Tag: 2023

The Draft! (Setan Alas!, Yusron Fuadi, 2023)

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It’s easy to feel as if you’re trapped on a certain path and that unseen forces are dictating your life, leaving you with little power to overcome your fate. But what if you were really imprisoned inside the as yet unfinished script for a terrible movie by a lazy, half-hearted writer who can’t think of anything more interesting than killing you in horrifying ways while being constantly hassled by an equally dull producer who threatens to replace him with Joko Anwar? 

That is indeed the dilemma faced by those at the centre of Yusron Fuadi’s Indonesian meta horror, The Draft (Setan Alas!). The opening sequence follows them as they drive towards a remote country villa owned by rich girl Ani’s (Anggi Waluyo) recently divorced parents. As soon as they get there, they begin remarking on how it’s just like something out of an Indonesian horror movie complete with a Dutch cemetery not too far away and a creepy caretaker who seems to pop up out of nowhere. Predictably, the power’s gone out and the generator’s on the blink, so they’ll have to have atmospheric candles instead and obviously can’t get any phone signal to call for help. Ani’s also brought a photo of her apparently deceased younger sister, though none of that turns out to matter because the screenwriter’s about to forget about it. 

All of this heavy exposition is delivered in a very knowing manner, as if mocking the tropes of the Indonesian horror movie while simultaneously indulging in them until the gang suddenly figure out that they’re just characters in a half-written screenplay which is why they can’t really remember much of their pasts. As such, they’re desperately in search of “god”, or the writer, who alone has control over their fates and seems to have ill intentions for them while their only means of defence is to force him into a rewrite so they won’t die. After a while, they begin to work out how they can manipulate this world by influencing the writer’s thoughts when their joking speculation about might what happen next gives him ideas, so they can also write into their dialogue that there’s a massive stash of arms in the basement that will be very useful against the surprise zombie hordes. 

Meanwhile, in the real world, time passes for the writer who burns his motorbike and argues with his producer while constantly rewriting the screenplay to suit his preferences. The gang joke that there can’t be that many zombies coming because CGI’s too expensive, and no one would give a film with dialogue this bad a budget big enough to pay for thousands of extras. The writer is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He either writes the film the producer wants with its generic plot and stereotypical characters or he doesn’t get to make a film at all.

The characters too are protesting being a part of this project and fighting for a movie along with a better life in which they have more light and shade, actual backstories and personalities both they and the audience can invest in. But increasingly, their author leaves them hanging as the real interferes with his screenwriting dreams and years go by with no more “revisions” leaving this film a perpetually unfinished draft that he may pick up again some day more out of idleness that ambition. The dream world of the movie seems to be forever receding like the cliff edge that prevents the characters from leaving, the abandoned drafts burning away as stripping layers from their reality. 

Trapped in this eternal state of limbo, they do at least realise they have an advantage and time to train, to write their own stories in the absence of their not quite so omniscient god. They might, after all, enjoy a life of “worldly pleasures without any consequences or commitment” while they wait as if this place too could be a kind of heaven free of any possible constraint save the inability to leave or to feel time passing and finally be allowed some kind of forward motion and growth. This project might be paused, indefinitely, and destined to live forever in the draw as an unfinished draft, but there might still be time to bring themselves into being while their inattentive creator perhaps does the same.

The Draft! is on UK and Ireland digital platforms 27 October.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ms. Apocalypse (세기말의 사랑, Lim Sun-ae, 2023)

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It’s funny to look back now at how worried we were about the millennium bug and the birth of a new century, but it’s true enough that the anxiety and desperation were enough to make people act in strange and incomprehensible ways. The first part of Ms Apocalypse (세기말의 사랑, Sekimalui Sarang) is filmed in black and white hinting at the dull incompleteness of the heroine’s life even as she finds herself overcome with dread and begging the man on whom she’s developed a crush to run away with her so she won’t die here, at her aunt’s funeral, where her obnoxious cousin wants her to pour drinks for his boorish friends. 

Young-mi (Lee Yoo-Young) is a mousy, shy woman who keeps herself to herself. At the factory where she works as a bookkeeper, they’ve nicknamed her “Ms Apocalypse”, because her face is “chaotic”, while the men make fun of how unattractive they find her behind her back. The only one of them that’s nice to her is Do-young (Roh Jae-Won), a driver who started five months ago. Young-mi has developed a crush on him, but is too shy to do anything about it and ends up rebuffing most of his overtures such as the precious gift of extra sausages from the canteen. But Young-mi has also discovered that Do-young has been embezzling the cash he’s supposed to be collecting for deliveries. She obviously doesn’t want him to get in any trouble, so she’s been making up the shortfall out of her own pocket by taking on sewing on the side. Unfortunately, when a remorseful Do-young turns himself in, Young-mi ends up going to prison too for failing to report his crimes.

