Tag: 2022

The Lump in My Heart (あつい胸さわぎ, Shingo Matsumura, 2022)

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A young woman with a growing desire for independence is thrown into turmoil by a totally unexpected diagnosis of cancer in Shingo Matsumura’s gentle coming-of-age tale and maternal drama, The Lump in My Heart (あつい胸さわぎ, Atsui Munasawagi). Perhaps because of her youth, the heroine finds herself struggling not with a fear of pain or death but of being unsexed while preoccupied with what it might mean for the rest of her life if she were to lose her breasts at such an early age.

It seems that Chinatsu (Mizuki Yoshida) has had a particular hangup about her chest size since the onset of puberty when her mother, Akiko (Tokiko Tokiwa), first refused to buy her a bra, making her wait a year longer than the other girls and leaving her with a sense of embarrassment that might be out of keeping with her age. One of the things that most bothered her about the doctors visits is that she was treated by a middle-aged man who was then the first person ever to touch her breasts which is something she’s unhappy about while also feeling insecure that she’s never had a proper boyfriend and might never get one if it turns out she needs a mastectomy. As it turns out, she’s carrying a torch for childhood friend Ko (Daiken Okudaira), an aspiring actor, but is too shy to say anything especially with this threat to her sense of femininity hanging over her. Of course, it doesn’t help that the doctors are asking her to make advance decisions about things an 18-year-old wouldn’t usually consider such as if and when she might want children because her feelings about her fertility might affect her treatment options. 

Then again, it’s also true that she remains trapped in adolescence resentful when her mother tells her not to worry she’ll make all the decisions but also perhaps relieved. A little sick of their co-dependency she’d been thinking of moving out though it seems difficult to believe she’d be able to afford rent with just her part-time job while studying full-time at university. But when her mother shows a little interest in an incredibly awkward man at work it sends her in the other direction, now feeling resentful and rejected while fearing the loss of their familial intimacy given it had just been the two of them for so long after her father’s death when she was four.

Motoharu (Masaki Miura) accidentally demonstrates the entrenched sexism of the world around them when he makes a misogynistic joke as an attempt at an icebreaker when introduced as the boss at the factory where Akiko works. It later comes to light that he left his last job due to an accusation of sexual assault, and though it turns out to have been a misunderstanding highlights a lack of awareness in the working environment that feeds in to Chinatsu’s ongoing preoccupation with her femininity and the elusiveness of romance. Her homework assignment over the summer holidays is to write a story about her first love, a topic which might be seen as bordering on inappropriate, perhaps discriminatory against those who do not feel romantic desire not to mention that Chinatsu is only 18 so it is only natural that she is still in the process of figuring things out and cannot be expected to have much of a perspective on what is to her still a fairly recent (in fact ongoing) event. 

Meanwhile, her mother and Motoharu are each feeling a pang of regret that they always let things pass them by like the arrival of the circus, destined to be in town for a limited time only so it’s best to catch it while you can. Unfortunately that’s easier said than done especially when not everyone’s on the same page. The lump in Chinatsu’s heart is her yearning for romantic love, though she still lacks the courage to be honest with her feelings even if it’s helped her repair her relationship with her mother. An unexpected piece of compassionate advice also helps her begin to re-imagine her femininity in accepting that the loss of her breasts might not mean that she’s destined to be alone forever nor undeserving of romantic love symbolically dissolving the lump in her heart in allowing her to move forward with her life no matter what the future might hold.

The Lump in My Heart screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (English subtitles

In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Park Dong-hun, 2022)

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Education is supposed to be the great leveller, a true meritocracy in which a combination of hard work and innate ability can enable anyone to follow their chosen path as far as it will go. The reality is however far less idealistic. Park Dong-hun’s In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Isanghan Naraeui Suhakja) is the latest in a series of Korean films taking aim at corruption within the educational system along with a persistent classism that ensures only the “right” kind of people are allowed to prosper. 

Han Ji-woo (Kim Dong-hwi) knows he’s not the “right” kind of person and feels out of place at the elite boarding school where he is bullied by teachers and students alike for being a scholarship boy amid the children of mostly wealthy families. Though he won the place though being a top student at his previous school, now his grades are merely average and he’s bottom of the class in maths. Ji-woo’s odious, elitist teacher coldly tells him that his case is hopeless and he’ll never get into a top league university with these kinds of grades at this kind of school. He pressures Ji-woo into applying to transfer out which he is reluctant to do because he knows how much his attending such a prestigious school means to his widowed single mother. In any case as we later discover, the teacher merely has it in for him openly complaining with other members of staff about having to fuss with paperwork for kids on scholarships and bursaries who in his opinion don’t really belong in a place like this which is clearly geared towards perpetuating the privilege of the children of the elite at the expense of those like Ji-woo. 

