Tag: Korea

Traffickers (공모자들, Kim Hong-sun, 2012)

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The one with money and power wins. The ones without it lose everything they’ve got. In many ways, it’s the overriding message of contemporary Korean cinema, but the words take on an even darker hue when uttered by the villain of Kim Hong-sun’s illegal organ transplant drama, Traffickers (공모자들, Gongmojadeul). The film’s Korean title, Conspirators, hints at the ways that this world reduces everyone to one degree or another to something less than human as they chase often small dreams of health, comfort, and happiness, in which the central conspiracy comes to stand in for a world ruled by power and money.

Young-gyu (Im Chang-jung) used to be an organ trafficker, but gave up that side of his business when his best friend was killed by a victim who woke up unexpectedly and tried to escape. Since then, he’s smuggled moderately less inhuman things and has developed a crush on a young woman who works on the ticket counter at the port. Yu-ri (Jo Yoon-hee) has a sick father who needs a transplant, but the one was lined up for is cancelled at the last minute apparently because she neglected to inform them of an issue which gave them an excuse to pull out in what seems to be a suggestion that the list is being manipulated. Fearing her only option is the black market, Yu-ri is in desperate need of money and turn to one of Young-gyu’s acquaintances, the leader of a Chinese gang. To get her the money Young-gyu decides to pull one last job, but soon finds himself in over his head as his new target turns out to have a connection to his past.

The film never really goes into Yu-ri’s decision get her father a black market transplant but rather focuses on her desperation as someone who has been frozen out of the legitimate system which itself already prioritises those with means to fight for better or more efficient treatment. It’s not clear if she is aware that the organ may come from someone who has been killed deliberately for that purpose, or if she knew but decided her father’s life was more important than theirs. Nor is it clear if she’s thought through the repercussions of indebting herself to gangsters for some of whom organ harvesting is just another means of debt collection. In any case, all she really cares about is saving her father and it seems she is willing to do whatever that takes. 

To that extent, what they prey on is desperation. The gangsters don’t expect their victims to ask too many questions, because this is all illegal anyway and they’re already at their last resort to save a loved one’s life. That said, it seems strange that they would choose Chae-hee (Jung Ji-yoon), a young woman who uses a wheelchair and thinks she’s just going to China on holiday, who is travelling with her husband, to be their next victim given that there is obviously someone who is going to be looking for her. They generally assume most of their other victims won’t be missed and write them off as those of little consequence swallowed by a dog-eat-dog world. It seems that part of the gangster’s motivation is that they don’t want to become victims themselves so have chosen the path of violence and inhumanity. 

But despite his occupation, Young-gyu is conflicted about the bloodiness of his work and on realising that he has a connection to Chae-hee begins to want to save her while equally wanting to save Yu-ri and her father. The traffickers have, however, sold them all false promise in that it’s mainly the people who were trying to buy transplants that end up becoming victims and it’s not actually clear who is getting any of these organs until a final suggestion that they’re actually going to rich people in Korea who wanted to jump the transplant queue, meaning people like Yu-ri and and her father lose out twice over. Organ trafficking works hand in hand with life insurance scams looking to make money off human misery while rich elderly men buy the blood and organs of young ones in a kind of human sacrifice they think will return their youth and and vitality in an one the nose metaphor for how the older generation oppresses the young. In this bleak and nihilistic world, the film suggests that its villain was right. The ones with money and power win, while those without are quite literally consumed and exploited by a corrupt and inhuman system. 

Trailer (English subtitles

Invisible 2: Chasing The Ghost Sound (귀신소리 찾기, Yoo Jun-suk, 2011)

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After hearing ghostly voices in her guest house, a middle-aged woman calls in a famous paranormal investigator but is put out when he arrives with a film crew in tow in Yoo Jun-suk’s eerie fake documentary footage horror movie, Invisible 2: Chasing The Ghost Sound (귀신소리 찾기, Gwisin Soli Chajgi). As might be assumed, nothing is quite as it seems, but as the relations between Geum-ja (Jeong Eui-soon), ghost hunter Pil-woo, and the few crew begin to  decline, the ghost may be the least of their worries.

