Tag: Korea

My Daughter Is a Zombie (좀비딸, Pil Gam-seong, 2025)

Posted on by

Jung-hwan’s (Jo Jung-suk) daughter Soo-a (Choi Yu-ri) is growing up. She’s no longer enthused about going to the amusement park for her birthday and wishes her father would stop buying churros to mark the occasion. Maybe there’s a part of Jung-hwan that’s frightened of this development, no longer quite knowing who his teenage daughter is becoming and confused by her moodiness. When she’s bitten during the zombie epidemic, however, it might be Jung-hwan who’s bitten off more than he can chew in deciding to hide her from the authorities in the hope she might get “better”.

More family drama than horror movie, Pil Gam-seong’s webtoon adaptation My Daughter is a Zombie (좀비딸, Jombittal) is on one level about unconditional parental love as Jung-hwan refuses to give up on Soo-a and continues to “train” her to regain her memories. With echoes of another pandemic, the film considers society’s reaction to “infectees” who are rounded up and killed to stop the threat of the infection. On returning to his rural hometown to live with his mother, Jung-hwan reunites with a childhood friend, Yeon-hwa (Cho Yeo-jeong), who has since become a teacher, but she has a pathological hated of zombies and until recently had made a point of beating them to death with her kendo sword. Still carrying the trauma of having to kill her fiancé who attacked her, Yeon-hwa doesn’t want to accept that Soo-a could be getting better because that would mean the “zombies” she killed were just people who were ill and could have recovered if she hadn’t murdered them out of rage and prejudice. Indeed, once the infection calms down, the relatives of people killed by state forces begin to ask questions and protest that their loved ones shouldn’t have been treated with such cruel indifference.

Then again, in terms of zombie movies, people who suggest that perhaps they should give the infected a chance rather than proactively killing them don’t usually last very long. The film takes place in a universe in which zombie movies exist with Train to Busan even getting a name check, but none of that’s very helpful to Jung-hwan as he tries to figure out how to keep his daughter safe while also trying to heal her. His job as a tiger trainer seems to come in handy in trying to navigate Soo-a’s new aggressive nature, while his mother Bam-soon (Lee Jung-eun) mostly makes use of her god-given granny powers and a wooden spoon to keep Soo-a in line. 

Meanwhile, the promise of a cure and treatment in America is waged agains the vast bounty the government is offering as a reward for turning in zombies. A not so friendly face shows up and tries to kidnap Soo-a for the reward money while even crassly suggesting to Jung-hwan that they split it between them when he tries to intervene and get Soo-a back. In healing Soo-a back to health, Jung-hwan is both attempting to repay a debt and assert himself as Soo-a’s father by essentially rebooting her so that she recovers the shared memories of her childhood.

To that extent, Soo-a’s time as a zombie is a kind of express adolescence in which she travels from grunting teenager to a young woman with a better appreciation for her father and the trouble he went to raise her. Of course, one could say that it’s all a little patriarchal and perhaps Jung-hwan is “taming” her to fit his own image of what his daughter should be much as he tamed the tiger and taught it to dance, but then again Soo-a is also readjusting herself and trying to figure out how to be a person in her own right after moving to her father’s rural hometown where she’s badgered into attending the local school despite her “illness” because there are only four other pupils and otherwise it’s going to have to close. The village is very proud of its current zero infections record, but the funny this they’re all very accepting of Soo-a, though they just think she’s a bit different rather than a “zombie” after buying Jung-hwan’s possibly uncomfortable excuse that she suffered brain damage in an accident. A father’s undying love does, however, eventually save the world after a continual process of being wounded by his daughter and healing again gives Jung-hwan a means to beat the disease if only in his refusal to give up on the idea his daughter will eventually recover.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Ha Gil-jong, 1972)

Posted on by

Park Chung-hee kept a tight rein on cinema which he saw as an important political tool and means of communication. That’s not to say, however, that criticising his authoritarian regime was impossible, but that criticism was often expressed in unexpected or abstract ways. The debut film of Hollywood-trained director Ha Gil-jong, The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Hwabun), was adapted from a novel by Yi Hyoseok that was published in 1939 when Korea was under Japanese rule but now speaks directly to the contemporary era as a young man and woman long for escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the “Blue House”.

The Blue House is the name for the residence of Korea’s president and where Park Chung-hee lived at the time, but within the context of the film, it’s inhabited by the mistress of a wealthy businessman, Se-ran (Choi Ji-hee), and her younger sister, Mi-ran (Yoon So-ra). The relationship between the sisters is, however, much more like mother and daughter with Se-ran repeatedly stating that Mi-ran is “everything” to her and that she must grow up to become a “great woman”. The slightly uncomfortable implication is that she is encouraging a possible relationship between Mi-ran and her patron Hyeon-ma (Namkoong Won) or at least that by “great woman” she means Mi-ran should be the partner of a great man who moves within their social circles. Ominously, however, the film opens with Mi-ran discovering that all the fish in their pond have died making it clear that the water here is poisoned and the atmosphere rancid. 