When Ji-woo is caught smuggling in pork and soju at the behest of his exploitative roommates he refuses to dob them in, making the unlikely claim that he intended to consume all four meals himself. The teacher first praises his idealistic stance but then calls him an idiot because the other boys wouldn’t do the same for him nor are they coming forward themselves to take responsibility. Perfectly happy to let the scholarship boy take the blame one of them even crassly slips Ji-woo some money afterwards, genuinely confused when Ji-woo tries to turn it down claiming such things are unnecessary between friends. Nevertheless, the incident brings him the attention of the “commie officer”, a North Korean defector (Choi Min-sik) working as the nightwatchman who easily solves Ji-woo’s impossible maths problems. The officer eventually agrees to teach him maths but only on the premise that he doesn’t care about tests or grades but solely on the art of learning. 

What he teaches Ji-woo is a valuable lesson that cuts straight to the quick of the issues within the educational system in which children are being taught to blindly answer standardised questions without developing critical thinking skills. The first problem he shows him has a deliberate error in it, but Ji-woo is so focussed on giving the correct answer he doesn’t stop to consider the question itself may be wrong and as the officer is fond of saying there can be no correct answer to an incorrect question. Yet this new philosophy of maths in particular being a purely rational science in which there is only one true answer brings Ji-woo back into conflict with his teacher who complacently teaches to test and humiliates him when he points out one of the test questions is badly formulated. The teacher tells them the correctness of their answer is irrelevant for they must answer in accordance with the textbook and willingly say that black is white if the textbook says it’s so. Meanwhile it also becomes apparent that he has been taking kickbacks from parents getting wealthy students into an elite tutoring group where he leaks the questions on upcoming exams.

This discovery prompts a minor rebellion by rich kid Bo-ram (Jo Yun-seo) who becomes disgusted with her elitist mother after being unwittingly enrolled in the cheating cabal while already resenting her for having made her give up playing the piano. For the officer, music is a mathematical language and merely an expression of the beauty of numbers which can used to explain everything there is in the world, yet as we discover he left North Korea after finding out that his research was used in weapons production only to become disillusioned with the South on realising that here people merely use it as a tool for advancement towards dull and conventional lives in the service of capitalism. When Ji-woo admits that he supposes he wants good grades to get into a good uni and then get a good job to be set for life, the officer decides to broaden his horizons encouraging the better instincts the elites at the school had rejected and showing him how to think for himself rather than blindly follow what he’s being taught. 

All that might seem quite ironic for a man from North Korea pointing out the unhelpful brainwashing of a rote learning system along with the unpleasant complacency of Ji-woo’s teacher not to mention his unethical hypocrisy. Nevertheless, the officer has his own tragic past which suddenly rears its head just as the two begin to form a paternal bond and Ji-woo finds himself at a moment of crisis once again pushed towards a transfer. Though the system is stacked against them, Ji-woo and Bo-ram eventually find their way through it in their shared resistance bolstered by the officer’s teaching as they gain the strength to fight back with honesty and integrity. It may be a slightly rosy conclusion implying the system has been corrected as if Ji-woo’s teacher were the only problem rather than the product of its corruption but does at least make the case that integrity is the one thing that pays but can’t be bought.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Wolf Pack (狼群, Michael Chiang, 2022)

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A disillusioned doctor quickly finds himself in over his head when he’s kidnapped by Chinese mercenaries in Michael Chiang’s oddly positioned action thriller, Wolf Pack (狼群, láng qún). Once again, the action takes place in a completely fictional Middle Eastern/Central Asian country with the mercenaries playing mysterious spy games in which their heartless amorality is at least heavily implied to be an affectation and that they are ultimately interested in “more than money” while covertly protecting Chinese interests abroad.

The film heavily implies that they are in fact in some way working for the Chinese authorities with a lengthy focus on the Chinese flag outside the place of government in this foreign nation given the unlikely name of Cooley (in fact, most of the names given for various people and places seem mildly inappropriate). The photograph sullen doctor Ke Tong (Aarif Rahman) carries around also features his father in a Chinese military uniform which might be why he is so reluctant to believe that he may also have been a member of this “private army” as his new boss Diao claims. Though Ke Tong is originally very hostile to Diao’s gang who have after all kidnapped him he later undergoes an entirely unexplained change of heart accepting that his father must have had his reasons for whatever he did so Diao is probably OK anyway. 

In any case, their current mission involves defending Chinese energy interests against a local warlord who is working with European businessmen to disrupt a gas deal by placing faulty regulators designed to engineer an explosion which will apparently domino all the way back to the Mainland. Largely kept in the dark, Ke Tong is unable to see the big picture and keeps trying to help by doing righteous things such as shooting at a soldier hassling a young girl whose father he’d just killed but unwittingly making everything worse. Eventually he realises that the end client must be the Xingli group who are running the China-Cooley collaborative gas field, though even the energy official they’re later asked to protect seems to be prepared to die in order to ensure the project’s success and prevent a mass explosion. 

Diao’s selflessness is also well signalled thanks to his tendency to listen to a recording of a baby crying and meditate on “all he’s lost” to be a mercenary which again reinforces the idea that they have a greater cause than simply money along with Diao’s position as a surrogate father not just to Ke Tong but to the other soldiers who are all, it is said, looking for a place to belong. The gang apparently also have some kind of role funding orphanages in China to prove that they aren’t just in it for the cash. Ke Tong too comes to feel a kind of brotherhood that makes the mission more than just mercenary activity and gives him an excuse to chase the evil war lord even though that is not part of their mission and really the villagers, including a small child who has been forced to do their bidding, are not their concern. 

Despite starring two prominent martial arts stars, the film is much more focussed on technical wizardry and gunplay than it is on physical fights save for a late in the game confrontation between female mercenary Monstrosity and her opposing number as they try to liberate the gas field. Diao’s incredibly well equipped crew appear to be almost all-powerful, even if Ke Tong manages to play them at their own game, using fly-shaped drones to assist them in their work though the final mission involves an improbable plot device of the local government needing to sign a document by retinal scan within 60 seconds complete with an onscreen countdown via an encrypted briefcase computer in the middle of a firefight. 

Chiang does indeed bring action with a series of high impact sequences one involving a large petrol tank explosion which results in several of the warlord’s men being engulfed in flames. It does however leave a thread of mystery hanging over Ke Tong’s quest to solve the riddle of his father’s death with the suggestion that not all of his body parts were collected hinting that there may be further conspiracies in store for a potential sequel though what seems clear is that Ke Tong has discovered his place to belong alongside a surrogate father figure doing quite questionable things but apparently working for the national good. 

Wolf Pack is released on blu-ray in the US on 23rd January courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Flying Swordsman (雪山飞狐之塞北宝藏, Qiao Lei, 2022)

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Close to the conclusion of Qiao Lei’s The Flying Swordsman (雪山飞狐之塞北宝藏, xuěshān fēi hú zhī Sàiběi bǎozàng), the latest adaptation of Jin Yong’s classic wuxia novel Fox Volent of the Snowy Mountain, the villain is reminded that his quest for treasure is a headlong plunge into an abyss and it is indeed greed that eventually seals his fate. In any case, the karmic wheel is very much in motion as the sins of the past will soon catch up to him.

In a brief prologue, Lord Tian hopes to get his hands on some treasure buried deep beneath a land of cold and so engineers a duel between the treasure’s guardian Hu Yidao and the only swordsman who can match him. The two men end up killing each other, but largely due to the machinations of ambitious underling Baoshu (Chunyu Shanshan) who has poisoned their swords with arsenic. Additionally he’s massacred a local village, something of which the head of their group Tao Baisui (Raymond Lui Leung-wai) does not approve, but still didn’t get his hands on an iron box containing a map to the treasure nor the key needed to open it.

The box then turns up 10 years later but causes nothing other than chaos and discord among Baisui’s followers as they all jockey to get their hands on both the map and the key though the clever part of the plan is that no one has both at the same time ensuring the continuation of infighting and betrayal. The sad thing is that both Baisui and Baoshu are childless and have come to regard their underlings as children though they are quickly sacrificed during the internecine plotting. Gui Yu (Zhao Huawei), a mercenary picked up by Baoshu’s henchwoman Qingwen (Chen Yusi) after escaping enslavement at a coal mine, seems to vacillate, playing advantages against each side but also manipulated by both and left to die after being poisoned. Apparently each of the other eight villains has a special talent, though Gui Yu appears to have none and often claims to be doing only what he needs to survive which fair enough given the vagaries of the feudal era. 

This world is indeed quite grim, as we can see from the guy hacking up some suspicious looking meat on the way into the fort. An assassin is fond of asking if the target thinks villains never face retribution, hinting at the degree of hubris in Baoshu’s ambition and his lack of thought for the future or the various ways the karmic wheel may turn against him. His downfall is caused by greed, but then there’s also a degree of tenderness in his relationship with adopted daughter Qingwen who is often dismissed as a “little beauty” even if he at times seems willing to sacrifice her life for relatively little gain. 

In any case, the treasure becomes something of a MacGuffin, merely an unattainable object that drives the villains mad and turns them against each other or alternately can be used to manipulate them. In this supernaturally tinged world, the band come up against strange monsters including a pack of wild hyenas amid the freezing cold and otherwise have managed to keep their special powers more or less secret from each other despite their long association giving Qiao frequent opportunities for plot twists and unexpected returns. He adds to the mythological fantasy aesthetic through the forest-bound vistas of trees in bloom along with the endless snowscapes that reflect the moral and emotional emptiness of men like Baoshu. 

Karma does indeed come back to bite him, a victim of a poetic revenge destroyed by his own greed and immorality. Amid all the infighting there is a genuine degree of solidarity to be found at least among those robbed by the evils of feudalism and hoping to avenge themselves through tricking the gang into destroying itself. Qiao’s wire-heavy action sequences hint at a poetic beauty of wuxia martial arts even if close combat is necessarily brutal though mostly relying on trickery rather than simple skill with the sword. Told over a series of flashbacks, the tale eventually straightens itself out to reveal the tragic legacies that provoke the fate of all long after those who caused them have forgotten their dark deeds and believed themselves free from guilt or consequences.

The Flying Swordsman is released in the US on Digital and DVD on Jan. 9 courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Black Night Parade (ブラックナイトパレード, Yuichi Fukuda, 2022)

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According to the opening voiceover of Yuichi Fukuda’s seasonal comedy Black Night Parade (ブラックナイトパレード), we’ve all got Christmas wrong. It’s not completely true that Santa only gives presents to the nice kids for there are in fact two Santas, the other one, the anti-Santa, making sure that bad children have a very unhappy Christmas receiving gifts ranging from the traditional lump of coal to offal. The Santa dressed in black is described as being a little more egalitarian, but does indeed pedal in disappointment and the opposite of the holiday spirit though in another way perhaps he’s just an embodiment of a sense of resentment towards to the unfairness of the contemporary society. 

Miharu (Ryo Yoshizawa) is very definitely grown up and a good example of someone who regards themselves as earnest but is becoming fed up with seeing those he regards as acting inconsiderately prosper. Still working part-time at a convenience store having repeatedly failed to get into university or find a full-time job, he’s irritated by his loudmouth slacker colleague Kaiser (Taishi Nakagawa) who just seems to constantly fall up in life while Miharu ends up being the responsible one doing most of his work for him. When Kaiser asks him to cover his shift Christmas Eve so he can go on a date with his pretty girlfriend seconds after telling him he’s actually had a full-time job offer, it obviously stings more than a little. But when Miharu takes a leaf out of his book and tries to take home one of the expired Christmas cakes, he’s immediately caught and threatened by his boss not to mention being deemed a bad boy by the Santa in black. 

Though in his case, it results in an ironic job officer to become one of Santa’s helpers at a gloomy Santa centre where they run a virtual surveillance state to figure out whether the kids that send in letters to Santa have really been as good as they claim to have been. Surveillance queen Shino (Kanna Hashimoto) decides one little lad hasn’t on catching him cheating on a test despite having emphasised how hard he’d been studying in his letter. Cheating on a test is obviously not “good”, but perhaps it’s not innards in your stocking bad either and Miharu’s moral compass is going haywire trying to understand the strange world he finds himself in while participating in a contest to join the elite Reindeer division of Christmas shock troops. Meanwhile, he’s also confronted by a conspiracy in which the red Santa has already been murdered by rats controlled by a mysterious group who hate Christmas and are trying to eradicate it. If they don’t find a new red Santa soon, the magic will be broken forever.

Despite the zaniness of the concept, the humour is a little less grating than the broad variety style generally employed by Fukuda in his other films even if several of the performances are on the larger side. Rather than rediscovering the true meaning of Christmas or coming to an accommodation with the unfairness of the contemporary society, Miharu is guided towards dealing with his own unresolved childhood trauma which repurposes the empty consumerism of a contrived holiday tradition as a means of signalling of a lack of something or the roots of unhappiness. Even if most most kids are asking for the latest toys it may be because they want others to play with with them, while some just want company because their parents have to work long hours and they’re lonely at home. 

Despite making the astute observation that the best way to disappoint a naughty child is to get them what they asked for but not quite right, Miharu eventually discovers a calling in making sure no child is left empty-handed on Christmas Day spreading the spirit of the season wherever he goes even while being chased by packs of evil rats out to destroy the joy of Christmas forever. Then again, there is some mildly satirical humour in the likening of Santa Claus House to a “black company” ruthlessly exploiting its employees while engaging in some very dubious corporate shenanigans in its use of customer data and clear invasion of privacy in its all-seeing surveillance network. In any case, it does appear that Christmas is safe from the rat race for the moment and children good or bad will wake up to a surprise equally so on Christmas morning for years to come.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Ghost Station (옥수역귀신, Jeong Yong-ki, 2022)

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The biggest evil at the centre of Jeong Yong-ki’s homage to classic J-horror The Ghost Station (옥수역귀신, Ogsuyeog Gwisin) is perhaps capitalism or more simply modernity. At least, it stands to reason that those covering up a great evil for financial gain could be deemed even worse than the person who actually committed the crimes in turning a blind eye to injustice. It’s in the midst of this paradox that jaded rookie reporter Na-young (Kim Bo-ra) finds herself while beginning to uncover the dark secrets buried beneath a supposedly “haunted” station though mostly lured by the desire for easy clickbait to appease her hardline boss (Kim Su-jin). 

The reason that Na-young is in trouble, is that she was at the station snapping photos for social media without bothering to get a written release from her subjects. The person she took photos of turned out to be transgender and was accidentally outed by Na-young’s story for which she feels little remorse, mostly feeling sorry for herself on realising her job’s on the line and she’ll have to bring in some powerful scoops if she wants to make sure the paper has her back and will cover the compensation money if the woman sues her. 

It has to be said that, in the English subtitles at least, the film has a strongly transphobic vibe in which the photographed woman is constantly described as “a man” , using male pronouns and otherwise treated as a figure of fun, just another “weird” thing going on at the station. Even so, there’s clearly a mild rebuke intended against the contemporary trend of mocking strangers online with a young man falling victim to the station curse in the opening sequence after uploading a video of a woman he first assumes to be drunk or mentally distressed before noticing that in the video he can see a pair of bloody hands attacking her. 

Na-young has been doing pretty much the same kinds of things with her clickbait even while resentful of herself and the loss of her journalistic integrity working at a low level tabloid only interested in viral articles that will generate ad income. But she’s also slightly proud on spotting people reading her pieces on the station ghost as they ride, feeling like she’s doing real investigative journalism even if no one in the office really cares about the dark secrets lurking in the station. Even she later realises that she lost sight of the victim in the case and hadn’t even thought about contacting his family or trying to find out who he was and why he died. 

What she eventually discovers is that her paper may have been involved in a coverup operation which is why her boss becomes hostile as her reports become a little too “real”. It was in the interests of powerful people that the station be built, so anything that might delay its construction was quietly swept under the carpet. Na-young wants to drag it into the light, but finds herself frustrated and then at the centre of a supernatural curse while hoping to give voice to those who were denied any of their own. 

The quietly oppressive, haunting nature of these unseen forces is brought home by the ominous tapping of the ice blue fingernails of Na-young’s ever impatient boss perhaps embittered by her own decision to abandon journalistic integrity for the lure of easy money peddling gossip and distraction to an already apathetic readership. Though adapted from a web toon, the film is co-scripted by Hiroshi Takahashi and bears many of the hallmarks of classic J-horror including the presence of a well implying the contamination of the groundwater that feeds the contemporary society which the station itself in someways represents, along with the uncanny movement of living ghosts in the contemporary environment.

Like J-horror it finds otherworldly spirits trying to communicate through modern technology, in this case saying what first seem to be fragments of a phone number but turn out to have a different meaning indicating a desire to be heard and recognised, reprieved from the hell in which they’ve been placed by a cruel and heartless tormentor. Na-young thinks she can give them that but is perhaps naive, if already corrupted, overestimating the power of the press to offer corrective justice and end a curse by throwing the truth into the light. In the end, she too decides to pass the buck escaping the curse by passing it on as an ironic act of vengeance and liberation thrown like a bomb at an infinitely corrupt social system but more out of spite than retribution. A little shallow and cynical, the film never quite lands its punches or achieves the eeriness it’s looking for but does nevertheless point the finger at the literal skeletons in the closet of the contemporary society.

The Ghost Station is out now in the US on Digital, DVD, and blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Mayhem Girls (メイヘムガールズ, Shinichi Fujita, 2022)

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Four teenage girls unexpectedly find themselves with superpowers during the Covid-19 pandemic, but largely struggle with just the same problems as everyone else in Shinichi Fujita’s sci-fi-inflected high school dramedy Mayhem Girls (メイヘムガールズ). Despite the implications of the title, mayhem is not exactly the girls’ vibe though they each in their own way challenge the oppressive social norms of those around them later depressed by the realisation that they’ll soon have to go back to being “normal” and lose this brief respite they’ve been given from the rigours of high school life. 

The girls are already close to boiling point with the pressures of the pandemic as the teachers (ironically) yell at them to use hand sanitiser and social distance. The final straw seems to be the announcement that the Cultural Festival will be going online. That might be one reason why popular girl Mizuho (Mizuki Yoshida) suddenly snaps when her teacher catches her reading Twitter on her phone rather than studying. Miss Sawaguchi (Maako Miwa) is young and somewhat timid, unable to exert her authority over the class which is largely uninterested in her attempt to read out articles from English-language magazines. What’s the point, Mizuho wonders, in learning English if you can’t go abroad anyway? Sawaguchi takes this opportunity to reprimand Mizuho as a means of asserting her control but it backfires as something strange happens when she confiscates the phone. Sawaguchi’s hand stops mid-air allowing Mizuho to simply reclaim it while she runs out of the room as if in pain. 

This is only the first inkling that Mizuho has gained unexpected powers of telekinesis though she struggles to understand what happened, certain that she didn’t touch Miss Sawaguchi and confused that she seems to be talking about “violence” and displaying bruises on her wrists. In any case, the event loses her her phone which is akin to a kind of social death for a teenage girl. Her powers have, however, brought her to the attention of Tamaki (Amane Kamiya) who is a telepath, or more accurately given her an excuse to make contact for as it turns out Tamaki has long been carrying a torch for the oblivious Mizuho who is hung up on the student who was her tutor in middle school, Yusuke (Taisei Kido). Soon they are joined by two more girls, Akane (Manami Igashira) who can teleport, and Kei (Hina Kikuchi) who can read the minds of machines, in a kind of after school superpower club. 

Though they eventually become good friends, the relationship between the girls is strained by their differing views on their powers and by Mizuho’s concurrent obsession with Yusuke who is now a part-time delivery rider struggling to find a full time job in the middle of the pandemic. Using Kei’s powers to track him down she waits outside his house for him to come back and inserts herself into his life. Though he seems as if he’s about to remind her that her behaviour is inappropriate, Yusuke eventually goes all in on Mizuho after learning of her powers and asks her to use them to rob a bank so he can forget about his employment woes. 

There are many things you shouldn’t do for a boy and robbing a bank is very high on the list, though perhaps merely a more extreme version of a lesson typically learned in adolescence. In any case, this is far as Mizuho is pushed to the dark side. Other than that, none of the girls really consider using their powers for evil ends with even Tamaki admitting that she has thought about poking around in Mizuho’s head but feels it would be wrong to do so. It’s Tamaki who draws the short straw in being largely unable to articulate herself even by using her powers before eventually trying to communicate in images only to be robbed of the power to do so at the very last second when she’s reduced to being “normal” once again. 

“Normality” does seem to resume for them, each of the girls heading back to their own individual cliques having seemingly learned little from their experiences save Tamaki who is left with a lingering sadness. Perhaps what they’ve been through is a kind of mayhem, a period of chaos provoked by the pressures of the pandemic along with oppressive teachers and the regular teenage issues of unrequited love and romantic disappointment but they’ve returned to “normal” all too quickly leaving precious little time to meditate on the results of their flirtation with superpowers and psychic abilities in a world in which normality itself is both somewhat illusionary and infinitely oppressive.

Mayhem Girls screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Letter from Kyoto (교토에서 온 편지, Kim Min-ju, 2022)

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A disillusioned young woman returns to her hometown in search of healing but finds it in a state of disrepair in the fracturing relationship between her two sisters, one approaching middle age and the other yet to graduate high school, and her ageing mother entering the first stages of dementia in Kim Min-ju’s poignant debut feature A Letter From Kyoto (교토에서 온 편지, Gyoto-eseo on Pyeonji). As the title implies partly a story of dislocation, seeking both an escape from and return to the safety and comfort of a hometown, the film explores the destructive effects of secrecy and miscommunication between those who ought to share a greater intimacy.

Hye-young (Han Sun-hwa) couldn’t wait to get out of Yeongdo and has been living in Seoul for the past several years with the aspiration of becoming a writer but has been earning her living working for a TV station making educational programmes. It’s clear that something has gone wrong for her in her sudden and unannounced visit home, though she only explains that she’s taking break. Meanwhile, she begins to notice that her mother, Hwa-ja (Cha Mi-kyung), has become forgetful and easily confused. Not only is she overstocking her fridge with multiple purchases of persimmons but habitually picking up the leftover kimchi from the kitchen where she works despite reminders from her otherwise sympathetic boss not to. 

The ages of the three sisters, like those of the Chekhov play marooned in the provinces, seem to be representative of the passage of a life. The youngest, Hye-joo (Song Ji-hyun), is boisterous and full of dreams keeping her hopes of becoming a hip hop dancer a secret on remembering all the fuss surrounding Hye-young’s announcement that she wanted to become a writer. Oldest sister Hye-jin (Han Chae-ah) by contrast is cynical and worldweary. She supports the family with her job in a mid-range handbag shop where she once dated the manager only he decided to break up with her because she didn’t want to leave Busan and had no interest in money. 

Hye-jin later tells unexpected love interest Polish sailor Piotr that she has never been abroad perhaps because she’s in a sense afraid to leave while constrained by her sense of duty owing to being the older sister, mildly resentful of Hye-young for abandoning them and shifting all of the burden onto her. A sense of displacement floats around the family home in part because of Hwa-ja’s childhood past, born in Japan and then brought to Korea by her Korean father without her Japanese mother’s knowledge. The film’s title comes from a series of letters the daughters find that are written in Japanese, a language that Hwa-ja claims to have forgotten though is perhaps slowly returned to her as they begin to translate in an attempt to retrace and reclaim the past that been hidden from them.

Though she recounts a fear of discrimination because of her Japanese ancestry, Hwa-ja had never particularly hidden her past answering Hye-young’s questions as to why she never mentioned it with the reasonable reply that she never asked. A sense of secrecy and miscommunication continues to divide the sisters with Hye-young reluctant to discuss the reasons behind her desire to return home, Hye-joo keeping her dancing dreams a secret, and Hye-jin not saying much at all in her disappointment and resentment. It frustrated Hye-young that her mother never throws anything away, but to her it would be like throwing away a part of her past self and another act of forgetting aside from that she no longer has any control over.

Yet the film seems to suggest that Hwa-ja need not remember everything when her daughters can remember it for her, adopting her orphaned memories into their own stories while she too is able to make a kind of peace with the past on reclaiming the memories of her own mother that were otherwise lost to her through linguistic and geographical displacement. Exposing the secrets and repairing the fracturing past frees each of the sisters to follow a path that more suits them, accepting that there’s a time to leave your hometown, and a time to return, whether or not or one eventually decides to stay. Poignant and somewhat elegiac, the film eventually celebrates maternal and sisterly connections extending beyond the immediate family in the presence of Hwa-ja’s staunchly loyal childhood friend along with a sense of serenity in rootedness to a particular place that represents a home.

A Letter from Kyoto screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman (目中无人, Yang Bingjia, 2022)

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A blind swordsman takes revenge against the evils of feudal society in Yang Bingjia’s impressively helmed action drama, Eye For An Eye: The Blind Swordsman (目中无人, mùzhōngwúrén). Set in the “lawless” society of the Tang era following the Tianbao rebellion, the film has a western sensibility with its twanging guitar score and dusty roads not to mention jumped up gangsters trying to get a foothold in the legitimate order simply because they have become too powerful and no one is willing to resist them. 

Ni Yan (Gao Weiman), a young tavern woman who lost her brother and husband when her wedding was attacked by the Yuwen clan asks for nothing more than “justice” but that’s something no one can give her. Wandering swordsman Cheng Yi (Mo Tse) who’d taken a liking to her because she offered him some of her wine and even gave some to his horse reports the crime to the local magistrate after claiming the bounty on a fugitive, only he tells her directly that he will do nothing because the Yuwen clan have already moved beyond justice and not even he will touch them. 

In a way, Cheng is depicted as a failed revolutionary and his blindness a symbol his despair in a world he no longer cares to see. A bounty hunter by trade, his work is facilitated by old comrade Lady Qin (Zhang Qin) who, in contrast to him, seems to live a cheerful life repairing musical instruments while much loved in the town around her. Though they pretend to be saving money for an operation to restore Cheng’s sight, their line of work is perhaps cynical in taking advantage of the times while accidentally outsourcing a justice the authorities can no longer provide in the weakened Tang society. The Yuwen have infiltrated most institutions and cultivated relationships with important people that allow them to ride roughshod over ordinary citizens who are now completely at their mercy.

There might be something quietly subversive in these references to a corrupt and authoritarian institution which tries to brand Ni Yani the criminal in her pleas for justice, insisting that she admit to killing her brother herself in resentment of his criminal past while he is also hunted by the Yuwen because he knows to much about their dodgy dealings including raiding tombs to get precious gems to use as bargaining chips in a dynastic marriage negotiation. Cheng Yi did not originally want to get involved, himself too cynical and having given up hope of “justice” in this “lawless” society, but finds himself sympathetic towards Ni Yan because of the kindness she showed him and the obvious suffering her ordeal has inflicted on her. 

In a sense, his eyes are opened to the injustice of the society around him to which he had been wilfully blind if ironically accepting that he will never see again. He alone is willing to stand up to the Yuwen while even within their ranks petty resentments are growing as a princeling grows ambitious to escape his own oppression at the hands of an authoritarian brother who berates him for his weakness. 