Geum-ja’s guest house is a traditional-style villa out in the country and at this time of year all but cut off by snow which is why it proves so hard for the team to reach. However, if the place is haunted, it’s by someone much more recently deceased than the Joseon-era past. Geum-ja suspects it may be her late sister and that she may have a message for her. That’s apparently why she contacted Pil-woo, hoping he would be able to record the ghostly voices and tell her what they say. 

Pil-woo, however, is suspicious of Geum-ja and suspects she may have been somehow involved with her sister’s death. Unable to find any sings of the paranormal activity, he thinks the ghost is probably a manifestation of Geum-ja’s guilt. He’s not particularly bothered about the potential crime, but is quite irritated that she’s wasted his time. She had indeed been reluctant to key him in on the facts of the case and may also have misled him. It seems Geum-ja’s sister Geum-seon may have been having an affair with Geum-ja’s husband, who has apparently not returned to haunt Geum-ja, or at least not in this form. 

But just as the crew are leaving, Geum-ja begins screaming and claims she can hear a voice that no one else can. Pil-woo too picks up five fragments of a ghostly voice from around the villa but struggles to assemble them into a coherent whole. This sudden reversal, however, only raises suspicion with the director of the TV crew who find Pil-woo’s discovery a little too convenient. He suggests that Pil-woo and Geum-ja may be in it together to cook up a ghost show. Pil-woo sees himself a genuine investigator and seems unhappy about working with the TV crew in the first place. He thinks of them as charlatans who regularly stage paranormal investigations to make the show entertaining. 

Geum-ja didn’t want to be on TV, either, though perhaps as Pil-woo suspects that she doesn’t really want to draw attention to herself or risk other things she might not want exposed coming to light. Pil-woo had suggested it was all a manifestation of her guilt, but never stopped to consider that both things could be true. Geum-ja and Geum-seon were twins, which means she is essentially haunted and confronting herself as expressed through the lengthy mirror shot in which Geum-ja converses with Geum-seon though her own reflection. Geum-seon plays a kind of game with her as if they were children, turning the sounds into a puzzle that must be solved in order to unlock the truth of her message. 

Yoo finally returns to make ionic usage of the eerie shot through a glass coffee table that opened the film as the malevolent presence eventually makes itself known.The villa becomes a more literal kind of haunted space, but as Pil-woo discovers its melancholy secret may be of a more ordinary kind, Geum-ja seeks a kind of reverse retribution, comforting the ghost of her sister but also asking for an apology as if she had the upper hand in this situation while wandering around in the team’s “stupid helmet” trying to root Geum-seon out. The dread only deepens as she comes closer to solving the puzzle and receiving its chilling message. Then again, perhaps the message is that Geum-ja should have just ignored the nagging voices in her head rather than chasing after ghostly echoes or seeking absolution from spirits rather than reckon with a painful reality. Though Geum-ja may see herself as the victim, so too may Geum-seon as the pair chase each other through the eerie space of the darkened villa with seemingly no escape for either.

The Distributors (유포자들, Hong Seok-ku, 2022)

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When Yu-bin (Park Sung-hoon) finds himself being blackmailed after being drugged in a club and videoed by an attractive young woman, he can’t help but feel hard done by. A teacher who once aspired to making films, he’s on the verge of marrying his fiancée Sun-ae (Kim So-eun) who is from an incredibly wealthy and very conservative pro-Japanese family, but if any of this gets out he can kiss his comfortable life goodbye. His focus is not, however, on how he shouldn’t have gone to his friend’s night club after promising Sun-ae he wouldn’t, but how he can cover all this up so she doesn’t find out he took two girls back to their flat when she was away on a business trip.

Hong Seok-ku’s The Distributors (유포자들, Yoopojadeul) never quite keys in to the fact that its hero’s a bit of a slimeball who nevertheless thinks he’s a good guy, and more often than not falls into his hard done by mindset. This might, however, echo the perspective of the average man in a society in which illicit photography has become a hot-button issue. As the film opens, Yu-bin is inflicting corporal punishment on two boys who’ve been caught taking inappropriate videos of women, which is perhaps not the best way to deal with this issue. Though he emphasises that they’ve done wrong, he’s also sort of on their side in that he agrees not to take this any further in case it damages their futures. Ji-ho, in particular, is on track to get into Seoul University and Yu-bin can’t really work out why he might have done something like this. The other boy Seong-min, happens to be his fiancée’s younger brother and predictably blames everything on Ji-ho.

