Tag: Korea

The Beetle Project (숙제, Jin Kwang-kyo, 2025)

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“Cousins should get along,” according to a North Korean soldier who’s just found out his son has been bullying his nephew, ironically by drawing a red line down the middle of their bedroom to make it clear that this interloper isn’t wanted in his territory. Red lines become a theme in Jim Kwang-kyo’s charming childhood drama The Beetle Project (숙제, Sugje) in which the pure-hearted goodness of a series of children knows no borders and sees only common ground between themselves and a North Korean boy who’s lost his pet beetle that he was keeping as a homework project.

Luckily, the beetle is discovered by best friends Ah-ram and Jae-hoon who decide to finish the boy’s homework for him in the hope that they will somehow be able to get the beetle back to him. Of course, that’s easier said than done given that Lee Chul-min lives in the North so it’s not like they can they just pay him a visit to give it back. The irony is that the beetle only came to them because of a flood that was partly caused by the North’s sudden opening of its floodgates prompting calls for greater co-operation across borders to prevent potential tragedies such as these. 

Meanwhile, we discover that Lee Chul-min is experiencing a degree of familial discord as his younger brother Chul-kyu is resentful of the fact he’s been sent to the city to study in a better school while he’s been kept at home and is forced to work in the fields with his mother. The film’s depiction of North Korea is largely utopian in which the repressiveness of the regime is barely felt aside from the occasional presence of soldiers and a degree of foreboding in the threat that the growing feud between the boys poses to a carefully balanced order. Chul-min’s cousin Chul-ju is also resentful that he now has to share everything including his room and has been bullying Chul-min because of it, though Chul-min is a stereotypically good boy who puts up with everything without making a fuss and makes sure to tell his mother what a good time he’s been having in the city where they get to eat ice cream every day when it’s hot.

Both sets of children deeply care about the fate of the beetle and what’s best for it, only to become a political football that’s picked up by a shady conglomerate Ah-ram’s journalist father Jin-kyu tried to expose for a food contamination scandal only to have to make a humiliating retraction on air when the station is ordered to back off. Hooked on the PR potential, they try to use the beetle, and Ah-ram, for their own ends, while the family simultaneously becomes the target of scammers promising they can help return the beetle for a small fee, and rightwing trolls who harass them for being North Korean collaborators. When one of the other kids damages the beetle’s enclosure. Ah-ram and Jae-hoon find themselves drawing another red line to keep them out only to later think better of it.

Disappointed by the adults around them, including Jin-kyu who is still struggling to deal with the death of his wife and his changed relationship with Ah-ram whom he sent to live with her grandmother in the country, the kids decide they want to send the beetle back by themselves and hand it straight to Chul-min. Jin-kyu ends up getting involved with an online insect enthusiast group who unbeknownst to him are all children and strangely led by a little girl who for some reason talks like a middle-aged farmer’s wife. In any case, it’s very much children doing it for themselves and realising that they have a lot in common despite the border between them. Ah-ram is worried that Chul-min will get into trouble for losing his homework and probably misses his beetle while she herself is also still processing her mother’s death for which she blames herself and adjusting to her new life in the country where she’s supported by her forthright schoolteacher who can’t resist resorting to colourful language whenever she encounters “injustice”. In its way, the beetle becomes a kind of symbol for Korea itself with the children promising to meet again as adults so they can find out what happened to it while wishing the best for “Beety” and vowing to look after it together. Charming and wholesome, the film is a gentle advocation for a spiritual, if not necessarily literal, reunification and a sense of solidarity among the younger generation dedicated to doing the right thing in a world in which adults call lies “flexibility” and think one beetle is no better than another.

The Beetle Project screened in Chicago as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Revolver (리볼버, Oh Seung-uk, 2024)

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Everyone is always making promises to Su-yeong, but promises don’t count for very much in this world of infinite duplicity. Reuniting director Oh Seung-uk with The Shameless star Jeon Do-yeon, Revolver (리볼버) takes place in a world of corrupt cops and criminal gangs where no one can be trusted and every relationship is transactional. Like the barrel of a revolver, allegiances shift and rotate as Su-yeong attempts to navigate these turbulent waters while well aware that she is completely alone and has only her quest for vengeance and justice to sustain.

It’s by a broken promise that’s she’s been betrayed. After having become lowkey involved in police corruption to help her lover Captain Lim (Lee Jung-jae), former policewoman Su-yeong agreed to take the fall for the squad. They promised her that she’d only lose her job rather than go to prison and that she’d be allowed to keep the apartment she’d just bought, get a 700,000-dollar payout, and a new job working for Eastern Promises security division. Only in the police station does she realise she’s been tricked as they slap a drug trafficking charge on her and hand down a two-year sentence. Predictably, once she gets out, no one’s there to meet her except a gloating prosecutor and a random woman she’s never met before, Yoon-sun (Lim Ji-yeon), who says she was a friend of Lim’s. He’s since been found dead in a suspected suicide, though that matters less to Su-yeong than the fact he gifted her apartment to someone else and has since died in mysterious circumstances. 

The funny thing is that Yoon-sun, who is working both with corrupt cop Dong-ho (Kim Jun-han) and the gang led by Grace (Jeon Hye-jin), actually has some sympathy with Su-yeong and disproves of the way she’s been treated. After all, they could have just paid her her money like they said they would. Well used to navigating these waters, Yoon-sun appears to be playing her own game and keeping her options open yet it seems genuine when she tries to help Su-yeong which isn’t to say she wouldn’t betray her if she absolutely had to but right now she doesn’t. There is something quite poignant about the sense of female solidarity that arises between them, even though they are romantic rivals, as women who’ve both been let down by this patriarchal society. Su-yeong is rightly fed up with it and she’s going to get her money and her apartment no matter what if only to make sure they don’t win. Yoon-sun has chosen complicity as her chosen means of survival, but may be silently rooting for Su-yeon to break the both of them out of this repressive system.

To that extent it’s ironic that the former detective’s main weapon is a retractable baton, as if she were trying to enact justice though she herself is a compromised figure having at least been on the fringes of the corruption if perhaps not at the heart of it. Then again, all of the police appear to be corrupt so perhaps it’s more that she’s no better than the world that surrounds her and well aware that promises mean nothing and no one can be trusted. Lim seemingly broke a number of promises to her but may have tried to make it right in the end, while she’s also the victim of a vendetta by grudge-bearing cop Dong-ho (Kim Jun-han) whose romantic overtures she once turned down leaving him with a desire to destroy her completely. Top bad guy Andy (Andy) also appears to be a figure of compromised masculinity, playing the rabid dog but having no other backing than his ambiguous relationship with Grace who may have offed a female rival to solidify her grasp over the criminal enterprise. Violently beaten by Su-yeong, he too vows revenge to reclaim his masculinity but is ill equipped to achieve it. 

Despite being disregarded as not a proper detective, Su-yeong patiently follows all the clues and plays a long game to track down the source of all her misery while really her dreams had been small, owning a nice apartment and sharing it with Lim. On her release from prison, she tells the guard that her parents are dead and she has no friends or relatives signalling her aloneness in a vast world of betrayal but also her resilience and refusal to back down in her ironic fight for “justice” which is simply making sure those who’ve wronged her honour their promises and she gets what she’s owed. The occasional bouts of dark humour such as the absurdity of the final confrontation scene lend a touch of surreality to Oh’s purgatorial world of constant mistrust. “Live as if you were already dead,” a defeated Andy ineffectually screams as he vows vengeance and insists Su-yeong hasn’t heard the last of this. But Su-yeong has been living like she’s dead all along and now, finally, might be alive once again. 

Revolver is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Harbin (하얼빈, Woo Min-ho, 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International trailer (English subtitles)

Manok (이반리 장만옥, Lee Yu-jin, 2025)

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When Manok returns to her rural hometown in the wake of her mother’s death, the irony is that some accuse her of running away from the humiliation of the implosion of her life in Seoul, but in other ways she has unfinished business in Iban-ri and this time she isn’t going to let them drive her away. Lee Yu-jin’s warmhearted dramedy is at heart about a love of community, or rather communities that might not at first seem compatible or even mutually exclusive but are then integrated by the sheer force of Manok’s determination.

Now in her 50s, Manok (Yang Mal-bok) had owned a popular lesbian bar in Seoul and was at the forefront of queer activism in the city hosting the annual after party for the Pride parade for the last 20 years. But times have changed and the young queer community has begun to find new places to root itself while Manok struggles to adjust to the generational shift taking place. Finding out on the same day that her mother has died and her brothers don’t really want her at the funeral, she’s losing the parade after party and without it her bar will probably go out of business, and her long-term partner Geum-ja (Kim Jung-young) knew all along but didn’t say anything out of fear of her reaction, sends her into frenetic spiral in which she abruptly leaves town and decamps to the house her mother inexplicably left her back in Iban-ri.

Manok had left town to live a more authentic life having tried to accommodate herself to conventionality through marriage but finding it unbearable. She is not exactly welcomed back with open arms as her brothers repeatedly blame her for being a “nasty lesbian,” and using it as a justification for increasing their share of the inheritance to cut her out. Her ex-husband, meanwhile, has become the city chief and rules the local area with an iron hand while misusing his position to exploit the local community. Manok ends up coming to the rescue of his child, Jae-yeon, whose transgender identity he repeatedly rejects while Jae-yeon faces discrimination and harassment from his schoolmates.

Jae-yeon is in many ways the reason that Manok can’t simply leave again and try to reconstruct her life in Seoul because nothing’s really changed in Iban-ri and Jae-yeon is facing all the same problems she once did but without the well-earned armour the middle-aged Manok has managed to forge for herself that allows her to stare down injustice with a steely gaze. Then again, back in Seoul, younger members of the community had accused her of being self-aggrandising, that she was overfond of justifying her actions as being for their benefit when really she simply enjoyed the status of being a community leader. In Iban-ri, however, she gains some time to reflect and truly becomes a part of this community that she again wants to save, this time by challenging her ex to win the position of city chief herself and enact change through kindness and solidarity. While the young leave for the cities, many left behind are elderly and are in their way just as exiled as Manok with the city chief failing in his obligations to look after them.

Later Manok says that her ambition is to make Iban-ri a place where no one is lonely or feels the kind of isolation she once felt through being rejected by those around her because of her sexuality. As her ex pathetically tries to cling on to his patriarchal authority, Manok decides to do things the Iban-ri way by winning hearts and minds and eventually showing them that there’s nothing to fear as she too reoccupies her mother’s house with her partner in tow finally claiming her claiming her space in this place that had no place for her. As Geum-ja had said, Manok really does love her community and sets about making Iban-ri a happier and healthier town where people care for and about each other and no one is left behind. A warm and quirky exploration of small-town life and the power of authenticity the film’s infectious spirit is difficult to deny as the joy it finds in the queer identity even amid so much fear and hostility brokered by one woman’s determination not to back down because there are kids who need protecting in Iban-ri and they all they deserve a Manok in their lives.

Manok screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Summer’s Camera (여름의 카메라, Divine Sung, 2025)

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Summer can’t bring herself to press the shutter button on the last four exposures left on the unfinished roll of film her father left behind. Her unwillingness to do so and seeming abandonment of their shared passion for photography hints at her difficulty to come to terms with his passing along with her own sense of adolescent confusion. But just as her father had told her she would, she learned to hear the shutter for herself and took three of her four remaining photos without thinking, all of Yeonwoo, the star of the school’s football team by whom she is unexpectedly captivated.

Well, perhaps not all that unexpectedly. Summer appears to already be aware of her queerness even if she hasn’t explored it yet and quickly finds that her interest is returned by Yeonwoo who immediately responds to her roundabout confession of love by asking her out. Which is all to say, this world is quite different from that Summer’s father Jihoon inhabited in his youth even if it’s rosier than the still conservative reality of contemporary South Korea. Summer’s direct announcement to her best friend that she likes girls is met with a simple “I know,” having noticed that she never took photos of guys and only a little hurt that she never said anything before and hasn’t let her in on her recent dating news.

But what Summer discovers after taking one very deliberate photo of Yeonwoo and having the film developed is that her father also took pictures of someone he liked and that someone was a boy, Maru. Of course, this revelation is quite destabilising for her. She can’t get her head around her father’s relationship with herself and her mother if he was gay though as her friend points out, he may have been bisexual which actually didn’t occur to her. In a quest for answers, Summer approaches the now middle-aged Maru and eventually like her friends did of her simply accepts this unknown fact about Jihoon while finding in Maru someone who’s gone through the same things she’s experiencing and with whom she can discuss the things she can’t yet talk about with her mother or friends. 

In her recollections, we never see the face of the adult Jihoon. He always appears with her back to her or just out of frame reflecting the ways in which she no longer feels as if she knew her father and has lost sight of her relationship with him in the wake of her loss. Though told it was a traffic accident, Summer wonders if in reality he might have taken his own life and chosen to leave her behind. Through re-embracing photography, she begins to rediscover him and come into herself gaining not only the confidence to be who she is but to believe that loss is something she can bear while like Yeonwoo’s running hobby which apparently can alter the flow of time, photography is also a means of trapping a memory which means that nothing’s ever really gone.

With the universal love and acceptance that seems to surround Summer, the film implies that the world has moved on and if her father chose conventionality over love that’s a choice that she may not need to make. Even so, in Maru she finds a strong queer role model who even in his own sadness and grief in his lost love for Jihoon is able to help her move forward in showing her a different side of her father which she had never known. He helps her navigate young love and offers a safe space for her to be herself until she’s ready to confront the unresolved past and make peace with it. Though perhaps tinged with melancholy and longing, Summer’s world is otherwise bright and sunny. Filled both with the giddiness of first love and the deep sadness of a catastrophic loss, it is nevertheless warm and beautiful as Summer sees it through the camera lens. With the shutter button as her guiding light, Summer learns to see in new ways peering both back into the past and ahead into her future now less fearful and more certain of herself having reclaimed both something of the father she lost and the one she never knew.

Summer’s Camera screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Amazon Bullseye (아마존 활명수, Kim Chang-ju, 2024)

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A harried Korean executive finds common ground with a trio of men from an Amazonian indigenous community while training them to win a medal in an international archery competition in Kim Chang-ju’s genial comedy, Amazon Bullseye (아마존 활명수, Amazon Hwalmyeongsu). Though mostly avoiding the obvious pitfalls of its subject matter and taking extreme care to be respectful to the indigenous people of the Amazon, it has to be said that the film otherwise has some rather outdated humour. Nevertheless, it does have some secondary points to make about exploitative businesses practices in Korea and abroad along with the destruction of natural world that goes hand in hand with capitalist expansion.

Jin-bong (Ryu Seung-ryong) once won a gold medal for archery, but is now a middle-aged office worker whose career is on the skids. After chewing him out for failing to make any significant deals, his boss, Park (Jeon Seok-ho), has a new proposition for him. He wants Jin-bong to go to the Amazonian nation of Boledor and close a deal to allow them to open a gold mine or else face compulsory redundancy. He’s supposed to do this by coaching their national archery team to win a medal in the upcoming championships. Unfortunately, the helicopter he’s travelling on is struck by lightning and he’s marooned in the jungle only to be rescued by an indigenous community who then conclude he’s an emissary from the Boledor authorities and has come to destroy the village in which case he must die. 

But Jin-bong finds unexpected connection with Walbu (J.B. Oliveira) who is also a father of three children and is later welcomed after saving his daughter from a wolf attack. As the young men communicate with the animal and try to convince it to return to the forest, it becomes obvious that they have a respect for the land that an urban man like Jin-bong does not. Unbeknownst to him, they have already refused permission to open the goldmine and are fiercely opposed to any encroachment on their land or traditional way of life. After seeing just how bad the national team is, Jin-bong has the idea of asking the men from the indigenous community to compete instead but is only able to persuade them by convincing the president to legally sign the land over so it can’t ever be redeveloped and they’ll never be moved on. 

Of course, that wasn’t quite what his boss had in mind so even though Jin-bong is protective of the Tagauri, it’s clear his company always meant to exploit them and doesn’t care about the environment or the preservation of traditional culture. Jin-bong too is oppressed by this system and only participates in the first place because he fears losing his job not least because it’s so unlikely he’d be able to find another at his age. Jin-bong has three children and a feisty wife (Yeom Hye-ran ) who complains that she’s already had to sell some of their possessions because they can’t afford all the bills on their poky flat. He may then envy the apparent simplicity of life in the forest. On returning home the three men remark on how silly everyone is in Korea suffering all month long for something called “money” they use to buy tasteless “dead meat” rather than going into the forest and getting some like a normal person. But they also point out that they aren’t really all that different seeing as people still love their children and fathers work hard to support and protect them. 

Nevertheless, there are perhaps a few too many jokes about Jin-bong’s “scary” nagging wife and his position as a henpecked husband. It may also go too far in exploring cultural difference as the trio is arrested for doing things like carrying their bows and arrows around and using them to shoot fish in the river that runs through the middle of Seoul. They also start a campfire in Jin-bong’s apartment to make a traditional smoked chicken dish and are confused by Jin-bong’s reaction to this well-meaning attempt to share their culture with him. While they’re in Korea, they start to become a little more Korean with chieftain’s son Eba (Luan Brum) even developing an appreciation for super spicy kimchi. But they also observe the high rise buildings and constant construction as echoes of the fate that may soon befall the village if the Bolderan government and Jin-bong’s company get their way. Through their sporting pursuit, the men discover a way to take back control, tell the world about the Tagauri, and mobilise public opinion against the faceless corporation to ensure that they can protect their land and way of life from the ravages of chaebol culture.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Devils Stay (사흘, Hyun Moon-seop, 2024)

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Unable to accept his daughter’s death, a father refuses to let her soul rest in Hyun Moon-seop’s possession thriller, Devil’s Stay (사흘, Saheul). The film’s Korean title “the Third Day” hints at its inverted religious overtones as a priest explains that she will indeed rise again like the Lord himself three days after her death, but as a destroyer of worlds in the incarnation of powerful demon. Heart surgeon Seung-do (Park Shin-Yang) isn’t sure that’s such a bad thing if only his daughter survives.

Then again, there’s a sense that Seung-do himself may share that So-mi’s (Lee Re) plight was partly down to his hubristic conviction in his skills as a surgeon that he alone could save her. So-mi evidently had some kind of serious medical condition that could only be cured by a heart transplant, but the obvious implication of that is if So-mi is to survive then another child must die. There is a kind of equivalent exchange in play and a wager that Seung-do is making with the universe. He may not think of it that way, but he is in fact making a deal with the Devil in his willingness to commit a human sacrifice to save his own child at the expense of someone else’s that in turn would colour the rest of So-mi’s life even if she had not become possessed by a demon.

Father Ban (Lee Min-Ki), a young and intense priest very committed to exorcisms and demon hunting, presses Seung-do as to how he came by this heart that he gave to his daughter, already sensing that this is how the demon crept in. Seung-do must in effect wrestle with the decision he made that has both damned and saved his daughter in equal measure along with the reality that whatever has survived is not So-mi, or at least, not So-mi alone. Father Ban tells him that when the demon rises on the third day, it will immediately turn on those closest to its host. He must then place another wager, deciding whether saving So-mi is worth risking the lives of his wife and son in addition to his own rather than letting her go gracefully and attempting to go on with his life while carrying the burden of paternal failure. 

But to all around him, it appears as if Seung-do has lost his mind. He rants and raves, insisting that his daughter isn’t really dead and even at times interfering with the funeral process to take charge of her body. Like him, Father Ban is also considered an outsider by other members of his church who think he’s too invested in demonology and possibly also blame him for the death of another exorcist priest who saved him when he was demonically possessed himself while serving in the army. Perhaps subversively, the film heavily implies that there was more than friendship to Father Ban’s relationship with the other priest and that his desire to vanquish the demon is also one of vengeance. In this, he may be Seung-do’s enemy as he is gradually seduced by the demon and considers appeasing it to save So-mi, encouraged to make another equivalent exchange and in a sense enact his own funeral to take her place.

In this way, the religiosity is undercut by the implication that the “light” that guided So-mi belonged to father rather than to God as he fulfilled his role as a her polestar and his promise that he’d come find her if she made sure to stay where she was. Even so, it amounts to an awkward advocation that father knows best in that So-mi’s salvation lies in her obedience to Seung-do, rejecting her autonomy to place her faith in her earthly father to save her as he promised he would. In many ways, it’s a story of paternal redemption in which Seung-do must reckon with the transgressive choice he made, no longer able to run or hide from it to but forced to accept his weakness and failure along with the morality of what he did. Essentially a character study, Hyun Moon-seop’s conjures a palpable sense of evil and eeriness but also hope as Father Ban’s mentor had reminded him, that demons too can be beaten though the worst of all dwells in the human heart. 

Devils Stay is released in the US on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital March 18 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Don’t Buy the Seller (타겟, Park Hee-kon, 2023)

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“Why do you always overreact?” a petulant craftsman eventually asks Soo-hyun, though Soo-hyun hasn’t overreacted so much as dared to assert herself in a world that often doesn’t listen to women. The irony at the centre of Park Hee-kon’s cybercrime thriller Don’t Buy the Seller (타겟, Target) is that it seemingly all unfolds because of a faulty washing machine, but like similarly themed films such as Door Lock, it soon becomes clear that Soo-hyun (Shin Hye-sun) isn’t really safe anywhere and there’s nothing this world objects to more than a woman who answers back.

In any case, it’s clear that Soo-hyun is not safe at work as her relentlessly creepy boss (Im Chul-soo) continues to sexually harass her while telling her off for taking things too personally when she finally complains. All he ever seems to do is yell at her for failing to enact his ludicrous demands while the guys at the construction site obviously don’t pay attention to her even though she’s the one managing this project. “Think he wants to work after being yelled at by a young lady?” one of the guys asks when one of the others doesn’t show up for his shift though Soo-hyun hadn’t actually yelled at him so much as asked him to please do his job and follow her instructions rather than ignore her in favour of his own judgement. 

She encounters a similar dismissiveness at the police station where she’s initially fobbed off as just another silly woman despite the younger policeman’s more sympathetic attempts to address her complaints even as his colleague leans over and explains there’s a four month backlog of fraud cases and they won’t even start to look for the guy who scammed her until then. Maybe he has a point, there are lots of victims of crime, but that only means they have lost the ability to enforce the law because the scammers know the police won’t catch them until they’re among the small number of unlucky criminals they do manage to get a lock on. Realising the police won’t help her, Soo-hyun vents her anger by tracking down the scammer on the reselling platform she tried to buy a washing machine from and leaving warnings not to buy on all his listings. