Tag: 2025

What Does That Nature Say to You (그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니, Hong Sang-soo, 2025)

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“But you’ve got your father behind you,” Junhee’s (Kang So-yi) older sister Neunghee (Park Mi-so) points to her sister’s boyfriend, Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk), meeting her family for the first time despite dating Junhee seriously for three years. But that’s not the way Donghwa likes to think about it, preferring to deny his privilege and insist that, as he does not take accept anything from his famous father, he’s an “independent” man. This notion is quickly squashed by Junhee who otherwise seems to have accepted Donghwa’s way of life when she admits that it’s more like Donghwa doesn’t like accepting anything from him, but will ask for money when he’s truly desperate. Neunghee subtly tries to remind him that whatever he might say about it, his life is only possible because he has a safety net and to insist otherwise is superficial and childish. But superficial and childish is exactly what Donghwa slowly exposes himself to be in Hong Sang-soo’s latest lacerating character drama, What Does That Nature Say to You? (그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니, Geu Jayeoni Nege Mworago Hani)

Donghwa is also, apparently, a little vain in that he needs glasses but doesn’t wear them so to him the world is always a little fuzzy around the edges. This might also explain why Hong films in low grade digital, much like In Water, rendering this otherwise idyllic mountain setting somewhat ugly and ill-defined. Donghwa wasn’t even supposed to be meeting Junhee’s parents today, which is why they sat in his car round the corner for ages after he drove her from Seoul before accidentally bumping into her father so he had little choice other than to stay. He said he’d come two years ago, but for whatever reason didn’t. Neunghee thinks it’s odd they’ve been putting off marriage, cautioning her sister that the “right time” never really exists and you don’t necessarily need to overthink these things, though increasingly she seems to come to the conclusion that the relationship isn’t strong enough because of Donghwa’s insecurities and Junhee’s lack of certainty. Junhee describes her as “depressed”, though Neunghee seems quite upbeat and though you could argue is basically doing the same as Donghwa in relying on her parents while she figures things out, seems to have more of a direction and self-awareness about the way she’s living her life. 

Though the initial meeting seems to go well and Donghwa bonds with his father-in-law Oryeong (Kwon Hae-hyo), he has a minor falling out with Junhee after she objects to some of his philosophical ramblings complaining that sometimes she thinks he waxes on about the ineffability of the universe in order to escape his problems. Oryeong later says something similar, that he spends his life evading things, while Jun-hee’s mother Sun-hee (Cho Yun-hee) laments that he hasn’t yet collided with reality and that’s why his poetry lacks substance even though he claimed to be a “poet”. When he says he likes the simple life and is wary of materialism, it’s difficult to know whether it’s a real position or merely an attempt to gloss over his lack of financial standing.

A now irritated Oreyong criticises him for not having his life more in order at the age of 35. Son of a famous TV lawyer or not, he doubts Junhee will be happy with a man still working part time at a wedding venue and as an ad hoc photographer on the weekends. Everyone keeps needling Donghwa about his old banger of a car, a Kia Pride from 1996 for which Oreyong thinks he paid too much seeing as it’s not old enough to be a “classic” car nor reliable enough for use as an everyday vehicle. Donghwa says he just likes it, before admitting that he doesn’t have the money for a new one anyway. The same goes for his recent adoption of facial hair with Oreyong criticising him for only doing it half-heartedly rather than going for the full bohemian poet aesthetic, though he’s likely done it to look a bit more manly and distinguished to gloss over his increasing insecurities about being the only son of a successful man who can’t escape his father’s shadow and still doesn’t seem to have figured himself out as an independent person.

Asking Donghwa what he likes about Junhee might not be entirely fair. It’s not as if love needs a reason. But his characterisation of her as an “angel” is also superficial, even if her family’s constant remarking on her upright character might be the same. Yet for all that, this awkward meeting filled with social niceties, and the wisdom of Junhee’s parents who think this relationship is not likely to last but know it’s better to let Junhee figure that out for herself, might be the collision with reality that Donghwa has been needing in showing him how childish and superficial his behaviour and lifestyle and have really been. Or at least, he’s beginning to realise they’re right about the car and maybe it’s time he set himself up straight if he is actually serious about his future with Junhee.

What Does That Nature Say to You screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Frosted Window (흐린 창문 너머의 누군가, Kim Jong-kwan, 2025)

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The title Frosted Window (흐린 창문 너머의 누군가, heulin changmun neomeoui nugunga) refers to the film’s final segment, a meta meditation on grief and loss, but, on the other hand, it’s true enough that we sometimes look at the world through a blurred lens and meet each other through an imperfect abstraction. A three-part portmanteau film, each of the segments takes place in a different season, with the opening titles perhaps standing in for an otherwise unseen spring, and reflect the director’s flights of fancy in imagining the lives of those living in the quiet backstreets of Seochon in Seoul, which is known for its literary associations and historical architecture.