It’s on her release that colour returns to the film, as if Young-mi as had been spiritually and emotionally set free to start a new life in the new century. Yet the only person who comes to meet her is Do-young’s spiky wife Yu-jin (Lim Sun-Woo). Yuj-in is living with a degenerative illness that has left her paralysed from the neck down though she maintains sensation in the rest of her body. Though they are opposites, the two women share a strange affinity and have more in common than they might care to admit. While Young-mi’s life had largely been in service of her aunt to set her cousin Kyu-tae (Heo Joon-Seok) free, Yu-jin has a complicated relationship with her niece, Mi-ri (Jang Sung-Yoon), who has currently run away from home and is imprisoned by her condition in the same way Young-mi is trapped by shyness. While Young-mi is all too aware of the way that others see her as “weird” and unattractive, Yu-jin is a beauty who radiates elegance and imperiousness. She has what her friend Jun (Moon Dong-Hyeok) describes as a nasty personality but is basically a reasonable person who knows full well how dependent she is on the kindness of strangers. 

Young-mi is a kind person, but there’s a question mark over whether she stays with Yu-jin because she wants her money back and has nowhere else to go after discovering Kyu-tae has sold her aunt’s house, or has come to genuinely care about her. It seems at first that they’ve both been betrayed by Do-young, though it’s not as simple as it seems and it may be a misguided gesture of kindness that’s landed them all in this very messy situation. They are nevertheless united in their outsider status as women at the mercy of a patriarchal society. Just as Young-mi is mocked for her appearance, the carers hired to look after Yu-jin make crass and inappropriate comments about her body while even her closest friend, Jun, has exploited her disability to get a discount on his car as well as swapping some of her favourite designer shoes for fakes, though Yu-jin knows she can’t say anything or risk Jun abandoning her. Though Young-mi was the one looking after her aunt who had dementia and a drinking problem, she was always at the mercy of Kyu-tae as her closest male relative and unfortunately he chose to betray her.

Kyu-tae’s not quite ex-wife blames the Asian Financial Crisis, but it seems Kyu-tae was always a selfish and unpleasant person emboldened his position in the patriarchal society and the meekness of Young-mi who he knew would not be able to stand up for herself. But it’s a new century now, and Young-mi’s world is certainly more colourful, if perhaps no easier. She’s learned to fight her corner, but also to make space in it for others in warming to the complicated Yu-jin whose loneliness and vulnerability all come out as meanness though she is a kind soul too and like Young-mi looking for ways to begin moving forward. Now they’ve got over their millennium bug, they’re ready to join the new century and embrace whatever it is that it has to offer them.

Trailer (no subtitles)

A Tour Guide (믿을 수 있는 사람, Kwak Eun-mi, 2023)

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“We look the same, but they treat us less than foreigners.” Han-young’s (Lee Seol) friend Jung-mi (Oh Kyung-hwa) laments, explaining that she’s decided to move abroad for a better life rather than scrape by in a country that is not always welcoming. Kwak Eun-mi’s A Tour Guide (믿을 수 있는 사람, Mid-eul su issneun salam) explores the position of North Koreans in South Korean society, but also the difficulties of assimilating into a new culture that is not primed to accept you, the isolation of being of this place and not, and the heroine’s complex cultural background that leaves her feeling torn between competing ideas of homeland. 

Having lived in China for a while after escaping North Korea, Han-young worked hard to harness her Mandarin-speaking skills to earn a license to work as a tour guide and interpreter. Even so, she struggles to find employment as many companies are unwilling to hire those from the North whom they view with suspicion. When she eventually is hired, it’s a for a zero hours contract freelance job in which her pay is dependent on the amount of souvenirs her wealthy Chinese holidaymakers purchase. The ironies could not be starker. While Han-young struggles to get by, the residents of the formerly communist turned hyper capitalist society have more money than they know what to do with and often aren’t really interested in the information she has to give them about Korean historical sites but are eager to get to the duty free.

In her interview, Han-young had said she wanted to share Korean culture with visitors to the country but it also seems like this wasn’t really what she worked so hard to get her license for. She also said she wanted to earn a lot of money and have a nice life, which is more honest, but the job doesn’t really allow her to do that. She was told that she shouldn’t force people to buy goods, but it’s clear that this is essentially what the company’s hired her for. Under increasing pressure, she finds herself bending the rules and her own integrity. Copying a less earnest colleague, she begins embellishing her speeches with made-up information to appeal to the Chinese tourists, while later colluding with the saleswoman to put on a snake oil-style act selling Korean cosmetics in the hope of getting her ranking up and being kept on while the company experiences a period of financial difficulty. MERS and declining political relations between China and South Korea see a huge drop off in tourism and a fair amount of economic damage. 