It’s not exactly clear how old Mi-ran is intended to be, only that Se-ran had been worried that hadn’t yet started menstruating. She’s spent her entire life in the cosseted environment of the Blue House and knows nothing of the world outside. That she gets her period for the first time when her father brings his secretary/secret lover Dan-ju (Hah Myung-joong) to the house suggests that she has, in a sense, been liberated by his arrival. For whatever reason, Se-ran had tried to warn her off him. She appears jealous while implying that Dan-ju is a dangerous social climber who threatens the integrity of her household. Mi-ran replies that you shouldn’t judge someone because of their background, but in a fit of pique also refers to Dan-ju as a “servant” which hurts both his feelings and his male pride.

But Dan-ju himself is something of a cypher whose motivations are often unclear. Having grown up working class, he’s risen in the world through complicity with Hyeon-ma’s authoritarian rule. As Se-ran says, Hyeon-ma is infatuated with him but perhaps more as a symbol of his overall control. He reminds Dan-ju that he controls his future and repeatedly asks him if he wants to go back to his old life of being a “scumbag” not quite realising that Dan-ju may have become fed up with his degradation and no longer thinks this kind of success is worth it. Hyeon-ma refers to Dan-ju as his “dream and ambition,” even going so far as to say he’d like to start a new life with him, though this is obviously not something that would be considered publicly acceptable in the Korea of the early 1970s. The film is often referred to as the first to depict a same-sex relationship, but it’s one motivated more by power than by love. It’s not clear if Hyeon-ma is so convinced that Mi-ran is completely safe with Dan-ju because he believes him to be interested only in men, or if he is certain that his control over him is absolute, while Dan-ju may not actually be interested in men at all and is only submitting himself to Hyeon-ma’s attentions in return for social advancement.

What he comes to represent for each is freedom. After running away, Mi-ran explains that she was happy with her life within the Blue House, in other words under authoritarianism, because it treated her well and so she could think of no other happiness. But meeting Dan-ju has shown her that happiness is possible outside of it. Love is a force that threatens the social order, and now Mi-ran resents her tightly controlled life and longs for the freedom Dan-ju represents over the patriarchal oppression represented by Hyeon-ma to which Se-ran has wholly submitted herself. Now that she’s committed to the regime, she cannot permit Mi-ran to leave it and tries to convince her to study music abroad and date an international pianist who could help career. Hyeon-ma, meanwhile, reacts in jealousy and frustration. He beats Dan-ju and throws him in his shed echoing the torture and imprisonment of dissidents that took place under Park’s regime. 

As time passes, however, something evidently goes wrong with Hyeon-ma’s business causing him to flee in a hurry abandoning Se-ran and Mi-ran to their fates. The ominous maid who has been dropping rats through their windows, eventually tries to release Dan-ju with whom she has some kind of intimate connection, with the consequence that he haunts the mansion like a ghost. Mi-ran appears to have reassimilated, dancing with another man while wearing what looks very like wedding a dress, but her desire for freedom is reawakened by Dan-ju’s return. The house itself is then stormed by the revolutionary force of Hyeon-ma’s creditors who are not exactly noble avengers. They raid the place looting his possessions to get back what they’re owned, even going so far as to cut off Se-ran’s finger to take her ring and pulling out her gold teeth. The message seems to be that the dictator will probably get away (Park didn’t, he was assassinated by the head of his own security forces), but a heavy price will be paid for complicity when the regime falls, as all regimes eventually do. 

The King’s Warden (왕과 사는 남자, Chang Hang-jun, 2026)

Posted on by

Can a king govern effectively if he does not know his people? Korean historical films are renowned for palace intrigue, but what’s often forgotten is the lives of ordinary subjects living in far off villages for whom the ruler is a distant authority whose efforts are more likely to hamper their lives than help them. At the beginning of Chang Hang-jun’s The King’s Warden (왕과 사는 남자, Wanggwa Saneun Namja), village chief Heung-do (Yoo Hae-jin) goes out to hunt deer which is the only access to meat the villagers seem to have while many of them have only vague memories of ever having even seen hot white rice.

Still, after he’s chased by a tiger, Heung-do is rescued by a nearby village which is in full festival mode celebrating the birthday of the young son of a regular villager. The boy’s father makes fun of Heung-do for eating deer which he says smells bad and offers him some of their lavish banquet. This village used to be poor like his, but at some point they agreed to host an exiled official, the former Minister of Justice. Though the minister was rude and entitled, he soon began to start teaching the local children for something to do resulting in one of them becoming a top scholar. And political realities being what they are, the minister’s supporters began sending lavish gifts to the village to hedge their bets on his eventual rehabilitation. Shortly put, that’s how they’ve all become rich beyond their wildest dreams and all they had to do was put up with someone being difficult and annoying for a short period of time.