It may be its maze-like quality that gives rise to so many differing tales, but in the first segment, at least, it stands in as another place as a lovelorn artist tries to pick up various women by bothering them while they are minding their own business in public places. The first is in a German coffee shop, where he speaks to a woman in English assuming her to be a foreigner because she has international vibes and is reading a book in German, but she is actually Korean, if having lived abroad for many years, which is awkward. Nevertheless, he carries on trying to chat her up while she tolerates him. Eventually he gets the message and leaves, trying to pick up another foreign woman in the street before backing off when she’s joined by a foreign man. The artist seems to a romantic who finds inspiration in these quests for love and advises his friend, a blocked writer, to go for a walk in search of romance in order to reawaken his creativity.

But a man who is also a blocked writer played by the same actor turns up in the second part where he is both an observer and an object. A woman calls a man to an upscale bar and drinks expensive whisky with him. The man is clearly interested in her, though he has a girlfriend he’s become tired of but won’t break up with, but she seems uninterested in him even as she continues to behave flirtatiously. There’s obviously something else going on, but it’s not originally clear if she wanted to toy with him a while, is making fun of him by exploiting his attraction to her to get him to make a fool of himself (to which he gladly obliges), or has something against his unseen girlfriend, on whom this is all very unfair no matter which way you look at it. It is, however, a performance for the barman, who watches silently until the woman comes back later to ask him what he thought.

The woman, a local beautician, along with another from the florist’s who reunites with the artist in the October-set first tale, reappear in the last one echoing the sense of a fictional world that begins to take over as one story gives way to another. This time we have two artists, an actress who has been taking some time out, and a female film director she has worked with previously, who meet by chance in a cafe of which this area seems to have a lot considering its size. As the director outlines the story, we see the actress playing her role blurring the lines between the layers of “reality” present in this segment and the film as a whole. We have been, in some ways, like the barman passive observers with each of these tales performed for our benefit, but this last meta segment allows the actress to begin processing the weight of a loss which may be her own.

She is saved, in a way, by the friendly atmosphere of Seochon and the kindness of strangers that restore her sense of self-worth, both as an actress and person. The actress tells the director that though she had taken only a small break, people had already forgotten her and so her return to acting has been more difficult than anticipated with no offers of major roles, only smallish, walk-on parts. The encounter with a fan shows her that she had been missed and there are those who are waiting to see her again on screen, so her life and career had not been pointless and there is a path forward for her in the wake of her loss. This is perhaps testament to the frosty window of Seochon, home to a thousand stories, and a gentle warmth that seems to emanate even in the depths of winter. 

Frosted Window screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Blind Love (失明, Julian Chou, 2025)

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There’s none so blind as those who refuse to see, as the old saying would have it. Though in Julian Chou’s Blind Love (失明, shīmíng) the problem is often more an obsession with the gaze of others that prevents its lonely protagonists from looking within and coming to an acceptance of themselves along with what it is they really want out of life. Set before Taiwan’s legalisation of same sex marriage, the film positions patriarchal heteronormativity as the cage in which the heroine willingly imprisons herself in fear and shame.

It’s telling that on being discovered with her girlfriend Xue-jin (Wu Ke-xi) when they were university students, Shu-yi (Ariel Lin) immediately jumps to the shame she feels in having done this to her mother. When the two women are together, it’s a bubble of perfect happiness, but on gazing at herself from the outside, Shu-yi feels only disgust in her feelings for Xue-jin and at some point evidently chose “properness” and conformity. Years later, when her mother has lost her sight and is living in a nursing home, she snaps at the nurse not to call her daughter because she’s married to a doctor and therefore very busy. Though it’s an odd moment, she says this with pride as if her own life were fulfilled by her daughter’s “successful” transition to wife to a professional man and mother to his sons. But it also seems as if this continual unseeing as manifested in her mother’s literal blindness is what later leads her to take her own life when forced to look inside herself while otherwise rendered dependent on Shu-yi and her unsympathetic husband Feng (Frederick Lee).

Feng is a selfish and unkind man who rules his home with an authoritarian iron fist. When Shu-yi tentatively hints that it might be better for her mother to live with them, he doesn’t answer but then immediately needles her, asking if she’s put on weight and whether the dress she’s supposed to wear to an important dinner will still fit. The domestic environment is rendered as a prison in which there is no natural light. The furnishings are cold and grey, as if there were no love or warmth here, and Shu-yi is under constant observation to ensure she plays her roles effectively. Feng sees his family only as tools or extensions of himself. He paints the picture of a perfect family to smooth his path to career success by ingratiating himself with the influential Doctor Gu and though Mrs Gu later sees through Shu-yi and is aware of the cracks within her marriage, chooses to unsee them and encourages Shu-yi to do the same by reaccepting her duty to dissolve herself within her husband’s ambitions even if her heart lies elsewhere. 