Her brother (Jeon Bong-seok) too has witnessed the implosion of his South Korean dream having failed to get into university. Manual labour at the docks wasn’t what he had in mind, which might be one reason he drops out of contact with Han-young who tries to look for him but continues to hit a brick wall. She eventually discovers that he thought about going back to the North despite knowing what might happen to him if he did. In some ways it may not be all that surprising that some people find themselves unable to adapt and prefer the brutal certainty of their old lives, but it’s equally true that the siblings encounter only futility. Viewed with suspicion, they are constantly monitored by a “protection officer” who is supposed to be helping them adapt to life in the South and prevent them being exploited or harassed, though Jang-mi thinks it’s more like “surveillance” than “protection” and the focus is really on whether they present a danger rather than are presented with it. Nevertheless, her aunt decided to extend her protection period voluntarily because she said it was easier that way.

One by one, each of Han-young’s lifelines disappears, from her friend who decides to try her luck abroad, to her brother, and then protection officer. Asked why she doesn’t go abroad too, Han-young replies that if she stays closely, her family call live together again as if hinting at a desire for reunification even as she desperately tries to get the money together to bring her mother to the South while prejudiced bosses tell her she should just work in a factory, or a cafe, or a convince store, which is to say casual labour jobs they look down on and consider unworthy for South Koreans because someone like Han-young isn’t really entitled to become a tour guide. Eventually she’s joined by a friend from China whom she has to disabuse, reminding her you’re poor here too if you can’t find work and it’s not exactly the kind of utopian paradise she might have thought it to be. Nevertheless, it seems as Han-young is leading herself towards her own liberation and a future less constrained by loneliness and petty prejudice.

Trailer (English subtitles)

I Did It My Way (潛行, Jason Kwan, 2023)

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“Oldies are still the best,” one bad guy tells another while listening to a retro pop song about the inability to distinguish good from evil, “life was simpler back then.” Jason Kwon’s I Did it My Way (潛行) is in many ways an attempt to recapture the action classics of the 90s starring many of the same A-listers though they are all 30 years older and in some cases really ageing out of the kinds of roles they’re accustomed to playing in these kinds of films. Nevertheless, the action is updated for the contemporary era in its unsubtle messaging that drugs and cyber crime are bad, while the police are definitely good and will always win.

Indeed, barrister George Lam (Andy Lau Tak-wah) is not a particularly sympathetic villain and is given little justification for his crimes save doing things his way. Cybercrime specialist Eddie Fong (Edward Peng Yu-Yan) isn’t terribly sympathetic either, but mostly because of his bullheaded earnestness. Chung Kam-ming (Simon Yam Tat-wah) asks him to work with regular narcotics cop Yuen (Lam Suet), but Eddie originally refuses, insisting that they formed their new cybercrimes squad because the “old ways” weren’t working, so it’s better that they keep their investigations separate, which is of course quite rude to Yuen especially as he goes on to add that Chung’s only asked him out of politeness and professional deference. Chung, however, reminds them that they’re all part of one big family and should learn to work together. 

One might think that a criminal enterprise is also a kind of family, but it’s shown to be illegitimate in comparison to that of the police. Yuen’s undercover agent, Sau Ho (Gordon Lam Ka-tung), has a family he’s trying to protect, as does Lam who is about to marry his much younger pregnant girlfriend. For them, family is also a weakness because it gives them a reason to be afraid not to mention something to lose. Beginning to suspect him, Lam uses Sau Ho’s wife and son as leverage, symbolically taking them hostage along with Sau Ho’s promised future that would allow him to emigrate for a life of freedom under a new identity. 

Like the song says, Sau Ho is also struggling to define his identity as an undercover cop caught between his original desire to fight crime and the criminal lifestyle he’s been forced to live which leaves him never quite sure what side he’s actually on. Lam claims he only started dealing drugs after his girlfriend was raped and subsequently developed depression but that’s too late for him to turn back and so he’s gone all in. There is a kind of brotherhood that arises between them that’s permanently strained by their positioning on either side of this line and the inevitability of confrontation. Fong promises to save Sau Ho, but he failed to save most of their other undercover officers, while Sau Ho and Lam pledge to save each other, though the act of salvation could mean different things to each of them while both torn between their respective codes and the natural connection that’s been fostered by their long years working together as part of the gang. 

The severing of this connection is again part of the price for their involvement with crime, with Lam led to believe that his choices have ironically robbed him of the pleasant familial future he dreamed of, while Sau Ho is returned to the familial embrace of the police force. Chung is repositioned as a benevolent father who can save his men, while Eddie too is forced to reintegrate by working with the other officers to fight cybercrimes which often intersect with those of other divisions. While the film includes several action sequences, it also insists that the major battle takes place online between hackers and police computer specialists, dramatising these online fights with CGI to slightly better effect than 2023’s Cyber Heist but still struggling to move on from an outdated iconography of the web. Even so, it’s clear that crime never pays even if a policewoman asks herself if it’s really worth it on a trip to the police cemetery. The sun has come out once again, making the dividing line between good and evil clear if also reinforcing the paternalistic authority of law enforcement under which living life “my way” will never be tolerated.