Obviously, Heung-do wants this for his village too, but unbeknownst to him they’re sent the deposed king Hong-wi (Park Ji-hoon) who ascended the throne as a child and has been usurped by his uncle. This obviously places them in a precarious position. Heung-do has to report to the Town Office on Hong-wi’s every move fearing that they’ll all be killed if anything happens to him, while the usurpers, led by treacherous courtier Myeong-hoe (Yoo Ji-tae), are actually banking on the fact that Hong-wi won’t be able to adjust to a life of exile having never lived outside of the palace and will likely either die or take his own life. For his own part, Hong-wi seems to have become depressed. He’s on a kind of hunger strike as a protest and later tries to end his life only to be saved Heung-do.

Hong-wi is indeed in a difficult position himself, still only a teenager and likely aware that there is only a small possibility of him surviving very much longer given that others make take up his cause and challenge his uncle’s claim to the throne which makes his mere existence an existential threat. Not having the power to do anything, refusing to eat is his only means of asserting control. Heung-do, meanwhile, is fairly ignorant of all this though tries his best to convey that Hong-wi refusing the food the villagers have prepared for him despite not having enough to eat themselves is both rude and causing them anxiety that perhaps it’s not to his taste and their commonness is killing him. 

It’s this more human kind of interaction that eventually brokers an easier friendship between the villagers the exiled king in which it seems as if Hong-wi would have “proved most royal” if he had not been usurped and continued to reign into adulthood. He has become better acquainted with the way his subjects live, while Myeong-hoe and his ilk are only concerned with power and courtly intrigue rather than the actual business of government. Nevertheless, in the end Heung-do must pick a master. To save the villagers he may need to sacrifice Hong-wi and demonstrate his loyalty to the new regime (who may or may not honour their promises), or else decide to risk being taken down with him if they continue to protect this man they’ve come to see as a friend and who is himself conflicted in the knowledge that his presence places them at risk.

Domestic viewers well acquainted with historical fact will know the direction that this story will eventually take, though the earlier parts of the film are largely concerned with village life in which the villagers great their hardship with good humour. As such, they never really question it but only look for ways to improve their circumstances and settle on making themselves even more subservient to authority, while even an exiled king finds himself entirely powerless within an inherently corrupt feudal system. The growing friendship between Heung-do, the villagers, and Hong-wi has then a poignant quality in their shared sense of futility and the glimpse of what might have been a better society for all if only Hong-wi had been allowed to follow his kingly destiny unfettered.

The King’s Warden opens in UK cinemas 6th March courtesy of Central City Media.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Ghost Train (괴기열차, Tak Se-woong, 2024)

Posted on by

Why are there so many stories about haunted stations? Perhaps it’s their liminal status that gives them an eerie quality. By definition, you’re not supposed to stay here. To that extent, they’re a kind of purgatorial space between one destination or another. We leave so quickly it’s like a part of us is left behind, hovering, and never able to find the exit. In any case, Gwanglim seems to have its fair share of ghost stories as investigated by “horror queen” Da-kyung (Joo Hyun-young) in an attempt to boost the fortunes of her failing YouTube channel.

She herself admits that her problem is she’s run out of content, which is why she’s badgering the stationmaster (Jeon Bae-soo) for information on this supposedly haunted spot. The funny thing is that the stationmaster seems to know a lot more than you’d expect about these cases, including their full backstories, which have nothing to do with the station or his job. You’d think that would give Da-kyung pause for thought, but she’s already drunk on the promise of a scoop and has ironically convinced the stationmaster to talk with the gift of alcohol. As she continues to listen to his stories and the ratings of her channel improve, she takes on an increasingly vampiric appearance while the stationmaster seems to become ever sicker. Nevertheless, Da-kyung only becomes thirstier for gruesome tales even as the stationmaster tries to warn her off by asking what the real reason behind her animosity to rival beauty influencer Lina (Jung Han-bit) might be.

In this, her story parallels that of a young girl on the train who is insecure in her appearance and contemplating plastic surgery only to be haunted by a woman in bandages seemingly jealous of the beauty the young girl doesn’t know she already has. Da-kyung has a crush on her boss, Woo-jin (Choi Bo-min), but thinks he prefers Lina and not just because her channel pulls in millions of viewers. Lina is a classic mean girl who endlessly puts Da-kyung down as a means of asserting her own superiority while Da-kyung secretly looks down on her for her vacuity. As her channel improves and she grows in confidence, Da-kyung sheds her dowdy outfits for something a little more stylish but is still consumed by resentment towards Woo-jin in her, it seems possibly mistaken, belief that he prefers Lina because she aligns more closely with socially defined ideas of typical femininity in her tendency to behave like a silly girl who can’t do anything for herself except look pretty around men. 