Feng exerts the same pressures on his teenage son, Han (Jimmy Liu Jing), by insisting that he study medicine though Han is now too old to submit himself to his father’s authority. You can’t let others decide for you, he tells a friend, and is told the same by Xue-jin whom he meets by chance and unwittingly falls for not knowing that she is his mother’s long-lost love. Xue-jin might seem like a more liberated soul having divorced her husband and accepted her sexuality while pursing her art as a photographer, which is of course the art of seeing, but her drink problem also hints at her loneliness and unresolved longing for Shu-yi. “You think what we do is wrong,” she tells Shu-yix with frustration, but Shu-yi can only answer, “How could be right?” before returning to her conformist life with all of its misery.

When she tells her younger son Rui that all that matters is how other people view you and asks him why he can’t just be “normal”, it’s as if she’s talking to herself. As the three of them pass through the pride parade and Rui asks what’s going on, Feng tells him that there are two kinds of people, the “normal” and the “abnormal” and that the people parading want to be seen as “normal” though they are not. Shu-yi pushes hard on the accelerator in anger and frustration, but it’s a divide she’s internalised within herself and remains unable to see that her love for Xue-jin is normal and natural. A woman in the bathroom at Feng’s dinner suggestively offers her her lipstick, explaining that it’s “the best form of camouflage for people like us,” before kissing her and leaving having rewakened Shu-yi’s latent desire. Hiding within this world of traditional femininity is the way Shu-yi has chosen to sublimate her desires and the concurrent self-loathing, but is also, in its way, an act of self-harm and means of punishing herself that amounts to a kind of suicide.

Only while making love with Xue-jin does she become fully herself before the self-recrimination finally kicks back in. Their connection is raw and honest, filled with tenderness and yearning, yet Shu-yi struggles to embrace happiness or accept her authentic self by escaping from the patriarchal superstructure represented by her mother and her husband’s authoritarianism. Chou ends on an ambiguous note in which Shu-yi is perhaps learning to see the truth of herself, but her world still appears cold and grey as if suggesting that, in the end, this kind of happiness and fulfilment is still not permitted to her even if she has finally accepted what kind of life it is that she wants.

Blind Love screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Kokuho (国宝, Lee Sang-il, 2025)

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What does it mean to commit yourself so entirely to your art that you become it and effectively cease to exist? Playing the role of Ohatsu in Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Kikuo (Ryo Yoshizawa) asks if Ohatsu’s lover Tokubei is really resolved to die for their love. The scene is intercut with his brother and rival Shunsuke leaving the theatre, led away by Kikuo’s girlfriend Harue (Mitsuki Takahata), just as Ohatsu leads Tokubei towards their mutual fate, as if Shunsuke were agreeing that he is not resolved to give his all to art in the way Kikuo evidently feels himself to be, at least in this moment.

The roles between them are reversed several times before they eventually perform the play again, but each of them are, in effect, in a love suicide with the art of kabuki, though kabuki itself is destined to live on. In any case, the “kokuho” of the title is a living national treasure and one who has indeed embodied their art. We’re introduced to one early on, Mangiku (Min Tanaka), an ageless onnagata, or player of female roles, who has a quasi-spiritual quality and warns the young Kikuo that though his face maybe beautiful, it could also be a barrier to his art and, in the end, consume him. It is said of Mangiku that all he will leave behind him is his art. The words are spoken with pity, but this is really what it means to be a kokuho and the highest compliment that might be paid to an artist. Mangiku himself would likely approve, casting an eye around his spartan room and declaring himself unburdened. 

But Kikuo is only half-joking when he says he cut a deal with the devil to make him the best kabuki actor in Japan. As a woman he abandoned later scolds him, all his sacrifices were made by others. Actors are greedy, another laments, and it’s true enough that Kikuo feared little in his need for success. The irony is that he too was an heir, only to a yakuza dynasty to which he could not succeed. His was father was gunned down in front of him while preparing to draw his sword, while Kikuo’s rebound tattoo does him no favours in the end and his attempt to avenge his father’s death apparently fails. Nevertheless, he vies for the approval of his surrogate father and kabuki master Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe) who values his skills above those of his biological son Shunsuke (Ryusei Yokohama) who alternately resents having his birthright stolen from under from him and acknowledges that Kiku has an innate talent with which his bloodline can’t compete.

Nevertheless, there’s a genuine and enduring brotherhood between the two men that never quite slips into hate or acrimony even as circumstances conspire against them. They both want what the other has. In the kabuki world, bloodline is everything and Kikuo is viewed as a interloper usurping Shunsuke’s rightful position, while Shunsuke wants the raw talent he knows he lacks and no amount of training and commitment can buy. Yet it is in a way about resolve, or at least the willingness to give your life to the stage and die in the pursuit of art. Kikuo’s signature piece is the Heron Maiden, in which a heron falls in love with a young man and becomes a young woman. But her love is unrequited. She goes mad, and can only show her love for him by dancing until she dies. This is, in effect, Kikuo’s dance with kabuki, a waltz to the death as he yearns for the “scenery” he as been searching for and eventually finds the apotheosis of his art in the moment of the heron’s demise.