I Did It My Way is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Don’t Buy the Seller (타겟, Park Hee-kon, 2023)

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“Why do you always overreact?” a petulant craftsman eventually asks Soo-hyun, though Soo-hyun hasn’t overreacted so much as dared to assert herself in a world that often doesn’t listen to women. The irony at the centre of Park Hee-kon’s cybercrime thriller Don’t Buy the Seller (타겟, Target) is that it seemingly all unfolds because of a faulty washing machine, but like similarly themed films such as Door Lock, it soon becomes clear that Soo-hyun (Shin Hye-sun) isn’t really safe anywhere and there’s nothing this world objects to more than a woman who answers back.

In any case, it’s clear that Soo-hyun is not safe at work as her relentlessly creepy boss (Im Chul-soo) continues to sexually harass her while telling her off for taking things too personally when she finally complains. All he ever seems to do is yell at her for failing to enact his ludicrous demands while the guys at the construction site obviously don’t pay attention to her even though she’s the one managing this project. “Think he wants to work after being yelled at by a young lady?” one of the guys asks when one of the others doesn’t show up for his shift though Soo-hyun hadn’t actually yelled at him so much as asked him to please do his job and follow her instructions rather than ignore her in favour of his own judgement. 

She encounters a similar dismissiveness at the police station where she’s initially fobbed off as just another silly woman despite the younger policeman’s more sympathetic attempts to address her complaints even as his colleague leans over and explains there’s a four month backlog of fraud cases and they won’t even start to look for the guy who scammed her until then. Maybe he has a point, there are lots of victims of crime, but that only means they have lost the ability to enforce the law because the scammers know the police won’t catch them until they’re among the small number of unlucky criminals they do manage to get a lock on. Realising the police won’t help her, Soo-hyun vents her anger by tracking down the scammer on the reselling platform she tried to buy a washing machine from and leaving warnings not to buy on all his listings. Of course, this earns the stalker’s wrath because he too is another man who doesn’t like it when a woman answers back. 

But Soo-hyun has bitten off more than she can chew. This guy is seriously dangerous and into way more than just scamming people online by selling them broken appliances. We can see he has some kind of cyber lair and offers similar services to other men in which he agrees to provide a woman’s phone number, passwords, social media accounts and social security details to any man that wants them, for the right price. If he wants porn or videos posted, that’s extra. But it’s clear that a man with money can ruin a woman who says no with relative ease. Deep into his campaign, the stalker offers Soo-hyun the opportunity to end all this by paying him a large amount of money though as Soo-hyun knows there’s no guarantee he’ll keep his promise. Still after months of terror and constant harassment, she’s on the brink of giving in.

In this way, the stalker becomes an avatar of patriarchal male violence that slaps Soo-hyun right down in her place. She begins to feel insecure in the domestic environment as the stalker sends her nuisance deliveries of fast food at all hours of the day and night along with strange men who’ve been told to visit her for a good time and have evidently been given the code for the door lock. She’d only moved in here a week ago and moving out will incur a financial penalty she’s not well equipped to pay having been scammed in the first place. But the police seemingly can’t do anything while Soo-hyun is plagued by a sense of threat and unease that this person has so much control over her life and could turn up to cause her harm at any moment. Suddenly, she’s not a woman who answers back anymore but a timid and nervous zombie who can barely speak at all. 

Of course, this is exactly what the stalker wanted and what many of the men around Soo-hyun want too. They tell her to stop overreacting or that she brought this on herself by goading the scammer. They imply that she’s made herself an easy target by living alone and that buying goods second hand through apps which involve any kind of personal handover is inherently dangerous, but really they mean that like her friend Dal-ja (Lee Joo-young) she should have got married, chalked up getting scammed to experience, and above all kept quiet about it. Which is to say let her sleazy boss get away with making her feel uncomfortable as a kind of appeasement rather than challenge his behaviour or remind him that he does not have the right to make her feel this way, to abuse his position to interfere with her career, or otherwise oppress her. The message is, you don’t have to buy what they’re selling, faulty goods are after all not worth all this hassle.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Rules of Living (ルール・オブ・リビング, Greg Dale, 2023)

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A lost tourist finds a begrudging sanctuary in the home of a reluctant middle-aged woman in Greg Dale’s cross-cultural comedy, Rules of Living (ルール・オブ・リビング). Well intentioned as it may be, the film has some outdated humour and suffers from an unbalanced perspective that prioritises that of the American hero and at times uncomfortably pushes a message of Western individualism as he somehow “liberates” there heroine, Mikako (Kaho Minami), from her sense of obligation to her family and wider community. 