It is then quite ironic that Yu-bin finds himself a victim of a video taken without his consent that shows him in a compromising position. Seven years earlier, he’d been accused of posting revenge porn after a former girlfriend broke up with him and had to pay her legal compensation. He claims that he didn’t intentionally leak it, but that his friend Sang-beom (Song Jin-woo) found it on his computer and uploaded it to the internet to make money on amateur porn sites. But again, his focus is more on how to make this go away rather than the harm he may have caused to Ga-young. She tells him that her life’s been ruined and that it’s pure hell to feel as if everyone’s looking at you wondering if they’ve seen the video. He, however, offers her money and suggests they settle this “like civilised people”, which is in itself not so different from blackmail while suggesting that she’s being unreasonable in not letting the matter drop.

Meanwhile, what Yu-bin might actually be worried about is that he’s made a tape of him and Sun-ae that she may not even know about or have consented to. In any case, his carelessness has meant that this video too might end up online ruining her life in the same way as Ga-young’s while the consequences for him are only mild humiliation and the breaking of his engagement. It’s not exactly clear how he and Sun-ae ended up meeting, but there’s a mild implication that he’s only really with her for the luxury lifestyle she provides while her father, who objects to the marriage because Yu-bin is not of their social class, also offers him career advancement in sponsoring a film department at the school. 

The blackmailer, Yu-bin, and his friend Sang-beom all make ironic references to this being like a Hitchcock movie, though Yu-bin is not really a “wrong man” so much as one running away from his own cowardice and imperfections. In his film class, he shows the children Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid, which is certainly an ironic choice given that it ends with a direct message warning men of the dangers of adultery and to always remember their duties to their family as husbands and fathers. Even Yu-bin’s sadly looking out through a rainy window echoes Kim’s cinematography, though Yu-bin is still in the mindset of feeling sorry for himself rather than coming to the realisation that even if it’s not Ga-young who is punishing him, he has never really faced his role in what happened to her or accepted responsibility for his failure to safeguard her privacy. Only now, when it’s him, does he begin to understand not only that he’s been selfish but that he’s failed in his role as a teacher by not figuring out what was going on with the boys and the videos while focussing on protecting their futures rather than those of the young women around them who deserve safety and respect but are provided little of either by a male-dominated society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Humint (휴민트, Ryoo Seung-wan, 2026)

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There’s something ironically dehumanising about the term “human intelligence”. Even the security services who court them seem to look down on their informants, viewing them more as traitors to their own side than those who’ve come over theirs. We have to ask ourselves if either side is really any better than the other. As Zo’s boss tells him, everyone’s just using each other to survive. There doesn’t seem to be a lot more to this world than that, just desperate struggle and cynicism.

Ryoo Seung-wan’s Humint (휴민트) is, like many similar films, at least as equally critical of the South as it is the North as the idealistic NIS officer finds himself an outlier among his comparatively coldhearted colleagues. In the course of his mission trying to find out who’s selling drugs to teenagers in Korea, Zo (Zo In-sung) uncovers a human trafficking network operated by the Russian mafia targeting North Korean women possibly with the complicity of their government. But his bosses don’t care about that, they just want the drugs, and it’s a bonus that they come from the North. Zo dangles the possibility of salvation in front of a woman trapped in a South East Asian brothel, but when it comes down to it, his boss won’t approve her rescue. They’ve effectively killed her, but all his boss tells him is that you have to get used to this sort of thing and you can’t afford to get hung up on each and every informant.