Like Lee Sang-il’s previous films Villain and Rage based on a novel by Shuichi Yoshida, the film is a poetic meditation on the price of the pursuit of art that revels in its sumptuous production design and the intricacies of the kabuki world. With shades of Farewell, My Concubine, it frames its central dynamic not quite one of straightforward rivalry but a brotherhood between two halves of one whole who each know that neither of them can really win, while becoming a kokuho is an endless pursuit of artistic perfection in which one must be resolved to kill the self and die on stage in a lover’s suicide with a forever elusive kabuki.

Kokuho screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Girl (女孩, Shu Qi, 2025)

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Taiwan may be emerging from martial law, but the cycles of patriarchal violence and oppression prove much harder to escape in Shu Qi’s touching directorial debut and portrait of a disrupted childhood, Girl (女孩, Nǚhái). Inspired by her own memories and set in the late ’80s, the film is unflinching in its depiction of mundane, domestic horror, but equally even-handed in extending understanding even to the most flawed of its protagonists who are themselves locked into a cycle of violence and self-loathing.

Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-Ying) doesn’t quite understand how her sister can be so cheerful even the other children at school make fun of her. Hsiao-lee is often criticised for looking “sullen,” and even her new friend Li-li (Lin Pin-Tung) jokes that on the rare occasion she smiles, she still looks “bitter”. But Hsiao-lee has plenty of reasons to be sorrowful and has perhaps already internalised the idea that there is no escape from her dismal circumstances. Finding a hole in the wall behind the school quite literally shows her another world, one that she later passes into in the company of Li-li who convinces her to ditch her classes and hang out with her at a sleazy video booth that is not really an age-appropriate environment for the two young girls. 

Li-li is Taiwanese-American and has recently moved to the island following her parents’ divorce. The fact that Li-li’s parents’ marriage has ended, even if she wistfully wonders if her father will suddenly jet in to repair the family, shows Hsiao-lee that the prison that is her family home has a door that could be unlocked. It’s clear that Hsaio-lee is terrified of her father (Roy Chiu) who is a violent drunk and may also be sexually abusing her. She zips herself up in a tent at night and cowers in terror as his hand presses down on the canvas, though he doesn’t like closed doors and flies into rages when he encounters them, which explains the large dent next to the handle to the door of her room. Hsiao-lee’s mother, Chuan (9m88), seems to take most of her frustrations out on her even if she tries to intervene and distract her father from further harming her.

Hsiao-lee doesn’t understand why her mother seems to resent her while doting on her sister, though we soon come to wonder if she blames her for condemning her to this kind of life. Shots of Chuan’s adolescence in rural Taiwan hint at a still more patriarchal world in which her father told her there was no need to study and if she had free time to hang out with friends she should spend it helping her grandmother instead. It’s implied that Chuan may have been assaulted while finally embracing the simple freedom of spending time with other people her age, while her father disowned her on her pregnancy declaring himself ashamed and telling her to leave and never return. Even now, she earns a meagre living as a hairdresser’s assistant and is groped by the male customers which the salon otherwise has little option other than to court. Her boss fusses over the air conditioning whenever they come in, and though Chuan may have taken a liking to Mr Chen, he is already married and only ever a symbol of the life that has eluded her. 

Chuan’s boss also tells her of a woman in Taipei who left an abusive husband and is now living happily with someone who treats her better, but Chuan continues to stick with Chiang possibly as an act of self-harm in her deep-seated self-loathing. Chiang doesn’t always seem to have been that way, but he’s otherwise someone who can’t fit into the contemporary society and is only employed thanks to a very understanding friend of his late father. Having gone too far and realised that Chuan may leave him if he continues to beat and rape her, he tries to reform, but it doesn’t last long and he’s soon back to drunkenly riding his scooter through town in the middle of the night. He too may feel hard done by, but it can’t excuse his behaviour nor the authoritarian terror of his home in which he takes out the frustrations of his fractured manhood on Chuan and Hsiao-lee. 

Chuan is imprisoned within the house and can find no escape from it, even when Hsiao-lee directly asks her to divorce him. Hsaio-lee might, however, be able to get out but only be accepting exile from her family and leaving her mother and sister behind at her father’s mercy. Given the omnipresence of male failure, there’s something quite heartening about the female solidarity that arises between Hsiao-lee and Li-li even if their circumstances are quite different from each other. Li-li is mired in the collapse of her family and longs for its repair with her father’s return while resentful of the unfairness of being exiled to an unfamiliar country where she’s looked after by her grandmother whom she can’t understand, presumably because she speaks Taiwanese rather than the Mandarin her mother made her keep up in America, while Hsiao-lee is trapped and looking for a way to free herself from her father. On a trip to the local shop, she ominously eyes up the rat poison while Li-li buys some sweets.

But even as Taiwan emerges from the authoritarian superstructure of the martial law era, patriarchal violence refuses to die and it’s only through an act of maternal sacrifice, framed as rejection and a continuation of that same cycle of violence now enacted by her mother, that Hsaio-lee finds a more literal kind of escape. Only once her father is gone does light return to the house and the possibility of healing the disrupted relationship with her mother become a reality. Beautifully written and elegantly directed, the film has a very genuine sense of place with its busy alleyways and bustling streets. The kids at school might cheerfully sing that there’s no place like home, but for Hsiao-lee home might be the scariest place of all and the one it’s the most difficult to escape.

Girl screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Yakushima’s Illusion (たしかにあった幻, Naomi Kawase, 2025)

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When is it that you can say someone is really dead? Grief-stricken paediatric organ transplant co-ordinator Corry (Vicky Krieps) finds herself pondering just this question while in Japan exploring differing attitudes to transplant surgery in Naomi Kawase’s latest, Yakushima’s Illusion (たしかにあった幻, Tashika ni Atta Maboroshi). Returning to her roots, Kawase includes several documentary-style sequences in which Japanese medical staff discuss traditional notions of life and death along with those relating to organ transplantation which remains taboo even in an otherwise advanced medical society.

One doctor relates that his own child had a transplant and they were plagued with harassment for “stealing” people’s organs. There’s a kind of ghoulishness in play, as if this practice were unholy in some way or were taking on a debt that can never be repaid. But from the perspective of the parents of children waiting for matches, there is indeed an undeniable sense of guilt involved given the knowledge that for their child to survive, another must have died and another parent just like them has suffered a loss. When a match finally comes up for one little boy, his mother feels conflicted knowing that a little girl that was ahead of them in the queue didn’t make it  and now it’s like they’ve taken her slot. Meanwhile the parents of the child that died battle their grief and confusion but decide to allow his organs to be made made available so that he will in some sense at least on. 

In this case, it was a heart transplant which presents the most complicated of existential questions given that traditionally death is marked by the cessation of the heart beating. Even when brain death has occurred, the body is considered to be living which obviously makes something like organ harvesting difficult if the patient is still considered to be “alive”. But on the other hand, it also means that death is infinitely postponed when the cessation of the heartbeat cannot be confirmed. Corry is haunted by the memory of an lover who disappeared without a trace and later discovers his family are trying to have him declared dead to smooth over an inheritance issue, though she objects because to her Jin is still alive even he’s not around.

It’s on Yakushima that Corry first meets Jin (Kanichiro), and one could say that he’s the illusion of the title. Indeed the Japanese title hints at his ethereal quality in translating as something like “the apparition that was really there”. He has an otherworldly quality and seems to exist outside of time with his old-fashioned camera and impish personality. Part of the film is set around Tanabata which is rooted in the tale of the Cowherd and the Weaver, Orihime and Hikiboshi, who were separated by a river and permitted to meet only on one day a year. This mythical quality adds to the sense that perhaps Jin was more ghost than man, a figment of Corry’s memory or a manifestation of her desires who was nevertheless himself consumed by loneliness. In a phenomenon known as “johatsu” in which people suddenly disappear without warning, Jin leaves her life as abruptly as he entered it leaving her with a series of regrets and lingering questions. 

It’s this shifting sense of dislocation with which the film plays in moving, as Jin describes it, through the shifting moments of the heart exchanging linear time for emotional chronology. Having lost her mother in childbirth, Corry is consumed by a fear of abandonment and incurable loneliness that is compounded by the fact that people really do disappear from her life with alarming frequency which is perhaps why she is so invested in saving the lives of these young children. Bonding with a couple who lost their son to illness and now operate a bento stand supporting other parents, she searches for a way to let go without letting go which she perhaps finds in the serenity of nature now captured with sweeping drone shots such as that which takes us inside a tree in search of the self. Frequent cameos from former Kawase collaborators such as Machiko Ono and Masatoshi Nagase in small roles add to the elegiac feeling even if the final message seems to be that life goes on in the image of a still beating heart giving new life and new hope even in the midst of death and loss.

Yakushima’s Illusion screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

The Ugly (얼굴, Yeon Sang-ho, 2025)

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Poets and philosophers have long debated the true nature of “beauty”. “Living miracle of Korea” Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo) has spent most of his life pondering it, not least because he is blind and is often told that the figures he carves on name stamps are “beautiful”. For his customers, “beauty” is rooted in the visual, and for those reasons it seems to them impossible for Yeong-gyu to experience it. It doesn’t occur to them that he may experience “beauty” in other ways or that beauty is not necessarily as connected with vision as they assume it to be. 

But then again, in Yeon Sang-ho’s dark fairytale The Ugly (얼굴, Eolgul), the concept of “beauty” is itself inverted to become something eerie and uncomfortable in symbolising the forced harmony of an authoritarian society. In the present day, a TV documentary crew is interviewing blind stamp carver Yeon-gyu, though it’s obvious the producer is becoming frustrated with Yeong-gyu’s evasiveness while simultaneously hoping to tell an inspirational story about how he overcame adversity that is in itself a little exploitative. She gets an ironic lucky break when, midway through filming, the remains of Yeong-gyu’s wife and the mother of his only son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min) are discovered following her disappearance 40 years previously.