In a case in point, Mikako doesn’t want a roommate because her well-appointed home is a private sanctuary from the outside world and its constant judgement but is more or less forced to let Vincent (Greg Dale) in out of guilt and politeness. For his part fleeing a messy divorce and his own dissatisfaction with life under capitalism, Vincent arrives in Japan only to be somehow surprised that everything’s in Japanese and he can’t communicate with anyone because they are all too embarrassed about their English ability to respond to his questions. This results in a little well-worn humour in which his asking a portly middle-aged lady about a cheap place to stay is misunderstood and leads to an awkward situation as the apparently sexually insatiable older woman drags the naive and wholesome Vincent to a love hotel. Yet Vincent, an aficionado of Lafcadio Hearn, continues to wander round with wide-eyed wonder before rocking up Mikako’s office for more language-barrier banter and subsequently at her house despite not having made any attempt to contact her to make arrangements having befriended her daughter Chieko in Bali.

The film seems to directly contrast Mikako with her daughter who has given up a prestigious job and corporate career to go travelling leaving Mikako overstretched trying to care for her own mother alone as her health declines. Chieko’s decision is to a degree selfish in that she doesn’t answer her mother’s calls and does not even return home for her grandmother’s funeral while ironically looking down on Mikako for being a doormat who always puts the needs of others above her own as, the films argues, is expected by Japanese society. That’s not entirely wrong, though there must be a middle ground between total abandonment and selfless sacrifice in which not everything would simply be left for Mikako alone to deal with and she would have more freedom to fulfil herself outside of the expectations of others including those of Vincent. It’s notable that Mikako also seems to be dissatisfied in her career because of persistent sexism and office mores in which, at 49, she’s been more or less demoted to the ranks of office ladies after spending the rest of her working life in accounts and likely won’t be offered any further promotions, therefore justifying Chieko’s decision to quit. At the office, Mikako is treated as a maternal figure unfairly over relied upon by the boss because of her advanced skills while the younger women make too many mistakes and are slapdash in their work because they aren’t planning to stay in these jobs long term.

Meanwhile, Mikako is also under pressure to remarry especially as many seem to remark on the fact her family home is too large for her as a single woman. She’s been in a semi-serious relationship with a divorced childhood friend for some time but neither of them seem keen to give marriage another go until he too is pressured by his father to find another wife in order to take over the family business. Koichi (Kippei Shiina) is apparently the perfect man, nice, polite, well turned out and professionally successful yet there’s no real spark and Mikako feels guilty that she can’t learn to love Koichi in the way everyone else seems to love him for her. If she marries him, it will be for convenience and companionship along with the expectations of others much more than for herself. 

Her romance with Vincent is not all that convincing but born of frustration with these same social expectations and desire to put herself and her feelings first as manifested in her sudden desire to learn English. Vincent teaches English around the neighbourhood and spreads these individualist ideas around while enlivening the community through the simple act of communication as if no one had ever thought to speak to anyone else before. Yet he meets a more cynical force in the head of the language school he eventually gets a job at who is from India and offers yoga classes on the side despite never having practiced it before coming to Japan in another example of the pernicious qualities of these “expectations”. Vincent partially falls victim to them too in assuming a young woman in the staffroom is a lost student rather than a teacher simply because she looks Japanese. Nana complains no one takes her seriously because of her appearance despite her native level English and American accent. Before arriving at Mikako’s Vincent had tried to rent an apartment only to be told they don’t rent to foreigners and those that do either offer inappropriate accommodation or ask for a series of spurious additional fees. A man in the street also yells at him to go out with his own kind when seeing him with Mikako.

Essentially, Mikako’s choice is between two men, Vincent who apparently represents “freedom”, and Koichi who represents conventionality. This rather undermines the central thesis of Mikako rediscovering herself and taking agency over her life rather than as her daughter had said devoting herself entirely to the service of others. The film’s title is taken from a series of rules Mikako pastes up as condition for Vincent staying with her which included not using the bathroom or disturbing her while she’s in the living room, symbolising her desire for privacy and reluctance to let the relentlessly friendly Vincent into her life (even though being reluctant to let a total stranger and especially a man you’ve never met before stay in your house with you is completely understandable), but also hints at the “rules” that govern her own life in a conformist and patriarchal society. Some of these at least she may escape in deciding to follow her heart even if the place it leads her to has rules of its own that may not in the end be all that better.