Still, what they’re asking them to do is necessarily dangerous and any promise they may make about protecting their informants is a lie. On the other side, the North sends young women to Vladivostok as “foreign currency earners” ostensibly working in a restaurant, but actually used as honeytraps drugging their clients and sleeping with them to get them hooked. Seon Hwa (Shin Se-kyung) is, ironically, in this position because the North does not seem to have kept its promises either. Her mother has advanced cancer, but her treatment needs money and so her father started smuggling to get it. When he got caught, her whole family was disgraced. She had to drop out of university and begin working as a foreign currency earner, breaking her engagement with top torturer Geon (Park Jeong-min). Geon is in town because he suspects the locale consular official is complicit with a series of mysterious disappearances of North Koreans near the Russian border, and he’s right. 

Hwang (Park Hae-joon) is certainly a slippery individual, apparently making Vladivostok his own personal fiefdom and, in the end, over playing his hand in trying to use Seon Hwa to take out Geon when he could probably just have let her go to make Geon leave him alone. “Do what you have to do to survive”, most people seem to say and it’s clear that personal relationships cannot reallysurive in this world in which human life is cheap. Seon Hwa and Geon’s romance was broken by the brutality of the North Korean regime, but it seems that the South is unwilling to save them. When Zo realises that Seon Hwa’s cover has been blown, he breaks protocol to try and save her, not wanting another woman’s death on his conscience. But though he unmasks the human trafficking ring, he’s reprimanded by his superiors who still complain that they’ve not made enough progress on the drugs case because Zo got sidetracked by the trafficked women. 

The women are, obviously, the ones who suffer because of these too regimes and perhaps by extension the division of Korea. Seon Hwa does her best to fight back, saving the other women so they can escape together, but is finally left with nothing. She has no country, and only asks to be sent somewhere where nobody knows her to start again. Expressing a new cold war anxiety born of geopolitical fluctuations as the South contends with the uncertainties of the North’s interplay with Russia and China, Ryoo’s espionage thriller has a retro quality, but also hints at contemporary unease, suggesting finally that there are really no good guys left and even idealists like Zo are compromised by their allegiance to an inhuman regime. Zo and Geon may become temporary allies in their quest to save Seon Hwa, but just as often point their guns a each other in Ryoo’s impressively staged action scenes amid a constant atmosphere of mistrust and betrayal.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Desperate Chase (필사의 추격, Kim Jae-hoon, 2024)

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The peaceful life of Jeju Islanders is disrupted by the threat of crime and drugs in Kim Jae-hoon’s zany comedy, The Desperate Pursuit (필사의 추격, Pilsaui Chugyeok). Though nobody is really being desperately pursed, time moves quite slowly on Jeju, the film plays into a generalised anxiety in recent Korean film in which the local community is fearful of “foreign” incursion, not only from meddling mainlanders but from Chinese investors who are currently buying up land and thereby pushing locals out.

The main drama revolves around an old-fashioned market that Taiwan-based gangster Zhu (Yoon Kyung-ho) wants to use as a medical centre that will act as a drug hub. Everyone who works there uses Jeju dialect and is keen to protect this disappearing slice of their local culture. According to some, they’ve already seen off the yakuza and aren’t planning on giving in to Triads either, though Zhu has already proved himself more ruthless by murdering his mole at the market when he asked the gangsters to avoid using violence because it was making his job of convincing people to take the settlement money and leave more difficult. Meanwhile, detective Su-gwang (Kwak Si-yang) who has been transferred to the island temporarily due to excessive use of force in Seoul remarks on how the landscape has changed since he last visited with all the new Chinese-owned skyscrapers.

To that extent, the contrast between the area around the airport and the location Su-gwang eventually finds himself in couldn’t be more stark. Though he encounters difficulty finding accommodation ironically because he’s from the mainland and all the landlords assume he’ll end up doing a moonlight flit, echoing the issues faced by international residents in the city, he’s eventually billeted in a pleasant country cottage owned by Ms. Yoo (Ye Soo-jung), leader of the market resistance, despite the objections of the crotchety old man who rents the other room. He’s not anticipating having to do a lot of policing, but is put straight on the case of a known conman they think may be in the area despite having previously fled abroad to evade all the warrants out against him. 

