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)

Breaking and Re-entering (還錢, Wang Ding-Lin, 2024)

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You go to the trouble of planning a massive heist, and then it turns out you have to put it all back again. The gang of theives at the centre of Wang Ding-Lin’s hugely entertaining crime caper Breaking and Re-entering (還錢, huán qián) brand themselves modern day Robin Hoods, pausing for a laugh when they claim to help the poor, “yeah, us”. Yet there is something a little suggestive about this particular gig as they find themselves hired for an inside job by an obnoxious bank chief who claims the most important thing in life is yourself and those around you are merely passengers to be jettisoned at will..

Chen (Wu Kang-ren) is a rich kid who inherited the family bank and thinks he’s hot stuff after studying abroad, speaking Mandarin like foreigner and peppering his speech with English. His big idea is a cryptocurrency called BST and his tagline is “Peace, Love, and Money” while ironically enough he is also claiming to run a charity to help the poor. It’s obvious he’s running some kind of scam and not altogether surprising that he’d plot to rob his own back and then have the thieves bumped off to keep them quiet along with the two employees he’s decided to frame for the crime. Unfortunately for everyone, one of his scapegoats, Shen Shu-wen (Cecilia Choi), is the long lost flame of chief crook Po-chun (Chen Bo-lin) who, having realised Chen plans to bump her off, comes to the conclusion his only option is to mess up Chen’s plan by putting the money back in the vault.  

Of course, Chen is a kind of gang leader too complete with his own chief minion, Hu, though at one point he simply shoots one of his guys in the back of the head after he complains that Chen that doesn’t really value him. By contrast, Po-chun’s gang is a close-knit family, a brotherhood of thieves founded on mutual solidarity and infinite loyalty. Chen’s philosophy maybe that the individual is all, but these men live and die for each other. Nevertheless, Po-chun has a problematic hero complex that sees him, as others put it, aways trying to “take responsibility alone”, sacrificing himself for the group rather than allow his fellow gang members to shoulder some of the burden. That’s presumably one reason he (un)intentionally ghosted Shu-wen after getting arrested and going to prison, convincing himself he was doing the noble thing by avoiding getting Shu-wen mixed up with crime but perhaps also ashamed and insecure unwilling to let her know he met her as part of a heist and his cover personality wasn’t real while never giving much thought to her feelings. Shu-wen spent the last five years looking for him which was apparently a primary motivation for changing her career to work in the bank.

Po-chun’s quest is really one of maturity, to stop being the lone hero and fully integrate into the group by sharing responsibility with the others rather than jump straight to self-sacrifice. As he says through the medium of a montage sequence, their secret weapon is teamwork which is how they’re able to fight back against the well equipped Chen and his minions when the reason Chen flounders is his arrogance and the indifference of his men. That is not to say there isn’t tension in the team, such as the unrequited attraction bruiser Wen-hao has for Po-chun that is quite definitely antagonised by the resurfacing of Shu-wen who seems to have figured out the group dynamics pretty quickly in addition to seeing through Po-chun’s strong man act. 

It’s the warm-hearted, lived-in relationships between the team members that give the film it’s charm along with the quirkiness of the elaborately planned reverse heist and its mild dig at corporate tyranny along with class-based inequality. But most of all what it seems to advocate for is a collective spirit and the triumph of the intellect over the pampered authority of rich kid Chen as Po-chun strategises a way out of his grasp while ending his influence and getting the girl. Wholesome and charming, the film makes the most of its surreal humour along with some hilariously placed reality gags such the infuriating slowness of a “high end automatic door” that ironically prevents a wealthy crook from fleeing the scene.

Breaking and Re-entering screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival and is also screening as part of the Taiwan Film Festival in Australia

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Yukio Noda, 1974)

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“Your sense of duty is too strong! The world isn’t a pretty place,” barks an irate policeman, scolding a female officer with a tendency to take things, in his view at least, too far. Yukio Noda’s kidnap drama Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Zeroka no onna: Akai Tejo) is on the extreme end of pinky violence and soaked in the political concerns of the 1970s along with all their concurrent paranoia but nevertheless positions its fearless avenger as a lone arbiter of justice in an incredibly unjust world. 