Yeong-gyu had told Dong-hwan, who was a baby at the time, that Young-hee had simply run away and does not seem to have made much attempt to look for her. Though this might seem odd, it was after all a time when people just disappeared without warning and asking questions would only put those left behind in danger, so perhaps it’s understandable that Yeong-gyu, a man marginalised by his disability, simply accepted the fact of her absence and chose to believe that she had left him even if it conflicts with his description of her as “kind”. Everyone describes Young-hee of having been a “kind” person even while they otherwise scorn her as “ugly”, describing her as a monstrous creature with an appearance they find gruesome though almost comical rather than frightening. 

When Young-hee’s estranged family turn up at the funeral, they too are embarrassed by her ugliness and crassly make a point of clarifying to Dong-hwan that they don’t want to share their inheritance with him. According to them, Young-hee left home as a young child after telling their mother she’d seen their father with another woman. Their mother beat and her and refused to believe it, while the other family members resented Young-hee for raising an inconvenient truth and fracturing the harmony of this “perfect” family. Young-hee encounters something similar while working at clothing factory where she challenges the boss after finding out that he has raped an employee, but is again ignored and then silenced. Years later in the present day, the former workers claim that it’s thanks to the boss that they survived, echoing the defenders of dictator Park Chung-hee who credit him with curing the intense poverty of the post-Korean War society and turning the nation into the economic powerhouse it is today no matter how many died in his pet construction projects such as the Gyeongbu Expressway. 

Young-hee too works under these exploitative conditions similar to those seen in A Single Spark. When her boss refuses her a bathroom break, she is too frightened to defy him and ends up soiling herself earning herself the unpleasant nickname “Dung Ogre”. Yet when she sees injustice she tries to combat it and refuses to back down even when others shun her. Gradually we begin to realise that the reason Young-hee is called “ugly” is because she speaks the truth and reflects the “ugliness” of those around her. Years later, the colleague who told her she’d been raped by the boss blames herself for her death, knowing that Young-hee was only trying to help her and probably didn’t realise that exposing the boss would kill her only resultiing in a quest to identify the victim. “My shame became his forgiveness,” she reflects, regretting that she too scorned Young-hee and that her failure to speak enabled him to go on abusing other women with impunity. Afraid of the factory boss’ violent thugs and desperate to keep their jobs, no one challenges him least of all Yeong-gyu who tells his wife to shut up and keep the peace.

But for Yeong-gyu, Young-hee’s “ugliness” has other implications in that it reflects his own insecurities and marginalisation. Along with using various derogatory terms to describe Young-hee’s ugliness, the interviews throw in a series of ableist slurs and it’s clear that they also consider Yeong-gyu to be “ugly” because of his otherness. Yeong-gyu resents that they look down him, and learning that Yeong-hee is considered to be “ugly” is consumed with a deep sense of humiliation as if he were being mocked and laughed at for having such an “ugly” wife while, paradocxically, she must only have been interested in him as a means of bringing about his degredation. 

But then, this visual notion of “beauty” is meangingless to Yeong-gyu who has been blind since birth so it ought not to matter to him whether Young-hee is objectively beautiful to the sighted. Notions of visual beauty are socially and culturally defined and shift over time, but at this time and in this society being “beautiful” is it seems important, not least because it implies conformity. Young-hee’s “ugliness” is then transgressive and empowering in its defiance of the code of silence that defines authoritarianism, but within it Yeong-gyu finds only the undermining of his masculinity and humiliation in being found unworthy. That he’s now called a “living miracle of Korea” for overcoming those hard times is a cruel irony and a comment on the state of the contemporary nation forged in dictatorship and tempered by a hyper-capitalistic disregard for human rights in the quest for prosperity. Confronted by these truths, Dong-hwan finds himself with a choice, but in the end may take after his father after all in his own desire to tidy away unpleasantness and avoid having to accept the “ugly” reality. 

The Ugly screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Project Y (프로젝트 Y, Lee Hwan, 2025)

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The opening sequence of Lee Hwan’s Project Y (프로젝트 Y) seems to echo the iconic intro of Millennium Mambo as two women look back over their shoulders as they traverse a seemingly endless tunnel. Later we realise that the tunnel is their passage out of the underworld of the red light district towards escape and liberation, not only from patriarchal control and their impossible lives, but from a generational legacy of abuse and entrapment.

