Tag: Jeon Yeo-been

Dark Nuns (검은 수녀들, Kwon Hyeok-jae, 2025)

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Large organisations have a tendency to gloss over inconvenient truths, but is it really in keeping with the teachings of the Church to ignore a confirmed case of demonic possession and allow a boy to die rather than admit that demons are real and members of the clergy are conducting successful exorcisms? According to Sister Giunia (Song Hye-kyo), a chain-smoking nun with a penchant for vulgar language, it is not, but she is largely hamstrung because of the ingrained misogyny of the patriarchal superstructure of the Catholic religion.

A spin-off from 2015’s film The Priests, Dark Nuns (검은 수녀들, Geomeun Sunyeodeul) goes in hard for the Church’s hypocrisy. As Giuna squares off against a powerful demon when taking over from two priests who’ve botched an exorcism on a teenage boy, it taunts her that the blood of all the demons she has slain will echo in her womb like a drum. There’s a suggestion that the existence of a nun is itself is an affront to God, as if a woman who has rejected her maternity and remained celibate is an aberration suggesting that a woman’s only proper role lies in motherhood. The fact that Giuna is later diagnosed with uterine cancer implies the same, as if she has cursed herself in her decision to serve God and become a bride of Christ. In her final confrontation with the demon, it tells her again that she will die of the tumour in her womb, a fact she already knows, but Giunia counters that she will exorcise the demon from this boy and use her womb to imprison it. Which is to say, she will kill him with her maternity and thereby fulfil her ideal role by becoming a “mother” to this demon, and symbolically to Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin) the possessed boy, before condemning them both to the flames. 

This fact itself is ironic, as the council at the Church refused her request to conduct an exorcism because she is not ordained and “only” a nun. Of course, a woman cannot be ordained in the Catholic Church and the priesthood is open only to men. Her powerlessness within the organisation makes it easy for them to dismiss what she is saying while writing her off as a crazed devotee of the weird teachings of Father Kim, the priest from the earlier film. When they finally do give permission for an “unofficial exorcism” after Giuna has contacted the Rosicrucians in Rome to borrow some holy artefacts necessary for the ritual, the council inform her that the exorcism will be performed by Father Paolo (Lee Jin-wook). A sceptic who believes demonic possession is a psychological phenomenon not a spiritual one, Father Paolo is an odd choice but there is something quite moving and transgressive when in he fact takes off his priestly robes and places them over Giunia’s shoulders, ordaining her and acknowledging both that what she has said is true and that she is the only person who can carry out this exorcism. 

This is doubly true as Father Paolo had also tried to use the teachings of the Church to press another nun, Sister Michela (Jeon Yeo-been), by leading her to believe that her own spiritual awareness was a psychological illness that she should struggle to overcome through faith and medicine. It seems that Michela and other women like her may have found themselves retreating within Catholicism to reject the destiny of becoming a shaman while she herself was placed in a Catholic orphanage as a “cursed” child born between a human and a demon. Giuna had friend who was once a fellow nun but has now left to assume her true calling as a shamaness. The two remain good friends and often work together while Giuna is open to the presence of other gods and other forms of spiritual divination such as Michele’s talent with the Tarot. As such, all of these practices exist within a wider spiritual universe which is another challenge to the Church’s oppressive rigidity in its denial of folk beliefs and ancient traditions. After all, there is no real gender bias in shamanism, or if there is, it runs the other way for the majority of shamans are women. 

In any case, beating the demon requires everyone to work together for a common goal using, as the Rosicrucian father says, “all available means”. Through participating in the exorcism, Sister Michela begins to accept her own identity later continuing to work with Deacon Choi to track down the remaining 12 Manifestations while accepting Sister Giuna as a mentor figure. They are each in a way freed from the Catholic Church while simultaneously remaining inside of it as they progress with their mission of quieting the demonic forces at large in the world and protecting the innocent from their rippling evil. 

Dark Nuns is released digitally in the US July 15 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Harbin (하얼빈, Woo Min-ho, 2024)

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Ahn Jung-geun is one of the most well-known figures of modern Korean history and his story has indeed been dramatised several times before, but what’s unusual about Woo Min-ho’s espionage thriller Harbin (하얼빈) is the way it tries to sublimate Jung-geun the individual in favour of making him an emblem of the common man. As such, the film is more egalitarian than might be assumed and ultimately praises the integrity and resilience of the Korean people who save their country and their culture in a more spiritual than literal sense.

