets part of his apartment his landlord won’t be able to kick him out.

Only the pair of lodgers he acquires are strange in the extreme. A very tall man in an alpine hat with two feathers that looks like bunny ears arrives with a decidedly childlike wife who appears not to speak much Korean and just smiles creepily while standing behind him. To make matters stranger they insist on living in the bathroom, because the wife has bowel issues, which also means Shin-dong has to start using communal facilities which turn out to be much busier than expected with similarly troubled office workers. Meanwhile, he starts to feel like someone is watching him and wakes to find one of the pair staring at him in his sleep.

Understandably, he regrets the arrangement but ironically he’s now in place of a landlord himself and feels awkward about asking the couple to leave while forced to acknowledge that they also have rights as tenants which include those to sublet the part of Shin-dong’s apartment he sublet to them. In this way, his space is literally shrinking but it’s also as if the city is further encroaching on his life. He explains that he’s a solitary person and much prefers to live alone but is prevented from doing so by the socio-economic conditions which surround him. His colleague calls him a hardworking loser who just makes trouble for everyone else with his constant overtime while he has invested in making closer ties with the boss in the hope of getting a promotion that way. 

But it appears the only way out of this toxic city which is literally choking Shin-dong with its low quality air is to get a transfer to the new utopia of Sphere 2, an idyllic future settlement with a purified air system advertised in both Korean and Chinese on his morning commute. The fact that Shin-dong works for a friendly corporate entity titled “Happy Meat” which apparently manufacturers ethical, cultivated meat products adds to the sense of unreality in which everything is somehow fake or a little less than you might have been expecting while things are that marketed as positive attempts at kindness are also in themselves a little bit toxic as Shin-dong works himself harder than the most earnest donkey and gets nothing back in return save the ability to think of himself as someone with the status of “officer worker” which at least confers a degree of respect. 

That might be one reason he’s disgusted by the idea of the attic dweller underclass who are, he’s warned, a little bit dangerous having been driven out of their minds by their dismal circumstances and prone to sometimes violent delusions. A less than helpful medical professional advises him to “reduce his thoughts”, which doesn’t seem like a very good long term solution even in this “zombie-like” city though even when he’s been given a chance to escape Shin-dong is told he’ll have to cancel his lease first, which means getting his tenants to stamp a form agreeing to end their tenancy and also get a form from the the person they’ve sublet to to do the same. It’s tenants all the way down. Shin-dong finds himself staring into the photo of a beach in the eventual hope of escaping to some kind of paradise, but otherwise seems to be trapped inside this hellish yet grey, lifeless dystopia in which it seems the only salvation may lie in madness. 

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)