It is, as the stationmaster says, foolish to chase after what you think you’re missing and end up losing what you already had instead of learning to happy just with that. The other stories too are about overreaching greed, such as that of a homeless man who discovers a magic vending machine that disappears people and allows him to pick up their clothes and wallets to enrich himself though he never escapes the station despite his increasing desire to disappear random people until the point he realises he has consumed himself. Da-kyung is urged to delete her videos by someone who encountered something dangerous at the station, explaining that it’s built on the former site of a chapel that belonged to a cult where a mass suicide took place, further suggesting that the location itself is greedy for the souls of those who were, in a way, trying to turn away from this hyper-capitalistic vision of the world only to fall victim to it.

The stationmaster too dislikes those who profit from the misery or misfortune of others, which is what he assumes Da-kyung to be doing in her voracious appetite for ghost stories. In the very first tale, a young woman repeatedly bangs her head into a glass door, but no one attempts to help her. Everyone just moves to another carriage or generally away from her. These stories are only interesting for their gore and strangeness, no one really cares about the victims or learning from the past, which is to say we’re stuck in the station reliving the same trauma and unable to progress to a better a place. Da-kyung is stuck here most of all, and in her way, also hungry for souls lured in by lurid tales of untold horrors.

Ghost Train is released on Digital in the US on February 17 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

One Win (1승, Shin Yeon-shick, 2023)

Posted on by

Wouldn’t it be nice to win just once? Eccentric chaebol son Jung-won (Park Jeong-min) waves the opportunity of victory under unsuccessful coach Woo-jin’s nose full knowing his unfortunate life of personal failures. In fact, this is why he’s hired him. Jung-won’s end goal is to engineer an underdog narrative in which the failing women’s professional volleyball team he’s just bought for a song can become a sensation led by a coach equally in need of redemption.

In Shin Yeon-shick’s One Win (1승, 1seung), the battle is against more against defeatism than anything else as Woo-jin (Song Kang-ho) and the team members first have to believe in the possibility of victory. Woo-jin is struggling to get over a sense of betrayal after his high school volleyball coach whom he idolised, Moon, who abandoned him during the quarter-finals having been offered a better job. Now he’s contemplating doing the same thing. Despite never having made much of himself either as a volleyball player, Woo-jin wasn’t keen to take this job and is convinced only by his friend’s assurances that he’ll set him up with a gig coaching the university team and this experience with a professional outfit will look good on his CV.

Then again, no one expects much of this team and even Jung-won’s ultimate goal is only for them to score one win by the end of the season. Famously faddy, a former communist rejecting his wealth and privileged scion turned spendthrift influencer, Jung-won is running the team like reality a show by constructing a narrative around them. If they get the one win, he’ll split two million dollars between the season ticket holders. This allows him to charge extortionate fees by dangling the possibility of a big payout and leveraging the drama of the team’s unlikely win. 

The problem is that the previous manager traded off most of their top players, assuming the team wouldn’t find a buyer and would have to be closed down. This has understandably created some resentment with those left behind feeling both betrayed and undervalued. There is discord among the players struggling to deal with the fallout. Intent on reclaiming past glories, the team had revolved around star player Yu-ra who had been, it seems, a mean girl bully. The other players don’t miss her even if they acknowledge they don’t otherwise have a team and now reject fellow team member Min-hee for having gone along with her abuse of them. Many of them haven’t had a real opportunity to play in years and are struggling to pick up the pace.

Woo-jin too doesn’t quite know how to use them and only later realises that he needs to change things up to make use of their true strengths and weaknesses. The first thing he does is to tell off the fan contingent who make everything worse by shouting at the team after every match to complain about their poor performance, further denting their confidence. In learning how to use new technology, Woo-jin knows that he shouldn’t just study the other teams but his own too so he can make use not only of their strengths and weaknesses , but of how their rivals will attempt to use them too. 

Nevertheless, their eventual victory can’t help but feel a little hollow given the lack of emotional investment in the players while even Woo-jin’s relationship with his sportswriter ex wife and earnest daughter is given fairly short shrift. Most of the women have some reason they’ve ended up on this “losing” team from the scary gangster player another team was only too glad to get rid of, to another recently returned from suspension, and the captain who is already 40 years old never having made the starting lineup. Their problem was, it seems, a lack of belief in themselves which Woo-jin begins to return to them while they begin to figure out how to work as a team by putting their disagreements behind them. They just need this one win to show them that they can in order to light the way to a more fulfilling future no longer defined by defeatism but a new hope for the future in which they can not only achieve their sporting goals but their purse their lives with hope and positivity.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Streaming (스트리밍, Cho Jang-ho, 2025)

Posted on by

There’s a kind of collective fantasy that lies at the centre of live-streaming. A bargain between the streamer and the viewer not to break the illusion, but the power dynamics between the two are vague and shifting. The viewers give “stickers” to express their appreciation or try to manipulate the streamer, while the streaming tries to fulfil the viewer’s wishes in the hope of getting more stickers without being too obvious that they’re letting the viewers lead them by the nose.