Indeed, Ito Hirobumi (played by Japanese actor Lily Franky), former prime minister of Japan and the first Resident General of Korea after it became a Japanese protectorate, remarks that he has always been sceptical of the annexation because though they have been ruled by “foolish kings and corrupt officials” the Korean people will continue to be a thorn in his side. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s attempt to invade Korea was defeated by a volunteer army and a charismatic admiral, Yi Sun-sin. Then again, a Japanese soldier remarks that it will be difficult to find such a hero in the Korea of today, a pointed comment that implies Ahn Jung-geun is just such a hero through the film skirts around the fact his assassination of Ito did not in the end prevent Korea’s annexation which was completed in 1910, while the Independence Movement did not succeed in liberating in Korea which regained its independence when the Japanese Empire collapsed at the end of the war and even then was subjected to a period of occupation by US forces before its sovereignty was restored. 

What Jung-geun becomes is a kind of torch bearer for another Korea serving as a moral compass and preventing those around him from becoming just as bad as the Japanese whose cruelty they resist. As the film opens, Jung-geun’s comrades are awaiting his return after going missing following a disastrous encounter with Japanese forces. Despite having won the initial battle while heavily outnumbered, Jung-geun’s decision to release the Japanese commander, Mori (Park Hoon), as a prisoner of war results in a counterstrike in which his forces are all but wiped out. His comrades had been against the decision and now doubt his abilities and judgement along with a new suspicion that should he return he may have been captured and turned by the Japanese to spy on them. But Jung-geun’s decision signals his righteousness and refusal to give in to the cruelties of war. He releases Mori because it is the right thing to do. Executing prisoners of war is immoral by commonly held standards of war, and he pities Mori as a husband and father. He perhaps also hopes that it is a gesture of good will that shows him the Independence fighters are just and reasonable. 

But just and reasonable the Japanese are not, and so Mori betrays his trust. Deluded by the death cult of militarism, Mori is humiliated by Jung-geun’s magnanimity which is after all a show of power and that he has overturned the dynamics by granting Mori his life. Mori asks to die as as loyal soldier of Japan by committing ritual suicide but is denied in this both by Jung-geun who tells him he must live and by Chang-sup (Lee Dong-wook) who wants to execute him. This deep sense of humiliation and shame in remaining alive after defeat spurs Mori into a personal vendetta against Jung-geun to reclaim his honour and that of Japan which leaves him almost indifferent to Ito’s fate though nominally in charge of preventing his assassination at the hands of Jung-geun. Jung-geun is also trying to redeem himself for the loss of his men’s lives and has in a sense declared himself already dead in that he lives only for the souls of dead men and has embarked on what is in effect a suicide mission to kill “the old wolf” as a means of atonement and the eventual liberation of his country. 

But then his comrades are already weary and some are already beginning to ask themselves if it’s really worth it. How many more men will have to die before they win their freedom? Sang-hyun (Lee Dong-wook) laments that if the Japanese write their history, his name will be forgotten and he will have left no mark upon the world. They are grieving what they’ve lost in more personal terms aside from their lost nation. In order to get the dynamite to blow up Ito as a backup plan, the gang have to make contact with a former comrade who has since abandoned the cause to become a bandit (Jung Woo-sung). Having lost his eye and his brother, who was also the husband of another committed revolutionary Ms. Gong (Jeon Yeo-been), he decided it wasn’t worth it anymore and chose a different kind of freedom. “If we all die like dogs, no one will remember us,” Sang-hyun later laments. But Jung-geun, who will be remembered, is less concerned with his legacy insisting that even those who may have betrayed them should be given a second chance for they will eventually see the light. Like Ito, he believes in the Korean people and that they will come together to carry the light into the darkness. 