The conman is one thing, but the other disruptive force is the beauty clinic run by Dr. Yang (Park Hyo-joo) with the very ominous name of “Omerta”. Yang is cahoots with Zhu after having spent some time in China after losing her medical license due to providing illegal pain killers to her VIP patients in a damning indictment of amoral and exploitative status-driven culture. Their aim is to start dealing fentanyl in Korea through Jeju, though Yang warns him it’s a risky prospect with no infrastructure in place and in consideration of Korea’s tight drug laws, but Zhu is insistent. One of the chief weapons they have against Yang is that she only treats “VIPs” of which there aren’t any in the local community. In order to create a diversion, the local women eventually storm the place demanding treatment and accusing Yang of discrimination in their proud Jeju accents. 

Meanwhile, Su-gwang and his colleagues battle police corruption while trying to attack the real source of disorder in the form of Zhu and his men who have already struck deals with the local authorities. Zhu speaks fluent standard Korean and claims to have had a Korean father, though he abandoned him when he was five, but is also irritated by the constraints placed on him in this new territory. It really does turn out that everything about personal connections in Jeju, though in a more positive sense than it first sounded as the islanders band together to protect the market and expel the corruption of Zhu’s gang who want to ruin the beautiful local landscape and corrupt the populace by dealing drugs.

It has to be said, however, that there’s something a little sinister in the justification of Su-gwang’s violent policing which is treated as a bit of joke while coming from a place of righteous fury at the contemporary society in which the rich and powerful are free to get away with their crimes thanks to their connections. Jeju, however, does seem to mellow him a little with its laid-back atmosphere and cast of quirky characters where everyone really does know everyone even if outsiders are still viewed with a degree of suspicion. Partly a kind of tourist ad for the local community, the film paints the island as a place of warmth both in terms of its climate and the kindness of the locals, at least once you get to know them.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Salsali, You Didn’t Know (007 폭소판 살사리 몰랐지?, Kim Hwa-rang, 1966)

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Gwang-sik (Seo Young-chun, a popular comedian nicknamed “Salsal”) is the very definition of someone who’s seen too many movies. The film opens with him playing a joke on his boss by messing around with a chocolate gun and stabbing a mannequin after becoming obsessed with the world of James Bond. Gwang-sik’s fixation echoes the kind of Bond-mania that was sweeping the globe, but has an additional flavour in the Korea of the 1960s that was ever watchful for North Korean communist spies. The title cards preceding the film even include a number to contact if you catch one or want to turn yourself in.

Nevertheless, Gwang-sik’s interest in 007 has a pulpier quality in which he sees himself as a kind of justice-minded vigilante and indulges in various gimmicks such as attaching knives to the bottom of his boots. The knife boots, however, turn out to be fairly impractical, getting stuck in a wall and making him a sitting duck for his enemies. Though they might fall for his chocolate gun, it doesn’t take them long to figure out that Gwang-sik is a complete idiot bumbling his way through life. He does, however, seem to have luck on his side. After going on the run with no money and promising to help a young lady who was robbed but also needs to get to Busan, Gwang-sik enters an amateur boxing competition despite weighing almost nothing and somehow ends up winning just on a fluke. 

He has a rather camp, effeminate quality that is finally fulfilled when he cross-dresses to go undercover as a dancer at a cabaret bar in order to unmask the criminals who robbed the jewellery store where he works. While he continues to read Casino Royale and idolise the hyper-masculinity of James Bond, the scenes at the cabaret bar seem inspired more Some Like it Hot as Gwang-sik unwittingly breaks hearts all over Busan and gets to do some very nifty dancing. For the avoidance of doubt, his relationship with Myeong-ja, the woman he met in Daegu, originally remains chaste, but she takes a liking to him for exactly that reason and, despite her appearing to be into the cross-dressing, they eventually become a heteronormative couple after Gwang-sik has solved the mystery and reclaimed his masculinity by putting on a stylish leather jacket.