What Cho Jang-ho’s Streaming (스트리밍) suggests is that the snake is eating its own tail and the desire for streaming success has led the streamers to make ever more questionable decisions and the viewers to demand increasingly extreme action which may cause harm to the streamer or others. There are several points at which we might wonder why Woo Sang (Kang Ha-neul) does not appear to have alerted the police nor do his viewers do so for him. They sit and watch passively while another streamer apparently gets up and takes her own life, some wondering if what’s just happened is for real and they ought to try calling someone or if it’s just another bit.

We might even wonder if any of this is “real” or just a game being played for the benefit of the viewers who each join in with what amounts to a kind of scavenger hunt as Woo Sang tries to track down a missing streamer, Matilda (Ha Seo-yoon), who went missing after he recruited her to help him investigate a series of murders. In his interactions with Matilda, we can see Woo Sang’s own insecurity. He’s clearly brought her on as a glamorous assistant, but she keeps upstaging him and he’s finding it increasingly hard to hide his irritation. When they role play what they think might have happened between the killer and his victim after they snuck out of a nightclub, he takes things too far and shows a dangerous capacity for misogynistic violence. Some of the viewer’s concerns that he may have harmed Matilda in some way in revenge for her taking the lucrative top spot on the streaming charts away from him may be understandable.

But at the same time, Matilda doesn’t quite seem to be on the level either and may, in fact, be using Woo Sang to further boost her popularity and stay number one which would allow her to keep 100% of takings rather than pay the 50% commission to the streaming service. Despite his critiques of other streamers, Woo Sang too is shown to be an amateur detective exploiting the serial killer case for his own gain while somewhat cavalier about Matilda’s safety after using her in his video. In truth, solving the serial killer case might be quite bad for his business because without it Woo Sang wouldn’t have any more material for his show. But then, while shows like this exist, content may also rise to meet them and the film almost implies that true crime gives rise to a kind of bloodlust that simultaneously glorifies the host and the killer who are profiting in terms of notoriety even if the streamer is taking all the money. 

“When interest becomes excessive, it turns into an obsession,” Woo Sang tells his viewers somewhat disdainfully of a man who may have become fixated on the public image of “Matilda”, though it might as well apply to himself and his audience of armchair detectives. “Staging means death,” he intones, though there’s no way to know he hasn’t made all this up himself and it wouldn’t really be surprising given the streamers’ obsession with being number one. Some of the viewers maybe be sceptical, but the truth is they’re all playing this game too and it’s all good fun until it’s not, leaving Woo Sang and his audience in way over their heads. Or then again, maybe his old-fashioned battle of wits with a Moriarty-like killer is just that, which would explain Woo Sang’s strange conviction that he will honour the terms of their agreement not to kill Matilda until the deadline expires even though Woo Sang thinks he’s seen through his attempt to throw him off the tracks. A little muddy in its messaging, the film nevertheless makes plain that it’s Woo Sang that has become dangerously obsessed and deluded by the persona he’s crafted for himself into believing that he alone can bring a killer to justice.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

The 2nd Repatriation (2차 송환, Kim Dong-won, 2022)

Posted on by

“Psychologically, I’m a man who is already buried in the ground,” laments one of the “converted”, “I just wish I could get out of here”. Kim Dong-won’s landmark 2004 documentary Repatriation followed a series of “unconverted” long-term prisoners who had been sent to the South as spies and were later caught but refused to abandon their ideology. A historical turning point in the relations between North and South allowed these men who longed to return home to do so, but others were refused on the grounds that superficially or otherwise they had “converted” and renounced North Korean Communism to live more freely in the South. 

Almost 20 years in the making, Kim’s followup documentary 2nd Repatriation (2차 송환, 2 Cha Songhwan) follows those who were left behind but have never abandoned their ideology in their hearts and are determined to return to the North. Just as in the earlier film, Kim frames them as essentially caught in a kind of no mans land between two nations and two ideologies, used and misused as tools of each but also pawns at the hands of geopolitical manouvering. Though Kim had assumed a second repatriation would follow soon after the first, this was not to be because of changing political realities not only in Korea but in the US whose influence many regarded as essential in brokering peace across the peninsula. 

Kim’s main protagonist Youngshik is a cheerful and vibrant man, but sometimes descends into aggressive rants about “bastard Americans”. As the documentary is quick to point out, there is truth in some of what he’s saying regarding the undue influence of and risks of military dependency on American forces, but the strength of his language often lays bare the rigidity of his ideology. Later in the film, a younger man asks Youngshik if there aren’t things that worry him about the state of North Korea today in the reports of widespread famine, but Youngshik appears to not really listen to him before brushing it off as all the fault of the Americans. Anything that’s wrong with North Korea is the Americans’ fault, but then so is the division itself so callously drawn up as an overture in a proxy war. Nevertheless, in the 2020 US elections he finds himself rooting for Trump based solely on the single issue of North Korean relations believing his election may pave the way for an eventual reunification despite the vast ideological gulf that must necessarily exist between them. 