What he does is light the way, and as the closing scenes imply pass the torch to others who will each keep it alight until the dawn of liberation. Nevertheless, Jung-geun does have an unfortunate habit of getting those around him killed while the horror of the battle scenes, the grimness of decapitated and limbless bodies along with the constant sense of loss and defeat seem to imply that perhaps it isn’t worth fighting in this way lending further justification to Jung-geun’s conviction that taking out the leadership is the only way to turn the tide of this war of attrition. In sacrificing his own life, he becomes a kind of martyr, wearing traditional Korean white clothing as he goes to his death knowing that others will come after him. Rich with period detail and tense in its sense of intrigue, the film ultimately argues for a more compassionate sense of revolution governed by righteousness in opposition to the rather cynical justifications made by Ito for the cruelties of Japanese imperialism.

Harbin is released in the US on on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray™ and DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Park Hoon-jung, 2020)

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Sometimes being too good at your job can be a definite liability. So it is for the hero of Park Hoon-jung’s melancholy gangster noir, Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Nagwonui bam). Park’s worldview is often nihilistic and sometimes downright unpleasant, though it’s a sense of fatalistic sadness that dominates this otherwise over familiar tale of a noble gangster cruelly misused by those who choose not to obey their shared code and thereafter finding himself on a dark path towards if not exactly redemption then at least an inevitable ending. 

Rising foot soldier Tae-gu (Uhm Tae-goo) has found himself in the middle of an old-fashioned gang war, serving an ambitious boss, Yang (Park Ho-san), who has unwisely decided to press into territory operated by the well established Bukseong gang. Getting some of his guys back after being kidnapped by Bukseong and held in an apartment block where the community is currently protesting the take over and demolition by gangster redevelopers, Tae-gu is told by his opposing number that Yang is a crazy upstart who would be a nobody without him and that he made a mistake turning down a job offer from Bukseong boss Doh. Tae-gu is however an old school mobster loyal to his gang which is why he doesn’t stop to think things through when someone close to him is killed in a car accident in which he assumes he was the intended target, believing Doh is striking a low blow. Encouraged by Yang, he meets with Doh in person and daringly knocks him off at a swimming pool sauna escaping through a window in the nude. Yang arranges to send him to Jeju Island to lay low before moving on possibly to Russia, but Yang has also been engaging in a failed pincer movement which left them all in hot water after failing to take out Doh’s no. 2, Ma. 

As the title might hint, even the island “paradise” of Jeju is not free of death and crime as Tae-gu discovers after bonding with their contact, Kuto (Lee Ki-young), a fixer smuggling guns from Russian mobsters hidden inside consignments of fish. Like Tae-gu’s sister, Kuto’s niece Jae-yeon (Jeon Yeo-been) is suffering from an undisclosed terminal illness that seems to have few obvious symptoms but has left her with suicidal tendencies. Kuto’s decision to take Tae-gu in is motivated by his desire for money to take Jae-yeon to America for treatment though she and Tae-gu are also much the same both having lost people close to them because of their proximity to the gangster world while he and Kuto search for ways to make up for the harm their lives of violence has caused. 

Jae-yeon is quick to remind Tae-gu that she will soon be dead and that therefore nothing really matters and her life has no meaning while he perhaps as a gangster feels something similar that his life ended the day he first picked up a gun yet there are also ways in which he must act in satisfaction of his code. His tragedy is that he’s operating under a misapprehension, blindly trusting in the wrong people when the truth is painfully obvious to all but him.

Park inserts a series of ironic pillow shots of the idyllic Jeju night scene with comforting lights swinging from tropical trees and gentle waves rolling on the horizon, before closing with a series of eerie daytime shots of familiar locations now devoid of people as if this were a hell our heroes had recently been haunting, ghosts of a violent landscape. His fight scenes are visceral yet also occasionally cartoonish, several taking place in the confined space of a car expertly framed by Park as the heroes fight desperately for life while constrained by their environment. A high octane chase through an airport with its ubiquitous escalators soon gives way to an impressive motorway-bound set piece with an unexpected resolution, the gangsters later scattering on hearing far off police sirens though as we also realise police collusion is an inescapable factor in the fragile equilibrium of the underworld even if it might not stretch all the way to idyllic Jeju. “Don’t waste your tears” Tae-gu unironically offers in weary resignation to his fate, a noble gangster to the last too good to survive in a world of nihilistic futility. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Cobweb (거미집, Kim Jee-woon, 2023)

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An insecure filmmaker becomes entangled within the movie in his mind in Kim Jee-woon’s homage to golden age Korean cinema, Cobweb (거미집, Geomijip). The film has caused some controversy with the family of director Kim Ki-Young attempting to file an injunction to prevent its release complaining that it shows him in a bad light, which is one reason earlier prints of the film listed the protagonist’s name as “Kim Ki-yeol” while it has now been changed to simply “Kim Yeol”. Kim Jee-woon argues that the character is not intended to represent Kim Ki-Young but is an amalgam of various directors of that time, yet it is true that his filmmaking has more than a little in common with that of the late director of The Housemaid.

