Tag: Cho Kyung-hun

Gangnam Zombie (강남좀비, Lee Soo-sung, 2023)

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A struggling YouTuber takes on sexism, classism and the zombie apocalypse in Lee Soo-sung’s office-bound horror Gangnam Zombie (강남좀비). Lee apparently chose the title to appeal to international audiences hoping to cash in on the cachet of Gangnam Style and the film does have a made for export aesthetic, but even so it tackles some of the ills of contemporary Korea from work-based sexual harassment to the difficulties of getting a foot in the door in media and calls from your mother asking you to go home and farm melons with her rather than hang around failing to make it Seoul. 

For all that, however, Hyun-seok (Ji Il-joo) is a fairly cheerful man actually quite excited about asking his colleague Min-jeong (Park Ji-yeon ) out to a Christmas concert even if voices on the radio warn that we’re not so much living in a post-pandemic world as with a virus that could easily mutate again and there’s no telling when the next great pathogen may arise to kill us all off for good. This is essentially what the film suggests the zombie virus is, though the implication that it was shipped in from China may be in fairly poor taste along with the immediate allusion to the first cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2019. In any case, patient zero acquires the virus from a zombie cat apparently trapped inside a container vessel he was in the middle of robbing and then goes on to kill his accomplice. 

Meanwhile the film devotes much of its time to the travails of Hyun-seok who is accosted by the landlady of the building where his office is because his boss is way behind on their rent while Hyun-seok counters he hasn’t been paid for three months either. The boss is also sexually harassing Min-jeong but she feels she can’t say anything because it was difficult for her to get this job and she’s worried about being blacklisted if people find out she reported her harassment. Hyun-seok had run into her outside work standing up for two women against to two chauvinistic men who’d apparently tried to use a date rape drug on one only her friend had noticed and saved her. Min-jeong feels confident standing up to them, citing the law to prove her point, but has mixed feelings when Hyun-seok intervenes pointing out that if they get lawyers it could be him going to jail not them. 

But then again, the law’s not much use in a zombie apocalypse. Hyun-seok is also a reserve member of the national Taekwondo team which is certainly a handy skill to have, but it’s also true that he sometimes ironically falls into a sexist hero mode in his desire to protect Min-jeong even if he does teach her a few moves she can use against both zombies and sleazy bosses allowing her to hold her own and in fact save him on more than one occasion. Meanwhile they are both saddled with the snooty landlady who is forever complaining that “the poor” have no manners, sense of responsibility, or inclination to save up for things while insisting no one call the police because it’ll lower the property prices and she’s trying to sell the building. It might be tempting to see her as an embodiment of a rabidly capitalist society consuming its workers and turning them into mindless, flesh-hungry drones if it weren’t perhaps also true that the film is not all that sympathetic about Hyun-seok’s failure to make it as a YouTuber. Perhaps he ought to listen to his mother and go home to farm melons after all. 

Lee does his best with a limited budget, as Hyun-seok and Min-jeong desperately try to escape the corporate prison of the office building to seek freedom and safety outside but largely saves the zombie action for the climactic final sequences in returning to the film’s opening while otherwise focussing on Hyun-seok’s romantic diffidence and the problematic atmosphere in his moribund live-streaming office. But then again it seems to say that just because you got away once doesn’t mean you’re safe or the aggressors of a dog eat dog society won’t necessarily wake back up when you least expect it to embody the city once again consuming those who cannot escape it with increasingly bloody violence. 

Gangnam Zombie is released in the US on Digital, DVD, and blu-ray on Sept. 26 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Beauty Water (기기괴괴 성형수, Cho Kyung-hun, 2020)

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“Nothing matters more than being beautiful” according to an ironic statement made by a crazed revenger apparently both consumed by and resentful of South Korea’s obsession with conventional “beauty” standards. Beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder, but in this case the beholder has a noticeably conformist eye which is why it’s become something of a running joke that every manufactured pop star, model, or actress, has the same face. Not to be considered “beautiful” is to be relegated to a kind of underclass in which one’s thoughts and achievements are not accounted credible to the extent that employment prospects and class status are often dependent on meeting closely controlled constructs of physical beauty. Though it is true that men are also increasingly subject to these same definitions of attractiveness, they are not usually faced with the same kind of “invisible wall”, as the heroine of Cho Kyung-hun’s animation Beauty Water (기기괴괴 성형수, Gigigoegoe Seonghyeongsu) later puts it, which so limits a woman’s prospects in the fiercely patriarchal society. 