We know this from the start as we see Zero (Miki Sugimoto) almost date raped by an apparent serial killer who has his own torture suitcase and apparently killed her friend. Knowing that he is a diplomat and therefore has diplomatic immunity, she simply shoots him in the balls in the film’s extraordinary opening sequence. But even though it could be argued what she did was self-defence, Zero is kicked off the force and thrown into a woman’s prison for an indefinite period of detention to keep the lid on any possible scandal. Zero is only reprieved when the daughter of a politician is kidnapped by thugs and, wanting to keep things quiet, they need someone to rescue her and also wipe out all of the kidnappers to ensure no one ever finds out.

Kyoko (Hiromi Kishi), the politician’s daughter, claims that her father will do “anything” to ingratiate himself with the prime minister and has in fact already arranged her marriage to his son. Kyoko, however, already has a boyfriend who, inconveniently, is quite obviously a student protestor given his yellow construction hat and other paraphernalia. The pair are accosted while sitting in a car near an old American base, and as Kyoko is gang raped, firstly by the gang leader Nakahara (Eiji Go) who is wearing a hoodie with the words US Navy printed on the back, US planes fly over her as if she were being raped by America in an obvious metaphor for the legacy of the occupation. 

Indeed, the flashbacks later experienced by Nakahara are of his mother whom he describes as a sex worker who worked at the base suggesting a very literal allusion to the corrupting influence of American servicemen. The gang operate out of a bar called “Manhattan” which is surrounded by other similar bars with Western names in a neon-lit area, while they constantly run across various signs written in English in fact peeing directly on a no peeing sign outside a largely disused residential area on the edge of the base where they later take hostage some kind of amateur dramatics / English-language class currently in the middle of a production of Romeo and Juliet. 

Yet the big bad turns out to be essentially homegrown in the form of the corrupt lackey policeman Osaka, and the politician Nagumo (Tetsuro Tanba), who is more concerned with his political capital than his daughter’s safety keen that the police keep everything out of the papers otherwise the wedding will be called off and he’ll have a problem with the prime minister. Seeing a very pale Kyoko, her clothes torn, barely conscious having been drugged by the gang, he says he no longer cares to think of her as his daughter and perhaps it would be better if she simply passed away in an “accident”, instructing Osaka to care of loose ends like Zero too. 

It’s very clear that women’s lives have little currency in this very patriarchal world, something Zero seems to know all too well even if at the beginning of the film she was content to work for the oppressive organisation of the police force though she later tears up her warrant card in disgust. The fact that division zero, operating like a secret police force on the behalf of an authoritarian government, exists at all is a clear indication that this is already a police state though one subverted by Zero who uses her red handcuffs to deliver ironic justice to all those who deserve it. Then again, unlike other pinky violence films there’s precious little solidarity that arises between herself and Kyoko whom she later describes as nothing more her mission objective seemingly caring little for her as a fellow human being. Noda cuts back between the Diet building and police HQ as if actively critiquing the latent authoritarianism of the early 70s society but even if Nagumo gets a kind of comeuppance it’s abundantly clear that nothing really will change and Zero stands alone wilfully freeing herself of the handcuffs of a controlling society. 

The Umbrella Fairy (伞少女, Shen Jie, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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Should you be bound by the past or try to forge your own destiny? It might be an odd question seeing as the central thesis of Shen Jie’s gorgeously detailed animation The Umbrella Fairy (伞少女, sǎn shàonǚ) is that every object has a soul which has developed over its lifetime and often bound to whoever originally owned it. Though what these fairies, perhaps subversively, learn is that they have will of their and should not be bound by the desires of their former masters but are free to decide their destinies for themselves.

In typical folktale fashion, a block of black jade is split in two and used to create an umbrella, which implies protection, and sword which is itself somewhat cursed wreaking death and destruction where it is found. In our world, it seems that peace has prevailed but the princess has had to abdicate her kingdom meaning that she no longer feels fit to carry her most treasured possession, The Imperial Umbrella, and places it in a repository for relics along with the Sword. There a heartbroken Qingdai tries to get used to her new life among the similarly discarded fairies while fulfilling her former mistress’ orders that she should try to look after her sister Wanggui, spirit of the Black Sword. But Wanggui is hurt and vengeful. She resents the death of her former owner and vows revenge, threatening to plunge the nation back into chaos. 