Rules of Living screened as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Project Silence (탈출: 프로젝트 사일런스, Kim Tae-gon, 2023)

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“It’s a nation’s duty to protect its citizens wherever they are,” according to a more earnest politician, though Blue House security advisor Jung-won (Lee Sun-kyun) counters him that actually their duty only extends to those who voted for them, and they expect wise political judgment. Jung-won is a classic political lackey in that he’s intensely cynical and his every living thought is about how best to spin any given circumstances so that his boss, Hyun-baek (Kim Tae-woo), will become Korea’s next president.

There’s something quite remarkable about the extent to which Jung-won has erased himself from this equation and dedicated his life to making Hyun-baek’s a success while otherwise leaving conventional human morality at the door and pursuing a doctrine of doing only that which is most politically expedient. Some of his detachment might be explained by the fact he lost his wife some time ago to a lengthy illness and is about to send his daughter, who views him with contempt, to study abroad in Australia thanks to a few strings pulled by Hyun-baek. 

But as he later says, if Hyun-baek were actually there and seeing this for himself, he would make a different decision. Despite his cynicism, Jung-won eventually becomes a voice of authority during a moment of crisis and determines to set about rescuing the survivors rather than communicating with Hyun-baek about how best to turn this situation to their advantage. Paradoxically, he redeems the government in the eyes of those stranded on a bridge after a multi-car pileup in the middle of a particularly thick fog who come to realise that the authorities are not all that invested in rescuing them and may even be partly responsible for putting them in danger.

The Project Silence of the film’s title turns out to be one of creating genetically enhanced attack dogs who can chase a target with a specific voice. Apparently developed originally by the US and EU, the project is being researched in Korea but rendered a failure with the current batch of dogs set for “disposal”. That is, if they hadn’t been set loose by the accident and the possibly malicious actions of their handler who claims he was researching rescue dogs but was forced to reprogramme them to kill on the orders of the military. As he points out, the leader of the dogs, who has a head injury suggesting their programming has been disrupted, is only taking their revenge for their constant mistreatment at the hands of humans.

Then again, one of the ironies of Project Silence is that there is quite a lot going on from the unusually thick fog, the multi-car pileup caused by a live streamer driving recklessly for views, the toxic gas flowing from a crashed lorry, to the fact the bridge itself may collapse after the military helicopter sent to retrieve the dogs crashes and damages the support cables. All things considered, it is too much all at once considering the outlandishness of the evil dog plot. Though there are an assortment of survivors to become invested in as is usual in these kinds of films, we don’t always get to know them well enough with a series of subplots left unresolved such as the creepy behaviour of a Buffalo Bill-esque trucker who nevertheless becomes a kind of comic relief figure and eventual saviour of the group while becoming a reluctant buddy to Jung-won. Similarly, the dementia of an elderly woman (Ye Soo-jung) is intermittently brought up but never for any real reason nor is it ever fully explored, not even in her relationship with her husband who is responsible for her care. The younger of two bickering sister’s golf career does however turn out to have a practical application.

The conflict between Jung-won and his daughter, meanwhile, is largely mediated through her contempt for his callousness and resentment towards him for failing to address her mother’s death. Of course, saving the passengers is also a way to redeem himself in Kyoung-min’s (Kim Su-an) eyes much like the father in the similarly themed Train to Busan, though the awakening that Jung-won undergoes is more like the fog gradually lifting as he realises he is also being played by political manipulators while it is as he said different if you’re actually there and much harder to make the “sensible” decision to let the bridge collapse and take the potentially embarrassing evidence of their rogue science experiment with it. Perhaps that’s the real meaning of “project silence,” making sure there’s no one left to speak. But Jung-won is used to playing this game from the other side so he’s a few steps ahead and knows his best weapon is noise, tell everyone and do it right away so they don’t have time to shut you down nor can they deny it later. He may have been party to lingering authoritarianism, but has now realised that a nation’s primary duty is to protect its citizens after all, even if they voted for the other guy. 

Project Silence is available in the UK on 4K UHD courtesy of Altitude.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Chang’an (长安三万里, Xie Junwei & Zou Jing, 2023)

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It’s a strange thought, in a way, that poetry could save a nation. In reality, it didn’t quite. The An Lushan rebellion significantly weakened the Tang dynasty and contributed to its rapid decline. Nevertheless, Tang was an era in which art, culture, and freedom of thought all flourished. Animated feature Chang’an (长安三万里, Cháng’ān Sānwànlǐ), named for the imperial capital of that time, attempts dramatise the era through the lives of its poets and the eyes of Gao Shi (Yang Tianxiang) reflecting on his youthful and often distant friendship with the legendary Li Bai (Ling Zhenhe) whose poems are still recited by the school children of today.

As the film opens, Gao Shi is an old man and embattled general staring down inevitable defeat at the hands of the invading Tubos emboldened by the weakening of borders following the failed An Lushan rebellion. But that’s not the reason he’s being visited by an imperial inspector who is far more interested in his relationship with Li Bai and the political importance it may have gained. Through this framing sequence, Geo Shi narrates the previous 40 years of history as he and Li Bai each age and take different paths in life while maintaining a distant if deeply felt friendship.