Yaeji (Moon Nam-sook) is a case in point. Ironically working as a makeup artist, she is regularly insulted by those around her including diva of the moment Miri (Kim Bo-young) who has her banished from the room, not wanting to see such an “ugly pig” so early in the morning. Only new recruit actor Ji-hoon (Jang Min-hyeok) treats her with any kind of kindness, remarking on the peculiar beauty of her eyes and later suggesting they do his makeup in a quiet corridor so she won’t be subject to Miri’s green room tantrums. Unexpectedly asked to fill-in for an absent extra sitting at a table laden with food, she later finds herself going viral, branded a “greedy fatty” online while journalists start bothering her at home trying to get her side of the story. She locks herself away in her room and refuses to come out. It’s then that she receives a mysterious text message followed by a parcel containing “Beauty Water”, an experimental substance which claims it can make even the least attractive of people “beautiful”.

“I just want to be loved” Yaeji plaintively claims, fully believing love is something you cannot have when you are not beautiful. Tragically she later realises that she was loved after all in recalling her parents’ reassurances during a traumatic childhood episode in which she came second in a ballet competition convinced that she danced better than the other girl but lost out because of her “ugliness”, but rather than learning to love herself in rejection of socially defined notions of conventional attractiveness Yaeji goes down the dark path of the quick fix entrusting her future to Beauty Water. She rebrands herself as Sul-hye and embarks on the cynical life of a vacuous influencer, dating various wealthy men but dismissing them all in her caustic interior monologue now confident enough to feel she can do better but leveraging only her looks in order to catch a useful man rather than trying to forge a life of independence. She is now fully a prisoner of the oppressive and tightly regimented gender-based social codes of a fiercely patriarchal society. 

Nevertheless, in the grand tradition of experimental serums, Beauty Water changes her soul as well as her face. Obsessed with the pursuit of perfection in beauty, Sul-hye becomes increasingly violent and aggressive, bullying her parents into lending her money for extra treatment by holding them responsible for giving birth to an unattractive child. We hear TV reports of young women in their 20s going missing and half-wonder if Sul-hye herself or someone like her, another victim of Beauty Water, may be responsible, but equally we see that the entire entertainment industry which Sul-hye is now trying to enter as another means of attaining success and fulfilment is entirely built on the exploitation of female “beauty” which is itself used as a means of control. Ji-hoon, apparently kind and sensitive, retires from showbiz because he can’t live with its manipulative cruelty and warns Sul-hye about Miri’s manager whom he believes bought Miri her career through pimping her out to “powerful” men and then embezzled all her money. Miri has since gone mysteriously missing. 

Finally we’re shown that appearances can be deceptive, that the “beautiful” are not always nice, nor exceptional in any other way than their physical appearance, and are unfairly prized by a superficial society. Judged for her purchases at the convenience store Yaeji stumbles on the way home while her building’s security guard offers no help, only the rude instruction that she should lose some weight then she’d be able to walk better. Meeting Sul-hye, the same guard reacts quite differently. Suddenly nothing is too much trouble, which might just be a problem of the opposite order in its vaguely threatening creepiness but just goes to show the extent to which a woman like Yaeji is held in contempt while those like Sul-hye are placed on a pedestal. 

Internalising a sense of shame and inadequacy in “failing” to meet these “arbitrary” standards, Yaeji is content to destroy in order to remake herself. “Say goodbye to the face you know”, Beauty Water’s instructional video teases before descending into surreal gore as a woman literally slices away her ugly facade to expose the beauty hidden beneath. Reminiscent of Perfect Blue, Beauty Water’s B-movie sensibilities send Yaeji/Sul-hye into increasingly paranoid and uncertain territory, desperate to remain “beautiful” so that she might be loved but never learning to love herself while quietly murdering her essential self to attain a soulless image of idealised beauty. A late swerve into an unintended transphobia nevertheless undermines the central messages of the dangers inherent in society’s obsession with aesthetic perfection as the heroine struggles to escape her internalised shame only in an extreme act of self-destructive masking. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)