Though he makes constant references to the Korean War which mark him out as being from a slightly older generation than Myeong-ja, Gwang-sik seems caught between old and new Koreas by virtue of his job at the jewellery shop. Seong-ja, the unwilling scammer and Myeong-ja’s sister, carries out a complicated heist by trying to buy 950,000 won’s worth of jewellery suggesting that the economic situation has developed to the extent that it’s produced a new class of super rich people willing to spend this kind of money, which as someone later says is enough to buy a house in a nice part of town, on something inessential purely as a status symbol. She claims that she’s been robbed, as Myeong-ja is actually later hinting the growing wealth disparity and that there are still those trapped and desperate at the end of the economic ladder. Seong-ja herself is only doing all of this because she wanted to get enough money to send her sister to university, but has since fallen into crime and immorality and is now afraid to face her, leaving the two sisters on either side of a dividing line.

Meanwhile, she makes an unwitting co-conspirator of an acupuncturist who says he treats mental illness by telling him that Gwang-sik is her brother-in-law who literally lost his mind when she inherited her late husband’s estate instead of him. Now, she says, he just goes around asking everyone he meets for money and rants about cheques and promissory notes. Swayed by her 10,000 won certified cheque deposit, the acupuncturist seems to take all of this at face value and even describes the brother-in-law’s condition as a modern malady that causes people to become obsessed with money and consumerism. Ironically enough, Gwang-sik ends up “arresting” two men for counterfeiting currency they intended to circulate in the city as if symbolising the essential meaninglessness of money as a concept, though it’s all anyone’s after.

Seon-ja turns out to be working for a kingpin (Heo Jang-gang) who runs a swanky nightclub whom she appears to despise. No matter how much she regrets her choices, she is already too corrupted and cannot be allowed to join the new society like her sister Myeong-ja. Most of the film is taken up with silliness and Gwang-sik’s anarchic spy craft in which he has the ability to turn any situation to his advantage, uttering his iconic catchphrase, “Surprise! Salsali.” and behaving more like a hero from a classic serial rather than international spy James Bond, who didn’t really do a lot of crime prevention or protecting civilians in the course of his work. Nevertheless, the film ends on a note of reconciliation as Gwang-sik’s boss patches things up with the acupuncturist. Both men look on from a paternal position, supportive, if a little embarrassed by Gwang-sik’s intention to marry and wishing the new couple well for their future having fully transitioned into the contemporary society.

Halo (후광, Roh Young-wan, 2025)

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An astrologer delivery driver Min-joon (Choi Gang-hyun) meets tells him that he’s unlikely to achieve his dreams of becoming a film director in Korea. He was born under an unlucky star, destined to be a self-sacrificing figure overshadowed by his toxic family. However, the astrologer points out, the stars look different depending on where you stand, and according to him the best place for Min-joon is the UK, as unlikely as that might seem.

The astrologer doesn’t seem to hold out much hope that he’ll make it, though. He feels sorry for people like Min-joon who have an over-developed sense of responsibility for those around them and are incapable of putting themselves first. They may very well be toxic and dragging him down, but as Min-joon says, they’re still his family. When we first meet them, his parents are having a physical altercation in the police station while his older brother, Min-ha, who has learning difficulties, screams in terror and confusion. It seems that Min-joon’s father has taken to drink and either can’t or doesn’t work. He criticises the state of the nation that reduces people to living like this, but as his wife points out rather than worrying about the country perhaps he could fix the light in the bathroom that’s been broken for months. He asks why he should when it’s not their place anyway, which might explain a few things about the state of the nation.

In any case, Min-joon is surrounded by radio broadcasts about North Korean missiles and various other disasters that lend an additional sense of doom to his monotonous life. Min-joon is honest and hard-working, diligently delivering parcels all day long and taking good care of his van, only to be treated with contempt and a constant stream of problems from his family. He dreams of becoming a film director, but is always frustrated, first by being unable to afford a colour print of his script and pitch for a producer he met through a connection. He shows up in a neat suit ready to discuss his idea, but she immediately shoots him down by saying that no one makes this kind of film any more and he has zero chance of directing anything. She advises working on the set to gain more experience, but those kinds of jobs don’t usually pay very well and Min-joon probably couldn’t afford to take it even if he weren’t hurt and demoralised by the humiliating experience of being so casually dismissed.