Another reason they may have been upset is that the film turns on a tragic studio fire that cost the life of a director while Kim Ki-Young himself really did die in a house fire though 20 years later at the age of 78. Meanwhile, the director who dies in the studio is clearly modelled on Shin Sang-ok. The actor who plays him (Jung Woo-sung) is styled to look exactly like Shin who often appeared wearing sunglasses. The film’s Shin Sang-ho (Song Kang-ho) is an example of an artist who gave all of himself for his art and then was quite literally consumed by it, stepping into the flames to get the perfect shot while burning with artistic passion. 

Kim Yeol (Song Kang-ho) by contrast can only watch. He’s hassled by some film critics in a diner who call him a “trash” director while suggesting that only his debut was any good and that was probably because it was Shin Sang-ho’s script though Kim Yeol is forever telling everyone that he really did write it himself. They ask him if he is still a servant in Shin’s house, a question that deeply wounds him not least because he has become the inheritor of Shin’s production company but struggles to emerge from his shadow. 

These themes of servitude and oppressive hierarchies are expressed through the film that Kim Yeol is making, itself titled Cobweb, which he has a sudden urge to reshoot in order to make it a “masterpiece” and prove that he is more than just a hack director of “trashy” genre films. The problem is that in the authoritarian 70s in which the film takes place, Korean cinema was constrained by an ever tightening censorship regime which prohibited any criticism of the government and required that films push conservative moral messages. Kim Yeol wants to take his conventional melodrama in which a young woman takes her own life in sacrifice for her family, and turn it into a story about a “modern woman” who refuses to do so. The wife, Mi-ja (Im Soo-jung), will now be a woman plotting a slow-burn revenge against the wealthy family who callously cast out her pregnant mother who had been their maid eventually teaming up with a Housemaid-esque factory girl who had given birth to her husband’s child, along with a former servant turned forest-dwelling hunter. 

Getting that past the censors might be difficult, even if they weren’t already on high alert after finding out about Kim Yeol’s unauthorised changes to the script which had already been passed. Kim Yeol is confident he can get it all shot within two days, but his cast aren’t very happy about being brought back or about the new direction of the film. “Why is it all so corny and overblown?” an exasperated veteran actress sighs unconvinced by Kim Yeol’s “vision”. Fiction and reality are increasingly blurred. The leading man really is having an affair with the woman who plays the factory girl who is secretly pregnant, a huge scandal in the waiting in the stringent 70s society where adultery is a criminal offence. A method acting policeman claims he has a prison cell in his home and spies on the illicit couple in noir fashion making little notes in his notebook. Kim Yeol meanwhile is so wrapped up in the film that he answers the phone on set rather than the one on the lot which is actually ringing. At a climatic real life moment, it’s the music cue from the melodrama which finally breaks in.

There’s a striking contrast between the full colour set design as we see it and the way it appears in the high contrast black and white of the film within the film which is full of gothic touches such as driving rain and thunderstorms not to mention film noir lighting and eerie composition. Kim Jee-woon includes a series of homages to golden age directors from the obvious nods to The Housemaid to echoes of The Devils Stairway while director Lee Man-Hee gets a name check as, perhaps ironically, a more established figure whom Kim Yeol fears his AD will leave him for.

Lee Man-Hee also had a fair amount of trouble with the censors and was actually arrested for breaking the National Security Law due to his overly sympathetic depiction of North Korean soldiers. In an attempt to get the censors off his back, Kim Yeol lies that the film is “anti-communist” while the head of the censor’s board relents because he’s just so excited about seeing North Korean spies get burned to death in Kim Yeol’s incendiary long shot. In a running gag, no one but Kim Yeol really understands the ending of the film though calling it anti-communist might be a stretch even if it might satisfy the censor’s moral concerns. In any case it remains uncertain if Kim Yeol, who has a hallucination of Shin Sang-ho giving him a fiery pep talk while hopped up on anxiety mediicine that might be destabilising his sense of reality, is really happy with his work and has finally managed to overcome his insecurity or is still entangled in Shin’s web and in the end slowly consumed by it.