To that extent, Guo Shi is the earnest and practical son of a once noble house attempting to resurrect his family legacy, while Li Bai is a free spirited libertine attempting to overcome his lowly birth as the son of a wealthy merchant to gain government office through his skill as a poet. Then again, as future great poet Du Fu (Liu Jiaoyu / Sun Lulu) remarks, in this age poetry is something anyone can do and distinguishing oneself through it is no mean feat. It is however the only option for a man like Li Bai and the film in part seems to be an advocation for meritocracy in which those of ability would be free to prosper without needing to rely on social standing or personal connections. Despite the supposedly classless society of the modern day, this world may not yet have emerged. Another hopeful laments that she alone of her brothers inherited military skill yet as a woman there’s no door that is open to her to serve her country. 

Serving one’s country is the virtue that Gao Shi praises most highly and in effect his life’s purpose while Li Bai’s is more personal advancement and the perfection of his art. His poems are often melancholy and reflect on a sense of loneliness and longing for home, or else raucous celebrations of the art of drinking. Gao Shi does not approve of Li Bai’s party lifestyle and his debauchery later places a strain on their friendship. The film tacitly implies that this decadent behaviour is behind the decline of Tang, but also the reason that art and culture flourished amid a sense of destruction and despair. Having learned a few lessons in underhandedness from Li Bai, Geo Shi in effect restores order, albeit temporarily, through strategy and courage, while Li Bai first chooses isolation and then in its opposite after being pardoned for an apparently accidental and entirely thoughtless act of treason.

But what the film is keen to emphasise is the deep-seated friendship, or perhaps more, between the two men that makes the victory possible suggesting that a society needs both practicality and art to survive, not that Gao Shi was not a great poet himself if one well aware that Li Bai surpassed him in skill and keen support his success. Even so, as Gao Shi points out, a poet is not always an easy thing to be and in his old age those who once drank with Li Bai are either dead, one beaten to death at the age of 70, exiled or imprisoned. In a sense, both men achieve their aims if perhaps not in the way they intended. Gao restores his family name, and Li Bai finds a kind of immortality in his work that he otherwise failed to find spiritually in devoting himself to Taoism. The often beautifully rendered backgrounds capture a sense of a society on the brink of eclipse, such as the striking beauty of Gao Shi’s first entry to Yongzhou with its blossoming cherry trees lit by the warm light of lanterns under a full moon, only to turn to darkness on his return amid the twilight of the Tang dynasty. 

Dazzler Media presents Chang’an in UK and Irish cinemas from 28th February.

UK trailer (Mandarin with English subtitles)

99% Cloudy… Always (99％、いつも曇り, Midori Sangoumi, 2023)

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Why do some people feel themselves entitled to ask insensitive questions at emotionally delicate moments? Kazuha (Midori Sangoumi) may have a point when she calls her oblivious uncle a bully when a lays into her about having no children at the first memorial of her mother’s passing, but still his words seem to wound her and provoke a moment of crisis in what otherwise seems to be a happy and supportive marriage.

Kazuha is a very upfront person and fond of directly telling people that she thinks she has stopped menstruating so she doesn’t think she could have a child now even if she wanted one. One of the other relatives, however, suggests that her husband, Daichi (Satoshi Nikaido), may feel differently which somewhat alarms her. The questioning had made her angry and offended, not least by the implication that a woman’s life is deemed a success only through motherhood and that those who produce no children are somehow “unproductive”, but it was all the more insensitive of her uncle to bring it up given that Kazuha had suffered a miscarriage some years previously.

The miscarriage itself appears to have resulted in some lingering trauma that’s left Kazuha with ambiguous feelings towards motherhood. Having been bullied and excluded as a child because she is autistic, Kazuha is reluctant to bring a child of her own into the world in case they too are autistic and encounter the same kind of difficulties that she has faced all her life. As the film opens, she’s trying to get in touch with someone about the results of a recent job interview but getting flustered on the phone and asking what may be perceived as too many questions all in one go. She does something similar while trying to enquire at a foster agency about a clarification of their guidelines as to whether she would be eligible to adopt as an autistic woman which she fears she will not be. It just happens that no one is available to talk to her that day as they’re all at an outing leaving only a member of the admin team behind to man the desk while Kazuha repeatedly asks the same question in the hope of a response. 

The truth is, Kazuha might have liked to raise a child but not her own while for Daichi it’s the opposite. He may still want to have a biological child but is not particularly interested in raising someone else’s. This question which has reared its head again at a critical moment immediately before it may be too late places a strain on their marriage as they contemplate a potential mismatch in their hopes and desires for the future. Daichi is reminded he has no other remaining family as his younger sister passed away of an illness some years previously and his parents are no longer around either. As he tells a younger woman at work, Kazuha is his only family while others needle them that there’ll be no one there for them in their old age should they remain childless. 