That might be why he takes the astrologer’s advice to heart and starts working overtime to save money to move to the UK while sleeping in his van and washing in a local public toilet. He makes the convenience store guy put his buy one get one free sandwiches in separate bags as if ashamed to have him know he’s going to eat them both himself and that that’s his only meal. Even so, his mother asks him to lend them money to buy his brother, the oldest son, a wife from North Korea so he can live a settled family life, seemingly thinking little of Min-joon’s right to do the same. Meanwhile, Min-ha has suspiciously also come into quite a lot of money, and is later arrested for getting involved with a gang running telephone scams. Min-joon thinks Min-ha probably didn’t know or at least fully understand what he was getting into and was exploited by the gang because of his disability but the police won’t listen to him and a lawyer seems to suggest there’s nothing he can do, bearing out the inherent injustice of the contemporary society.

There really is no way out for him. He’s insulted by residents of the snooty apartment blocks he delivers to who don’t like him using their lift, his van gets robbed, and he ends up bumping it too, requiring even more money to repair and now he can’t even sell it to help his brother pay the compensation money for victims of the scam so he can stay out of prison. He repeatedly visits the apartment of a hoarder with a piles of boxes outside her door that she never opens. It’s like he too is trapped in the room surrounded by cardboard with only his family for company. His desperation mounts with frightening intensity until reaching its unavoidable conclusion as he seeks the only kind of escape available to him.

Halo screens in Chicago March 28th as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Last Woman on Earth (지구 최후의 여자, Yeum Moon-kyoung & Lee Jong-min, 2024)

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Wronged by an internationally famous film director, a pair of aspiring filmmakers set their sights on cinematic revenge in Yeum Moon-kyoung and Lee Jong-min’s meta comedy, Last Woman on Earth (지구 최후의 여자, Jigu Choehuui Yeoja). Even so, they find themselves mired in a world of sexism and artistic jealousy ruled over by powerful elites content to feed on their aspiration, chew them up and spit them out only to, on the one hand, insist that exploiting them made them sad, and then on the other barely remember them at all and claim they did nothing wrong.

Hana and Cheol each have painful histories with a Hong Sang-soo like festival darling that have frustrated both their lives and artistic careers. They meet in a film class where they workshop their movies that are also attempts to overcome their trauma. Hana’s is a high-concept sci-fi drama shot like a silent film and peppered with intertitles in which the only woman left on earth after a virus wiped out all the others is imprisoned by men who harvest her eggs and attempt to clone her. Cheol’s is Hollywood gangster noir set in Chicago in 1989 in which he kills an annoying old man who was holding him back. Cheol annoys Hana by pointing out the theme of her film was “misandry”, as if there were something wrong with that, while she points out his film is obviously about his resentment towards a father figure. Even so, Cheol thinks the reason no one likes his script its that it’s too manly, and he could use some female input to help him score points on the grant application, which is how they end up working together.

Their various traumas highlight the problems in the mainstream film industry, even if Cheol’s problem is, in another meta touch, with indie filmmakers who make indie films to show to indie people at indie festivals. After being talked into a nude scene a more famous actress had refused to do, Hana became the talk of the town while her scenes from the movie ended up porn sites. She became a sex symbol, but was shamed out of show business. The only jobs she got offered were erotic movies and all she could do in the end was abandon her old identity. As she reveals in a lengthy musical number, she still wants to make films even though it’s painful and no one wants to seem to letter.

Like her, Cheol sought the approval of a master but feels betrayed by him. Tak stole his screenplay and used it to win awards in Europe without crediting him. Even since then, he’s been determined to become the Ant-Tak by doing what he couldn’t, making a hit popcorn movie that’s nothing more that an good time at the movies. But even Cheol can’t completely abandon the patriarchal mindset, first gender-flipping his revenge drama, then changing gears to make Hana the hero only to suddenly appear as a male character to swoop in and save her from the evil professor, Tak. 