Despite the budgetary issues which often plague straight to streaming cinema, Yang’s elegantly lensed drama brings a real sense of place to the dusty provincial towns where Cheng plies his trade along with the ornate elegance of the realm of Lady Qin whose flowing robes belie her military past. Drawing inspiration from the western as well as Japanese genre classics such as Yojimbo the film presents a world in decay in which the wandering swordsman becomes a moral authority, delivering justice if for a price. The irony is that it isn’t money which opens his eyes, but the reclaimed ability to see with his heart in deciding to help Ni Yan in her quest to avenge the deaths of those close to her. A series of excellently choreographed and well-shot action scenes along with Yang’s post-modern take on the material lend this tale of wandering swordsmen and feudal abuses a sense of the legendary that hints at further adventures for wandering sword for hire Cheng Yi bringing his own brand of justice to a lawless place. 

Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman is out in the US on Digital, blu-ray, and DVD on 28th November courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

A Wild Roomer (괴인, Lee Jeong-hong, 2022)

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“Separation and connection” is apparently the architectural theme of the well-appointed home where not completely qualified carpenter Gi-hong (Park Gil-hong) takes up residence in Lee Jeong-hong’s quirky drama, A Wild Roomer (괴인, Goein). It’s not quite clear if Gi-hong is the strange person of the Korean title or if it refers to the young woman he subsequently encounters, to all of us, or someone else entirely but what does seem to be true is that Gi-hong lives a kind of separated life from those around him.

Ironically enough, Gi-hong’s job is as a joiner though as a conversation with a friend he’s hoping to recruit for his moribund business makes clear he may not actually have finished his apprenticeship and has jumped the gun setting up on his own. The way he tells it, people these days don’t hire interior design firms for small jobs but entrust them to a carpenter, such as himself, who can subcontract the other services involved. But it seems Gi-hong is not a particularly considerate boss, looking down on his employees while complaining that labourers are money grubbers and it’s alright for him to be rude to them because that’s how working men talk to each other. He criticises an elderly electrician who asked about his pay because he has medical expenses for not having planned better for his old age but appears to be doing little to plan for his own while keen to give everyone the impression that his struggling business is actually doing big numbers. He also doesn’t appear to care very much about finesse either, using the cheapest materials possible and doing a slapdash job that even loyal colleague Kyoung-jun (Choi Kyung-june) thinks is not really up to scratch. 

What’s also clear is that Gi-hong has an inappropriate crush on the piano teacher whose studio he’s refitting and a lack of understanding about personal boundaries. At several points he encounters doors that don’t open for him, while ironically his landlord doesn’t seem to believe in them. Though he rents the annex which has a separate entrance, Jung-hwan is keen for Gi-hong to treat the main house as his own entering and exiting through the front door which is all very well but also means that Jung-hwan (Ahn Ju-min) could presumably also wander into Gi-hong’s space whenever he feels like it. Jung-hwan is also living a “separate but connected” life with his enigmatic wife Hyun-jun (Jeon Gil) who he says doesn’t actually like him and never has. For reasons not entirely explained, Jung-hwan is home all day and seemingly lonely hoping he can adopt Gi-hong, who is also home a lot because there’s no work coming in, as a kind of surrogate little brother. 

Yet for all that Gi-hong seems, as his friend describes him, “irresponsible” and self-interested, there’s childlike vulnerability in him that finds an outlet when he unexpectedly encounters a young woman he assumes is responsible for the sizeable dent in the roof of his van. Skittish in nature, Hana (Lee So-jung) is in someways earnest and others helpless. She has no home or family and is in that sense separate and in search of connection while Gi-hong seems to feel guilty about asking her to take responsibility for what happened to his van considering she has no means to do so though is doing her best. She assumes that Gi-hong, Jun-hwan, and Hyun-jun must be “family” considering that they share the same space and seems to want to join them in a separate but connected existence. 

The mechanic they contact about fixing the van goes off on a minor rant about the younger generation, or more accurately those now approaching middle age in their 30s or early 40s, who he claims have been given false expectations because of Korea’s unexpected success in the 2002 world cup which has led them to assume that dreams come true on their own and things will just work out without the need to really do anything to make them. The irony is that he’s pretty much describing Gi-hong who seems to have an insecurity and baseless hope that his business will pick up while terrified it won’t. But then everyone seems to be living a life of quiet separation, privately anxious and dependent upon the loose connections that have replaced the certainties of a blood family. Gi-hong, whose attempts to construct pleasant spaces for others are often imperfect, may have found himself a home of separate connection. “It feels so weird” a woman exclaims on looking at a precariously balanced rock, but like so many things in Lee’s strange world it seems to work even if you think it shouldn’t.

A Wild Roomer screens 11th November as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Origina trailer (English subtitles)