Youngshik has indeed never given up his mission and is seen giving speeches on the subway and protesting outside the Ministry of Unification crying out for peace. He claims that he “converted” only superficially after being tortured but feels ashamed of his actions. A second issue arises when a group representing the families of those kidnapped by North Korea objects to the repatriation on the grounds that their relatives will not be afforded the same opportunity asking for something more like a prisoner swap. But Youngshik and the North Korean authorities deny that any kidnapping took place, insisting that anyone captured by the regime after accidentally straying into its territory would have been allowed leave if they so wished laden down with rice, fish, and fresh clothes. Another of the converted speculates that they may have chosen to stay because the South Korean state would simply have confiscated everything they’d been given. Some fisherman who did return were punished under the Anti-Communism laws or accused of spying. 

Each side is keen to use those caught between them for their ends with the truth an unintended casualty. Meanwhile the irony remains that both the kidnapped and the former North Korean spies have been forcibly separated from their families by political forces beyond their control. Youngshik insists that he came to erase a border but has since been trapped by it, unable to understand the absurdity which prevents him from visiting his home. On one particular occasion, he is permitted to visit North Korea but only to a single village set aside for that purpose pointing at his hometown which he says lies just over the hill. In any case Youngshik is by that point in his 80s. After he learns that his wife has passed away. He begins to despair wondering what the point of returning home would be. His children would be strangers to him. They may harbour resentment or perhaps they would not get along. 

Despite his convictions life in the North must be very different and romanticisation of it as an exile a dangerous fantasy. Youngshik tells the man who asked him about famine that life the North was easier in part because there was no need to think. Your basic needs are taken care of so long as you do the work assigned to you whereas in the South you have to take care of yourself, no one will help you, and if you cannot work you cannot eat. The life of Youngshik and those like him is necessarily hard, ill equipped to survive in a capitalist society and without support network outside of each other save a few volunteer groups. One of the other men who married a South Korean woman explains that he is still working long hours at a physically strenuous job despite a heart condition because he has no other choice. Another who also married prepares to divorce his wife and return to the North ensuring she will inherit their home and face no financial penalty but otherwise resolved to abandon her in the hope of reuniting with the family he once abandoned if not entirely through choice. 

Only one of the men, who resented by the others, states that he did not come by his own volition and on balance prefers to stay in the relative freedom of the contemporary South. Each of the others is desperate to return and trapped in a kind of limbo unable either to make a life in the South or cross the border into a life which may still be rootless and uncertain. Some say the previous returnees were forced to marry in part to have someone to take care of them in their old age, assuming their families would not or could not do so, and in order to monitor them to ensure they had not been turned or were engaged in a counter mission against the North. In the end Kim is not able to complete his story with the prospect of a second repatriation ever more distant. Even his own trip to North Korea in search of his secret history is rendered impossible. The liaison company ironically suggest he send a foreigner instead, a Korean-Norwegian producer appealing through another Asian nation apparently having more luck. A list of the names of applicants for the second repatriation at the film’s conclusion lists many as deceased while those surviving are already over 90 and left with nothing else than the desire to return to a homeland that seems as if it may have forgotten them.

The Great Flood (대홍수, Kim Byung-woo, 2025)

Posted on by

Humanity survived a great flood once before, or so we’ve been led to believe. The mysterious forces at the centre of Kim Byung-woo’s The Great Flood (대홍수, Daehongsu) believe we can survive it again, albeit in an altered form. Or then again, maybe not. What begins as a disaster movie soon shifts into speculative fiction exploring the nature of “human emotion” and whether such a complex thing can ever really be replicated synthetically.

After their apartment is surrounded by floodwaters slowly climbing past their third floor flat, An-na (Kim Da-mi) tries to make her way to higher floors with her often uncooperative six-year-old son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong). As in recent similarly themed films, the apartment block becomes a microcosm of the contemporary society with An-na encountering stairs that have been blocked and neighbours who aren’t happy about those from lower floors encroaching on their space. Religious maniacs block access and insist this is God’s will. The only way out is a human sacrifice. Meanwhile, thuggish looters rob abandoned flats despite the fact that all of these previously valuable items are probably worthless now that no one knows when the waters will stop rising let alone when they will recede. 

It turns out, however, that An-na is an important person because she works for the Emotion Engine Development Team at the Darwin Center which has apparently known about this all along and has planning ways for humanity to survive for quite some time. It’s soon revealed that Ja-in is not An-na’s biological son but an experimental AI child she’s been developing to create the Emotion Engine. After the initial flood, An-na and Ja-in become separated and she is plunged until a looping series of simulations structured like a video game in which she must reunite with her son to give the Engine maternal instinct and save humanity.

Whether intentional or not, this is all incredibly sexist. Though apparently a top researcher, An-na’s worth is now entirely defined by her ability to become a mother. A flashback reveals An-na asked her boss if she could give Ja-in back because motherhood isn’t for her, while in flashbacks to her time with him she’s shown repeatedly hurting his feelings by neglecting him for her work. He asks to use her work iPad to do his drawings because she doesn’t look at them otherwise, while she’s irritated by his badgering when she’s obviously busy. The conceit is that she can’t find Ja-in because she doesn’t understand why he left her. She worries that he might not want to go with her anyway because she “abandoned” him to go with the men from the Darwin Centre to be saved from the flood and continue her research to save humanity.

The man sent to save her, the unemotional Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo), was also abandoned by his mother and is cynically looking forward to seeing what decision An-na will make. He’ll feel reassured in some way if she chooses to leave Ja-in behind because it will mean that it wasn’t just him, this is the way “human emotion” works. An-na obviously has an opportunity to recast “human emotion” than just recreate it, if that weren’t perhaps against the spirit of what she’s doing. In any case, the earlier part of the film is full of these dilemmas as Hee-jo encourages her to leave struggling people behind so they can make it to the roof for the helicopter. Even so, she comes across people who haven’t abandoned their humanity such as an old man continuing to feed his wife who seems to have dementia with the waves approaching and a man who stays with his pregnant wife who has gone into labour. In the end, An-na can only complete this quest by embracing her humanity by saving the little girl who is trapped in the lift and helping the pregnant lady rather than by abandoning them to survive alone.

This is also true of overcoming her maternal anxiety to believe she can be a mother to Ja-in which is also positioned as becoming a mother to all mankind as a kind of eve in a new digitised world. The apartment blocks are shaped like datacentres and the water reinterpreted as fire as if this is where people live now. Even so, we can’t be sure whether any of this, even the first flood, was ever really “real” or part of the AI-training scenario in which the Engine must be trained by “real” experiences, or if the An-na who accepts her motherhood and asks to be the test subject sent with Ja-in is the “real” woman or the model from the simulations. In any case, is humanity really surviving by being recreated as AI or bringing about its own demise? In our world at least, the waters may already be rising.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Revelations (계시록, Yeon Sang-ho, 2025)

Posted on by

A put upon pastor’s life begins to spiral out of control when he comes to suspect a recently released sex offender has kidnapped his child in Yeon Sang-ho’s grim spiritual drama, Revelations (계시록, Gyesirok). Less about the crime at its centre, the film is more an exploration of our intense desire to justify our actions and remake the world in a way that makes sense to us while refusing to see or accept the reality of others.

Min-chan (Ryu Jun-yeol) runs a small evangelical church that is part of a larger religious organisation and like any other ambitious employee is hoping for advancement. With the area undergoing redevelopment, a larger church is to be built and Min-chan’s wife Si-yeong (Moon Joo-yeon) comes to the conclusion that his mentor Pastor Jung gave him this smaller church to build a congregation in preparation for heading up this larger one. But Jung rather insensitively asks him if he can think of anyone to run it while suggesting that ideally he’d prefer to give it to his son, Hwan-su, though Hwan-su doesn’t feel ready and thinks Min-chan would be a better fit. Min-chan consoles himself by repeating the pastor’s words that God will show them the right person for the job and is secretly heartened when Hwan-su is out of the running due to the exposure of an extra-marital affair with a parishioner. But on the other hand, he’s recently discovered his wife has been having an affair with her personal trainer, which means he wouldn’t get the job either if anyone found out.

As such, he’s under an intense amount of pressure and increasingly dependent on revelations he believes are from God. When Yang-rae (Shin Min-jae) walks into his church, Min-chan is intent on recruiting him but is unnerved by his ankle bracelet. When his own child goes temporarily missing, he becomes convinced that Yang-rae has taken them, especially when he sees Yang-rae loading up his van with shovels. Though this is an example of Min-chan’s latent prejudice and a contradiction in his religiosity given that he has no idea what Yang-rae might have done and is uninterested in helping him only in increasing the numbers of his congregation, it turns out that Yang-rae has taken another child from among his parishioners. Having had an altercation with Yang-rae and attempting to cover up his crime, Min-chan pretty much forgets about A-yeong (Kim Bo-min) and believes he has received a revelation that she’s dead and it’s his mission to purge the evil of kidnappers by killing Yang-rae, coming over all fire and brimstone and ignoring Yang-rae when he points out they’ll never find A-yeong if he dies.

For Min-chan, Yang-rae has become a faceless figure of evil in a similar way he has for traumatised policewoman Yeon-hee (Shin Hyun-been) who is haunted by the ghost of her sister who took her own life after being kidnapped and tortured by Yang-rae. A psychiatrist she meets explains to her that the ghost isn’t real but only a manifestation of the guilt she feels for not being able to save her sister. Her desire to save A-yeong is also a means of making peace with the traumatic past, but even she is caught between the desire for revenge and that of finding her in being at least tempted to pull the trigger and kill Yong-rae herself. She had also been further harmed psychologically by the fact that Yong-rae got a reduced sentence on the grounds of the horrific childhood abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his step-father. But it’s only by acknowledging that he wasn’t a faceless evil but a real person with his own feelings and trauma that she can come to understand him and put the clues together to find A-yeong. 

As the psychiatrist says, Min-chan’s God, Yeon-hee’s ghost, and Yang-rae’s one-eyed monster are all the same thing. They’re trying to overcome the reality that most tragedies in life are caused by things we can’t control. Placed into a police cell, Min-chan has a large square window that floods the room with light, but also a large smudge in the wall that looks sort of like Jesus. He begins scrubbing at it, trying to clarify the image, but it just becomes muddier and could just as easily be a demon rather than God, leaving him finally uncertain as to from whom he was receiving his “revelations”, be they from God, the devil, or just his own confused mind, while dealing with the stress of having his masculinity and career progress undermined in being cheated on by his wife and passed over by his mentor. While Yeon-hui has laid her ghosts to rest, all Min-chan is left with is uncertainty.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Mission: Cross (크로스, Lee Myung-hoon, 2024)

Posted on by

“Justifying each other’s existence, is that what marriage is about?” Asks top cop Mi-seon (Yum Jung-ah) while contemplating her vaguely dissatisfying marriage to househusband Kang-mu (Hwang Jung-min). In the opening sequences of Lee Myung-hoon’s action rom-com Mission: Cross (크로스), Mi-seon describes Kang-mu as a lottery ticket that’s never going win and suggests she only puts up with him because he’s not the worst man in the world and maybe marriage means putting up with each other. Only on discovering his long-buried secret does she begin re-evaluate him along with what marriage means to her.

Part of what puts her off, however, is Kang-mu’s seeming unmanliness. As a househusband, a rarity in South Korea’s patriarchal society, Kang-mu takes good care of care of her but Mi-seon finds it vaguely annoying and is irritated by his tendency to raid her wallet. It’s also Kang-mu that hosts when her colleagues come over for celebrations after solving a case and he’s got labelled Tupperware in his fridge with homemade kimchi for them. Nevertheless, they all jokingly refer to Kang-mu as Mi-seon’s “missus” which is also in part born of their characterisation of Mi-seon as a man because of her no-nonsense nature and the authority she holds over them. When Kang-mu asks Mi-seon’s colleague Sang-un (Jung Man-sik) to give her a wrist brace he bought her but thinks she’s too proud to accept from him, she jokingly asks if he fancies her but he replies that he only likes women. Nevertheless, Sang-un too is positioned as unmanly because his wife cheated on him which led to their divorce. The other two officers, meanwhile, are obsessed with romantic drama and act out their own version of events after spotting Kang-mu with another woman and becoming convinced that he’s having an affair.

Kang-mu, however, has a secret past as an intelligence officer from which he got fired for conducting an unauthorised mission to stop a Russian arms shipment reaching North Korea. While they were on the boat, they discovered that it was actually going to South Korea while one of his men was killed by the Russian Mafia. Six years later, one of his old colleagues has gone missing while trying to expose a procurement fraud scam run by the mysterious General Park through a fake contract to buy a new aerospace weapon from the Russians. Meanwhile, Mi-seon is investigating the attempted murder of a young woman who was shot after delivering a USB stick containing accounting files to a dead drop. 

Obviously, the cases are connected and Mi-seon is about to make a discovery about her husband but not before she experiences the unexpected jealousy of suspecting that he might actually be having an affair. The film actively turns an established trope on its head in that there are countless dramas in which a secret agent thinks he’s married to a regular housewife only to find out she used to be a top assassin, but in its way still ends up conforming to traditional gender roles while essentially subverting them. Mi-seon’s attraction to her husband is reignited when he becomes more stereotypically masculine by charging in with guns and rescuing her. In any case, finding out truth seems to complete the puzzle so that she can reconsider the point of marriage to reflect “Even if the whole world is against you, I’m on your side. That’s what marriage is.” 

Even so, the end result is that they fight crime together rather than Mi-seon having to take a back seat while she also commits to making it work rather than being vaguely irritated with Kang-mu but not making any attempt to improve their marriage. Lee cleverly plays with the tropes of the genre to create a genuinely surprising twist complete with a Bond-style maniacal villain playing off the region’s complicated geopolitics by working with the Russians who are thought to be colluding with North Korea against the South when really just in it for themselves. While the final mid-credits sequence, a reference to Hwang’s Netflix series Narco Saints, is a little uncomfortable in its implications, it’s clear that there’s a lot more milage in this potential franchise built around the unusual dynamics of the central pair’s marriage as well as those of Mi-seon’s equally unusual team of lovelorn romantics.

Trailer (English subtitles)