Cobweb screens 13/14th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Alienoid (외계+인 1부, Choi Dong-hoon, 2022)

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According to the strangely warmhearted AI robot at the centre of Choi Dong-hoon’s Alienoid (외계+인 1부), the universe is already finished, destined only to tear itself apart in destructive instability. According to him, his society evolved, became compassionate and forgiving, yet like many others sought to avoid a problem it did not want to deal with in exiling its most dangerous prisoners to the minds of oblivious Earthlings who apparently rarely realise they’re sharing body and soul with an alien killing machine until that is one decides to escape. 

Thunder (Kim Dae-myung), an AI unit accompanying the sullen Guard (Kim Woo-bin) who is also a kind of guardian, paints the aliens as dangerous mutants who live only for violence yet it might be worth considering that their rebellion may be justified as members of an oppressed minority apparently considered harmful to mainstream society were it not for the fact their plan involves poisoning the Earth’s atmosphere to free their brethren while suffocating humanity in the process. Guard is fond of saying that he cares nothing for humans and does not involve himself in human affairs, yet it’s obvious that as much as his duty is to ensure the aliens stay captive he feels a responsibility to protect humanity, coming to care for an infant child Thunder spirited away in compassion after its mother died when the alien hosted inside her tried to escape. 

There is something a little curious in the fact these alien beings have chosen to live in what is our present day when according to them time is not linear but happening all at once and they appear to have the ability to travel through it at will, even stashing mutant criminals back in the 14th century where a Taoist dosa magician, “The Marvellous Muruk” (Ryu Jun-yeol) is on the hunt for the Divine Blade and a young woman who “shoots thunder” (Kim Tae-ri). Alien technology may seem like magic even if rooted in “science”, but feudal Korea is a place of majestic fantasy in which wizardry is apparently very real to the extent that a pair of powerful sorcerers tour the land hawking magical supplies such as random sutra stickers and mirrors that enlarge whatever passes through them to mysteriously masked warrior monks. Yet as we can see the girl who shoots thunder is merely welding a pistol, a kind of halfway house of technology which seems like strange magic to the people of Goryeo but nothing more than a child’s toy to the laser-wielding robotic aliens. 

In any case, Choi eventually connects these two worlds bridged by temporal conspiracy as if implying that the future’s salvation lies only in the past. Guard is forced to reflect that their strange act of colonial imperialism in secretly implanting alien prisoners in human minds may have been misguided when challenged by his plucky little girl (Choi Yu-ri) who has already realised there’s something a little different about her distant dad while the fact she’s effectively being raised by two men passes as incidental detail even as the Guard is stalked by her best friend’s apparently smitten aunt (Lee Honey). 

This being the first instalment in a two part film, there is a notable lack of resolution in its closing moments though Choi excels in world building running from hard sci-fi to feudalistic fantasy imbued with the strange magic of technology and underpinned by an interrogation humanity as the heroes battle through time looking for a way to repair an “unstable” world ruled by greed and violence and largely find it in each other. While the chief thrill may come from the incongruity of a young woman firing a pistol in the age of the crossbow (not to mention blasting her way out of a coffin), Choi packs in a series of innovative action sequences shot with a knowing irony as Muruk faces off against the masked monks in the past while the Guard and Thunder try their best to keep the aliens at bay with their high tech weaponry, shooting electric pulses from their palms and dodging lasers but still making a last ditch attempt by leaping at the enemy spaceship and trying to stab it in the heart. Whether this disordered world can be stabilised through a moment of cosmic connection will have to wait for part two, but this opening instalment at least is quite literally a charming affair.

Alienoid is in US cinemas from Aug. 26 courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Secret Zoo (해치지않아, Son Jae-gon, 2020)

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A corporate stooge begins to reassess his life choices in Son Jae-gon’s capitalist satire, Secret Zoo (해치지않아, Haechijianha). As someone belatedly points out, no matter how nice you make the enclosure, you can’t get away from the fact you’re in jail and aspiring lawyer Tae-soo (Ahn Jae-hong) might have to admit that he’s no more free than the animals he’s sent to oversee (or not, as we’ll find out) when he’s randomly sent to take over a failed wildlife park at the behest of his shady boss. 