Part of the issue is a lack of direct communication as Daichi talks through his relationship issues with a colleague in trying to process Kazuha’s revelation that she felt relieved after the miscarriage given her guilt and anxiety that the baby would also be autistic which is not something that had previously occurred to him nor that he particularly worried about. The film seems to hint that Daichi has the option of moving on, perhaps entering a relationship with his younger colleague, if his desire to have a biological child outweighed that to stay with Kazuha while that is not an option for Kazuha herself who is left only wondering if she should divorce him so he can do exactly that. In flashbacks, we see her reflect on some of her past behaviour and realise that she may have inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings in speaking the truth and been shunned herself because of it. Even so, she has a warm community around her who love her as she is and are in effect an extended family. The accommodation that she finds lies in fulfilling herself through art and building a relationship with her nephew while also helping and supporting those around her. It may be cloudy 99% of the time, but there’s still a glimmer of light and a radiance that surrounds Kazuha as she embraces life as she wants to live it rather than allow herself to be bullied by belligerent uncles and the spectres of social expectation.

99% Cloudy… Always screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Cottontail (コットンテール, Patrick Dickinson, 2023)

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A recently bereaved widower travelling to Lake Windermere to scatter his wife’s ashes begins to reclaim an image of family in Patrick Dickinson’s melancholy character study, Cottontail (コットンテール). Having travelled to the Lake District in her childhood to visit her father who was working in the UK at the time, Akiko (Tae Kimura) recalled fondly a sense of familial connection symbolised by a photo she believes to have been taken on the lake’s shores and continued to wear a Peter Rabbit necklace right to her dying day.

In a poignant note to her husband Kenzaburo Lily Franky) written before her dementia worsened and left with a Buddhist priest until the time of her death, Akiko expresses regret that they were never able to go there again as a family while she was alive but would like him to scatter her ashes on Lake Windermere in the company of their Son, Toshi (Ryo Nishikido), who now has a wife and daughter of his own.

As we can see from the opening scenes, Kenzaburo is a man living at odds with the world around him. Emotionally distant, he finds it difficult to relate to his son and often quite literally shuts him out leaving Toshi hurt and resentful. To begin with, Kenzaburo insists he will go to Lake Windermere on his own and only later agrees to allow Toshi and his family to accompany him, making all the travel arrangements. Once there, however, he becomes impatient and after a minor argument over the itinerary takes off alone only to get on the wrong train and end up on the opposite side of the country as he’s kindly informed by a raucous hen party on their way to York. Forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, he’s taken in by a farmer (Ciarán Hinds) and his daughter (Aoife Hinds) who have suffered a bereavement themselves and attempt to help him process his loss while encouraging him to reconcile with his son. Presenting a kind of mirror he may bounce off while mediating these complex emotions in a second language allows Kenzaburo the opportunity to confront himself and his grief along with his feelings of inadequacy as a husband and father.

We can sense his own regret in a flashback to a meeting in a cafe shortly after Akiko was diagnosed with dementia in which she looks to Kenzaburo for reassurance but he remains in denial. She tells him that she’s afraid and can’t bear the idea of losing her family or becoming a burden to them but he simply tells her that it won’t come to that as if he were closing himself off to the reality but also from her in leaving Akiko alone to deal with her fear and loneliness in refusal to confront anything that is emotionally difficult or unpleasant. Yet Kenzaburo refuses to relinquish her memory, stubbornly carrying her ashes in a tea tin and at times holding it up as if he were showing her around and attempting to share this trip with her in a more literal way.

What threatens to devolve into a more conventional road trip drama in which Kenzaburo is helped on his way by a series of improbably kind and sagacious strangers develops into something deeper as he trudges his way through the English countryside which as it turns out is not all that aesthetically different from that of Japan and largely free of the often claustrophobic hedgerows that literally separate us from the surrounding scenery. The landscape further recalls scenes from Kenzaburo’s life as he begins to reflect on his time with Akiko and confront the reality of her loss along with his new life without her.

In effect, he’s journeying towards a recreation of Akiko’s photograph and its capture of a brief moment of familial unity in a gradual process of reconciling with Toshi and his own position as a father. Quiet and unassuming, Dickinson’s film is less a slow voyage through grief and learning to let go as it is one of gaining courage to open a door that had long been closed, Kenzaburo no longer the melancholy octopus hiding deep in the ocean but a bobbing rabbit eager to experience more of the world around him before it’s too late.

Cottontail opens in UK cinemas 14th February courtesy of Day for Night.

UK trailer (English subtitles)