Of course, the point of the sword and the umbrella is balance and the idea is they should work in work in harmony with neither in the ascendent. The vision of the outside world we get when Qingdai ventures off in search of the escaped Wanggui is of a wounded nation still trying to repair itself in much the same way as craftsmen Mo Yang attempts to repair the objects in the archive not so much restoring them to their former glory as adapting them for a new life. Yet we can see that objects are also a way for the living to mediate their sense of loss while embracing something that is permanent but not perhaps unchanging. Thus Qingdai and Mo Yang find themselves repairing a damaged flute the sound of which only brought pain to the Governor for it belonged to a musician who, again a little subversively, seems like he may have been more than a friend and gave his life in service of the Governor at the end of the war. Once repaired the flute has a different yet familiar sound and is passed on to a new owner to make with it what they will while accepting its legacy. 

In many ways it’s about taking the past with you, but also learning to let it go. The fairies think that they’re powerless. They can’t touch any solid objects and humans, even the ones they care so much about, cannot see them. But they do in fact have power and there are things they can do to shift the world, Qingdai’s unusual strength not withstanding. Under the guidance of Mo Yang, who becomes not quite a love interest but a kindred spirit, she begins to realise that she does have agency and is free to make her own decisions rathe than remain slavishly devoted to the desires of her former mistress. Wanggui perhaps learns something similar, rediscovering and redefining her purpose to determine to fight for something rather than flailing around in hurt and anger sowing the seeds of chaos wherever she goes. 

The again, the mystery villain is a cursed mirror who has centuries of pain in ironically being forever unseen for when people look into it they only wish to see themselves. Yet as Wanggui later says, there is something powerful in Qingdai’s surrounding herself with love while protecting all with her umbrella even if some in the outside world would be content to strip it for parts. Beautifully animated, the character design and aesthetic leans closer to Japanese anime than many recent Chinese animations which otherwise rooted themselves in cultural traditions such as ink painting and established mythology but otherwise spins a tale of learning to find oneself again in the wake of loss as a free spirit free from petty tyrannies and wider oppressions forever on your own journey fixing things as you go. 

The Umbrella Fairy screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Suffocating Love (愛的噩夢, Liao Ming-yi, 2024)

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Everything seems to put pressure on M, the cavalier hero of Liao Ming-Yi’s quirky exploration of confused male desire Suffocating Love (愛的噩夢, ài de èmèng). At heart, the problem might be that he doesn’t know what he wants, or he’s just someone who chases the dream of romance and is unsatisfied by its reality. Then again, the Chinese title of the film means something like “nightmare of love”, and it maybe that M (Austin Lin) is simply ill-equipped to deal the pressure of grown-up romance.

Conversely, the pressure he feels might be understandable given the nature of his relationship with Chia-chi, a manic pixie dream girl he falls for after meeting her through a book exchange app. Chia-chi describes herself as having “quirks” though at first they don’t seem to extend much past her vegetarianism, issues connected to a longstanding health condition, and her religiosity. But after dating for a year, M moves into her apartment and is confronted by a series of “rules” he must follow which make it clear that Chia-chi is controlling and possessive in the extreme. M must agree to send her updates every two hours to prove where he is with photographic evidence and reply to her messages right away. To begin with, M thinks it’s a small price to pay in the name of love, but eventually begins to feel the “pressure” of Chia-chi’s ever watchful gaze especially once another woman arrives on the scene. 

If these gender roles were reversed, we would be certain M should leave this abusive relationship though he seems to view it with a kind of nonchalance and only mild but increasing irritation. Ai-hsuan, a high school crush serendipitously turning up at work, offers the fantasy of escape to a more liberating kind of romance that’s tinged with teenage innocence even if Ai-hsuan’s problem is that she has cold feet about an impending marriage to a man she feels she’s grown apart from during their seven year relationship. Of course, this affair doesn’t place much pressure on him because for the moment it’s casual, an illicit bubble of freedom from Chia-Chi’s control in which he can be himself again. 

But is that what he really wants? After being transported to a strange dream realm, a bunny man harking back to the Alice in Wonderland reference that brought M together with Chia-Chi puts a gun to his head and forces him to make a wish at which point he wakes up with an other woman entirely, Kurosawa Yumi, a half-Japanese photographer and social media influencer who was his celebrity crush. The pair don’t live together, but Yumi seems to pop round to change his sheets and cook his dinner which is perhaps more reflective of a male fantasy than M realises even as he describes as her at the woman every man wants, What he wants is a woman who takes care of him domestically, and sexually, but demands nothing from him so that he doesn’t feel “pressured” by emotionally interacting with her or having to accept that she’s a whole, real person (which this Yumi at least obviously is not). 

At this point, events take a rather strange turn with implications of black magic and manipulation beyond the weird dream realm and its Alice-esque butler forcing M to play Russian roulette with his romantic desires. With a gun to his head, can he really say what he wants or will he always be chasing romantic fantasy? In truth, M’s tunnel vision has its share of latent misogyny and a fear of being “controlled” by women if in a less literal way than he wilfully submits to in his relationship with Chia-chi, a generalised conviction that each of his potential matches is manipulating him while it’s clear that his view of them is blinkered by his selfish desires so he’s incapable of seeing them as whole people or really giving much thought to their thoughts and feelings. Is he suffocated by love, or does he himself suffocate it in his reluctance to engage with the reality? In any case, the jury seems to the out on whether or not M is awakening from his nightmare of love or perpetually trapped inside it by external pressures he is ill equipped to bear.

Suffocating Love screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English 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)

Love Lies (我談的那場戀愛, Ho Miu-ki, 2024)

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The heroine of Ho Miu-Kei’s cybercrime dramedy Love Lies (我談的那場戀愛) later rejects the idea that she has been deceived for she was only falling in love and love once believed is real which paradoxically hints at the idea of romantic love as fantasy or self-delusion. There is undoubtedly some truth in what she says, if only in the fact that the young man scamming her also begins to fall in love if not exactly with her but with the image of himself as reflected in her eyes. 

From what we can see of Joe (Cheung Tin-fu), he doesn’t quite fit our image of romance scammer. He isn’t cruel or heartless and has more or less fallen into this kind of work, learning to see it as a kind of game which conveniently allows him to ignore the real human he’s exploiting in order to win. Awkwardly still living with his ex-girlfriend’s family, he’s bonded with her father and seems to be seeking something like familial love and acceptance along with the feeling that he’s wanted and valued by another person. Of course, being a romance scammer gives him what he needs as his targets are drawn into his trap and eventually become dependent on him though it’s obviously not “Joe” they’re dependent on but whoever he claimed to be online who is perhaps all the things he’s like be rather than who he is. 

In any case, he finds himself conflicted while trying to scam Veronica (Sandra Ng), a fantastically rich gynaecologist still struggling to deal with the death of her husband four years previously from whom she was about to get a divorce. Veronica is also not being entirely honest online, posing as a 25-year-old nurse named Linda and using a random photo from the internet while planning to have some idle fun chatting to a stranger in this case a heartbroken French widower named Alain. Like Joe, Veronica is also a little unhappy in herself, explaining that she’s a difficult person who blows off steam by rearranging the goods in convenience stores and has few friends. Being “Linda” also affords her another perspective on herself and a means of reassessing her thoughts about her husband and marriage. 

But this vulnerability is also what makes her vulnerable to the scammers as mastermind Joan (Stephy Tang), who used to be a TV screenwriter, points out in instructing Joe that he’ll really have cracked Veronica when she feels comfortable enough to tell him about her husband. Ho presents the scammers as an unusually well equipped yet old school bunch who have an actual art department to construct props to help Joe sell his fantasy though he’s pretty slow to cotton onto the idea of stalking Veronica’s social media profiles for information he later uses to create a bond with her. 

Though quirky and somewhat wholesome, the film does hint at the dangers of online interaction and the information we choose to share with strangers, perhaps unwisely. Intellectually, Veronica is aware of the potential of scamming but also sees herself as “better” than that, as if an educated, successful woman such as herself should be too smart to fall for something so obviously untrue and is later unwilling to accept that she’s sent large amounts of money to a conman despite the advice of her bank which of course only keeps her in the scam so she can prove to herself that she’s not being conned. 

But the conclusion she finally comes to is that if she fell in love with someone who didn’t really exist, then that doesn’t mean the love itself wasn’t real. In any case, it allowed her to re-engage with lost love and recover herself and her memories of romance while finally beginning to deal with her husband’s death and the end of her marriage which arrived more abruptly than expected. In much the same way, Joe begins to realise that he ended up scamming himself, half in love with the image he created as reflected back to him while more aware of his own needs and desires along with the emotional consequences of the scamming game. To that extent, maybe love itself is a long con or beautiful fantasy but there might also be truth in a lie and a genuine connection between lonely souls beyond all the wilful deception and misrepresentation.

Love Lies screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Killers (더 킬러스, Kim Jong-kwan & Roh Deok & Chang Hang-jun & Lee Myung-se, 2024)

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Led by Lee Myung-se, The Killers (더 킬러스) was originally billed as a six-part anthology film featuring different takes on the short story by Ernest Hemingway, but somewhere along the way took a kind of detour and now arrives as a four partner with a looser theme revolving around noir and crime cinema. Frequently referencing the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks, the film hints at urban loneliness and a haunting sense of futility along with the mythic quality of noir as a tale that tells itself.

At least that’s in part how it is for unreliable the narrator of the first episode, a petty gangster who wakes up in a mysterious bar after being cornered by rival thugs. While in there he meets a similarly lost, middle-aged film director in the middle of a strange date with a fawning young woman who’ve definitely wandered into the wrong place. A sense absurdity is echoed in the fact that the man continues to sit in the bar oblivious to the knife in his back until the bar lady pulls it out for him and exposes the real reason why she lures lonely souls to this strange place out of time. Even so, thanks to her dark initiation the gangster is able to become himself and stand up against the rival thugs who were bullying him with his newfound “feistiness” having overcome something of the futility of black and white, classic noir opening sequence.

That’s something that never really happens for the heroes of part two who are a trio of youngsters trapped in Hell Joseon unable to escape their lives as cut price contract killers working below minimum wage for a chaotic company in which everything has been sub-contracted into oblivion. Ironically, one had dreams of becoming a policeman and another a nun while the third has recently had plastic surgery in the hope of landing an acting gig and claims he’s not in this for the money but to make the world a better place. Seeing their work as a public service, they tell each other that it’s wrong to grumble over their unfair pay because other people get less and are otherwise incapable of standing up for themselves until they take a leaf out of the boss’ book and try a subcontracting of their own which doesn’t quite go to plan.

While the first two episodes had been set in the present day the second two are set during the long years of dictatorship, the first sometime in the 1960s under the rule of President Park as an undercover detective and two men who appear to be unsubtle KCIA agents descend on a noirish, rundown bar with a picture of Nighthawks on the wall waiting for a mysterious fugitive to arrive. They don’t appear to know anything about why their target needs to be caught or who he is save for a daffodil tattoo on his arm and are merely they shady figures of authoritarian power we can infer are hot on the tracks of someone hostile to the regime. In any case, they are they are about to have the tables turned on them in a demonstration of their inefficacy in their power.

It’s the fourth and final piece unmistakably directed by Lee himself, however, that brings the themes to the four as it opens with an allusion to the assassination of President Park as the narrator tells us that it is 1979 and someone sent a bullet into the heart of darkness but the darkness did not die. The two goons who later show up are KCIA thugs working for the new king Chun Doo-hwan come to threaten the denizens of the cafe which include a man called “Smile” because he can’t and a woman called “Voice” because she has none while trapped inside an authoritarian regime. Inhabitants of Diaspora City, a home to the exiled, they have only a small hole to another world which affords them the ability to dream. Relentlessly surreal the segment is marked by Lee’s characteristic visual flair and sense of noirish melancholy that extends all the way out to a world more recognisably our own though no less lonely or oppressive.

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