Throughout the runtime, there’s the sense that the world is coming to an end, and of course it is because the world of this film lasts only until the closing credits. Still, they want to make the film anyway, even if there’s no tomorrow and no one will see it, because it’s what they have to do. They start out by making a documentary about Tak, hoping to destroy the Korean film industry by exposing what he’s really like. But Tak doesn’t really take them seriously. He points out he’s not Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon Ho, so no one’s going to watch their film anyway. Though he claims to feel bad about what happened to Hana after he used her for his film, he also says that it’s not his fault because that’s just how things were and everybody did it. Like Cheol, he’s now trying to make a “feminist” film to atone, laying bare the cynicism of these kinds of gestures intended only to whitewash the image of a tainted artist. But films after all “next world” and the way out. You can make one on your own, and it doesn’t really matter if no one sees it. Killing her past trauma, Hana transfers fully into the world of cinema, staying with Cheol to watch the world end as the camera continues rolling on waiting for the next world to enter the frame.

The Last Woman on Earth screens in Chicago March 27th as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The First Ride (퍼스트 라이드, Nam Dae-joong, 2025)

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According to Tae-jung (Kang Ha-neul), the most hopeless phrase that Koreans say is “next time.” As he grew older and away from his childhood friends, he found himself saying “next time” more often without really thinking about it. But of course, the thing about life is that you always assume there’ll be a “next time”, but that might not necessarily be the case. Perhaps right now is a “last time” and you don’t even know it. The sometime narrator of The First Ride (퍼스트 라이드) tells us right away that this is a”sad story,” but it’s also happy a one about the enduring power of friendship even if you might not be all that close any more.

Tae-jung, Yeon-min (Cha Eun-woo), Do-jin (Kim Young-kwang), and Geum-bok (Kang Young-seok) have been friends since they were six years old, but Yeon-min is moving to New Zealand with his family right after he graduates high school. To mark the occasion, the boys decide to go on a trip and pick Thailand for their destination because Yeon-min’s favourite DJ is going to be playing at a festival. After managing to convince their parents, they finally set off only to be frustrated by an unexpected development that prevents them from travelling. Ten years later, Do-jin has been having a hard time, spending the intervening years in and out of pyshciatric hospital. He nevertheless wants to recreate their teenage trip as soon-to-be 30-year olds. As Yeon-min is unable to come, he decides to take him along with them in the form of a life-size pillow with his face on it, which proves very confusing for the good people of Thailand.

It’s clear that each of the young men has had various struggles in the intervening years. Geum-bok became a tattooist and is still in flight from his mother’s determination that he follow in her footsteps by becoming a Buddhist monk. He ends up going on holiday with his head shaved and wearing monks’ robes hoping for one last hurrah. Tae-jung, meanwhile, is on the way to achieving his dream of becoming president by working as a secretary to an assemblyman who is currently on hunger strike to protest some kind of injustice. Tae-jung’s pure-heated belief in political integrity becomes something of a thorn in the side of his boss who, is of course, not really going so far as to refuse all food, so he’s only too happy to let him go on a once-in-a-lifetime male bonding trip. Tae-jung is also followed by Ok-sim (Han Sun-hwa), who sees herself as his girlfriend, while he seems to be indifferent to her partly because of his own unresolved trauma and fear of making new relationships. But Do-jin who has suffered the most, unable to get over Yeon-min’s absence and looked after Tae-jung and Geum-bok while he struggles with mental health issues including hallucinations and delusions. 

Nevertheless, their time in Thailand is mainly spent on goofy fun which more than once gets them sent to the local jail only to be rescued by an exasperated embassy official (Yoon Kyung-ho) who tries to persuade them to go home early or at least pretend not to be Korean. A baffling plot development in which the gang are kidnapped for illegal organ transplant takes the film in a darker direction though is still mostly played for laughs and acting as a mild caution about the dangers of travel, and most particularly of people who seem nice but might have ulterior motives. It’s only Ok-sim’s messiness that saves the day in the end even if she begins to become slightly fed up with Tae-jung’s continued insensitivity towards her in flirting with other women during their trip. 

But even so, through their shared experiences, the three men begin to overcome some of their shared trauma while reaffirming their friendship. Do-jin comes to accept the truth and is able to begin living a more settled life thanks to the support of his friends in processing his guilt and grief. Though they may not be so close any more, the memory of their childhood friendship becomes a sustaining force for each of them, while they try to maintain their relationship as adults with busy lives. They are, however, much better equipped to that after their strange trip to Thailand despite its continuing absurdity.

Trailer (English subtitles)

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

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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)