Indeed, Ga-young (Kim Shin-rok) the adoptive mother of Mi-sun (Han So-hee) and birth mother of Do-kyung (Jeon Jong-seo), is fond of asking who is saving who when we’re all the same, and insisting that your life is yours to save. It’s a message the girls have taken to heart, yet they remain devoted to each other in a relationship that also appears to be romantic or perhaps has already transcended romance in the depth of their connection. Mi-sun has been working as a karaoke bar hostess for a number of years while Do-kyung works as her driver and occasional courier for various shady types. They plan to leave the red light district now Mi-sun has saved enough money to buy a florist’s from its retiring owner along with a downpayment on a apartment, but it turns out half the girls in the red light district have been scammed by a dodgy estate agent at the behest of local kingpin Blackjack (Kim Sung-cheol).

It seems that Blackjack may have done this deliberately in a nefarious plot to increase the girls’ debts and prevent them from leaving. Blackjack’s callousness is signalled early on when he tells the girls’ manager to get rid of a drooping plant if she can’t manage it and space the others out to disguise the gap. But on the flip side, Blackjack has a young and very silly wife who has got into host clubs and has been spending all his money on a young man who is openly exploiting her. Though the men are ostensibly in the same position as the women, they still have a greater power in preying on female loneliness while the women, by contrast, may be indulging in this behaviour precisely because it gives them an illusion of control they ordinarily don’t have a patriarchal society. Blackjack’s wife throws expensive gifts at her favourite host in an attempt to persuade him to enter a deeper relationship while blabbing her husband’s secrets. The host doesn’t seem to have realised it might be a bad idea to be messing around with Blackjack’s wife, while stealing his secret stash is going to annoy him even more and Blackjack’s not the sort of man you want to be annoyed with you.

Blackjack watches a video of a dog drowning in a tarpit while he works out, and this particular tarpit acts as a kind of vortex drawing all the greed in the red-light district towards it. Hearing about the plot to rob Blackjack, the girls decide to rob him first and blame it on a local hoodlum. But after retrieving a bag with the exact amount they lost, discover a stash of gold bars. It’s taking them too that damages the integrity of their quest and sets them on a course towards a direct confrontation with Blackjack as they try their hardest to escape the red light district for good.

The implication seems to be that if they take the money, they’ll never really be free because it stemmed from the source of their exploitation. This might in a way be what Ga-young is trying to teach the girls in her otherwise hard to read behaviour, sacrificing herself to save them from their poor decision to cross Blackjack while trying to catapult them free of the red-light district though she knows she herself can never leave. Slick and stylish, Lee’s noir stays just on the right side of realism despite its recurrent grimness and larger than life characters such as the Blackjack’s icy female enforcer Bull and captures both girls’ desire for a “normal life” of working in the day and sleeping at night, along with the cheerful solidarity of the hostesses as they band together to take revenge on Blackjack and finally free themselves from this world of constant betrayal and exploitation.

Project Y screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The People Upstairs (윗집 사람들, Ha Jung-woo, 2025)

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A moribund marriage finds itself haunted in the reflective image of the couple upstairs in Ha Jung-woo’s take on the Spanish film, Sentimental. A very ’70s sex farce, the film is, in other ways, a refreshingly modern examination of contemporary relationships that ultimately comes down on the side of sexual freedom and personal fulfilment rather than encouraging its unhappily married protagonists back into a socially conformist cage of merely settling for an unsatisfying existence.

You can tell Jeong-ah (Gong Hyo-jin) is unsatisfied by the way she accidentally embarrasses the life model at the art class where she teaches part-time to the point he feels he has to cover himself up even though it defeats the purpose of him being there. Her work as a temporary art teacher is also a symbol of her defeated hopes having given up on her creative practice to focus on more practical concerns while her husband, Hyun-soo (Kim Dong-wook), is a struggling film director who is currently on the 48th draft of a project to turn an unsuccessful film pitch into a TV drama that he’s been working on for the last four years. 

Neither of them are getting much sleep because the rambunctious nightly lovemaking of the couple upstairs keeps them up at night, but these days Hyun-soo sleeps on a fold up mattress in his office which is full of empty boxes of instant ramen like some student bachelor pad. Though they’re only in adjacent rooms, they communicate through Kakao talk and are otherwise leading separate lives. That might be why Jeong-a is drawn to the self-help YouTube channel run by Soo-kyung (Lee Hanee), her upstairs neighbour, which assures that no one can cure the loneliness inside you and the fastest way to better relationships is to stop expecting too much from other people. 

But it’s clear that Jeong-a, at least, is looking for something more which is likely why she decides to invite the upstairs neighbours over for dinner. Hyun-soo isn’t keen on the plan and tries to force her to cancel, then only agreeing to stay an hour while making passive-aggressive comments and veering close to telling the Kims that they can hear everything that’s going on upstairs and they don’t like it. Soo-kyung and her husband Mr Kim (Ha Jung-woo) are, however, the inverse of Jeong-a and Hyun-soo in their hyper-sexualised relationship and apparently solid marriage. They’ve come with something to say too, but while Jeong-a is increasingly receptive to their entreaties and open about her dissatisfaction, Hyun-soo is rude and indignant, resentful of what he sees as a perverse intrusion into his otherwise very “normal” life.

Indeed, part of this is that Mr Kim keeps making subtle digs at his masculinity in needling him about his lack of career success and inability to get this TV drama off the ground after apparently working on it for four years. This is also the root of Hyun-soo’s own insecurities and withdrawal from Jeong-a, unable to see himself as a man in the wake of his dissatisfying career. But Mr Kim is also a contradictory picture of masculinity. A teacher of Chinese characters who really wanted to be a calligrapher, he cuts a fairly authoritarian figure, but is otherwise a modern new man who is domesticated and open with his feelings. The Kims bring a dish to the dinner that Mr Kim has made while he orgiastically tears into pomegranate and suggestively squeezes lemons. He fixes drinks, makes tea, and gets out of the way while his wife does her work. 

But at the same time, the film seems to dial back on the inherent queerness of the Kims’ sexual practice by eliding the homoeroticism between Hyun-soo and Mr Kim who is keen to recruit him because his apparently explosive essence. This internalised homophobia is also a manifestation of Hyun-soo’s conventionality and desire for middle-class properness to bring order to his life, if only superficially, by continuing to live in a simulacrum of a marriage that leaves husband and wife unhappy. The recently remodelled flat is full of the signs of aspiration from the posh china to elegant modern decor. But it’s a row about the curtains that most obviously signals the cracks in their relationship. Jeong-a doesn’t want any because she wants a more open and transparent marriage, while Hyun-soo can’t live without them because he craves repression and can’t understand a life without it.

In any case, during their incredibly weird evening with the Kims, the couple hit rock bottom that is also a kind of epiphany liberating them from their misconceptions and the inertia of their married life. Hyun-soo, finally, begins to realise that Jeong-a is right when she says he uses sarcasm to run away from his problems and if he wants to save his marriage, he’ll have to be a little more emotionally honest and open to compromise. Despite his squeamishness, the film seems to come down on the side of the Kims who are living happy and fulfilling lives in embracing their sexuality, while it is Hyun-soo, by contrast, who must learn to open up even if he’s not quite ready to get in the lift.

The People Upstairs screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force (封神第二部：战火西岐, Wuershan, 2025)

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Picking up where the previous film left off, Yin Jiao (Chen Muchi) has been taken to the immortal realm of Kunlun where they first assume it’s too late to save him what with his head and his body having become separated. But on a closer look, the Immortals realise that the sheer force of Yin Jiao’s resentment has sustained him. They can save him after all, but when they try, he usurps all their power and becomes something that not even they can control. The future of the Shang, in fact of China itself, now rests with him. Will he be able to contain his rage and fight for a better world, or will it get the better of him and he’ll burn it all to hell in revenge?

To that extent, the second part in the Creation of the Gods trilogy inspired by the classic foundation myth The Investiture of the Gods, presents a similar problem to the first. Given the opportunity to save the world or enrich oneself, what will most people choose? Yin Shou chose the latter and is still in thrall to his fox demon lover who is now herself in mortal peril having transferred Yin Shou’s wounds to herself to heal him to the extent that her own body, that of rebellious lord Su Hu’s daughter Daj (Narana Erdyneeva), has begun to decay. 

There is something quite tragic and poignant about the almost romance that arises between Ji Fa and Deng Chanyu who bond over the realisation that they are really fighting for the same thing, family, even he fights for the living and she the dead. During her time in Xiqi, Deng Chenyu gains a glimpse of another life in which she might find the home she’s been searching for only to realise that she must sacrifice herself for its survival though in doing so she might also achieve her dream of dying on the battlefield with her family. As the people of Xiqi hold a celebration for Yin Jiao’s return, two old ladies grab Jiang Ziya (Huang Bo) and try to pull him into a reel. He protests he has more important matters to deal with, but as the old ladies remind him happiness is the most important matter. In effect, that’s what each of them is fighting for in opposing the by now quite literally lifeless tyranny that Yin Shou represents. His romance with the fox demon has its poignancy too in her apparent willingness to sacrifice herself for him and resultant powerlessness to save herself while he can only rely on the might of giants and demonic magic in order to cement his rule.

Accelerating the pace, Wuershan moves from set piece to set piece beginning with an epic horse chase along a narrow mountain road as Ji Fa and Den Chanyu (Nashi) face off against each other while building progressively towards the assault in Xiqi and confrontation with end boss Wen Zhong (Wu Hsing-kuo). The influence of the supernatural only grows in strangeness as Wen Zhong uses his third eye to create deadly beams of light that paralyse all caught in their beams to make his soldiers’ jobs that much easier as they wipe out Xiqi. Demonic magician Shen Gongbao (Xia Yu) lurks in the background preparing a huge zombie army with his “Deathworms” spell and continuing to disconcertingly float about as a severed head. This time around, altruism squarely defeated selfishness, but who knows if the world will be as lucky next time?

Trailer (English / Simplified Chinese subtitles)