Currently a temp working out his probation at top three legal firm JH Law, Tae-soo is desperate to be taken on as a full-time employee but as he explains to his sister who wants to sue some thugs bullying her son, that largely means he’s basically just an errand boy taking care of the unreasonable demands of their incarcerated clients who are in the main chaebol sons accused of fraud and embezzlement. JH Law is under siege from protestors angry at their role in perpetuating chaebol influence and siding with large conglomerates to frustrate workers’ rights and enable exploitative working practices. Yet it’s not squeamishness that he’s wound up working for such an awful company that has Tae-soo too embarrassed to attend the reunion for the “third rate” uni he graduated from, but shame that he is only a temp not a full-time employee. That’s part of the reason he instantly accepts a strange offer from his boss to head up Dongsan Park with the promise that he’ll be taken on as a regular employee in Mergers and Acquisitions if he can turn it around in three months. 

When he arrives, however, Tae-soo gets something of a shock. Most of the park’s most valuable animals have already been seized by its creditors, and international safeguards regarding the trafficking of live animals ensure that he cannot simply buy more within the three month time limit. After being surprised by a stuffed tiger while drunk after the welcome party and catching sight of some photos from a mascot day Tae-soo has a bright idea. They’ll simply have hyperrealistic costumes made and sit in the enclosures themselves keeping far enough away that the customers hopefully won’t know the difference. After all, when someone tells you’re visiting a zoo it probably doesn’t occur to you to question whether the animals are “real”.

Secret Zoo, or more accurately a zoo with a secret, is on one level a mild satire on public perception and fake news. You hear the word zoo and have a set of expectations. Unless something happens to convince you otherwise, your brain naturally smoothes over any minor issues you might have because it would be ridiculous for someone to “fake” a zoo. Despite the evidence of his eyes, the only thing the corporate stooge sent to inspect finds suspicious is the animals’ “funny” names which all end in the same syllable. The zoo becomes an unexpected viral phenomenon when Tae-soo, wearing the polar bear suit, is snapped drinking Coca-Cola just like the advert but even then no one questions the idea that he’s not a real polar bear, or that it’s perhaps not ethical for a polar bear to be drinking Coca-Cola in the first place or for guests to be throwing objects into the enclosures and especially not with the intention of harming the animals. 

Only conflicted doctor So-won (Kang So-ra) questions the zoo ideology, pointing out that however nice they make the enclosures it’s still a prison for animals that they are in essence exploiting. Secret Zoo is at pains to make a direct comparison between Tae-soo caught in the corporate cage of modern-day capitalism and the animals he’s impersonating as prisoners of the world in which they live. Tae-soo’s shady boss is, as might be expected, essentially corrupt. As Tae-soo begins to figure out, if this job were important he wouldn’t be doing it, he’s been sent because he’s desperate and expendable while his boss snidely remarks that it’s not a job to be done by someone “brought up soft” hinting at the class snobbery that further oppresses him as a “weed” coming up from a “third class” university. 

So desperate to achieve conventional success by becoming a member of the elitist club, Tae-soo doesn’t really question what it takes to get there until bonding with the employees and becoming invested in the idea of saving the zoo only to discover that his shady boss never really meant to “save” it anyway. Yet the only solution on offer is it seems merely a nicer cage which in power rests firmly with the same corrupt chaebols only now persuaded that it’s in their interest to be more socially responsible as a means of improving their personal brand which of course merely enables them to continue their exploitative business practices even if implying that Tae-soo too has a modicum of power in the ability to manipulate them. Black Nose, the polar bear driven mad by confinement, cannot be returned to the wild but regains his “freedom” in a polar bear sanctuary in frosty Canada, Dr. So-won too freeing herself of her problematic need to protect him by keeping him close. Tae-soo getting a dose of his own medicine in being observed by a young couple who press him for a selfie as the director of that “fake zoo” seems to have gained a little more awareness of what it’s like to live in the enclosure of an inherently corrupt social system akin to corporate feudalism but like Black Nose has perhaps at least improved the quality of his captivity. 

International trailer (English subtitles)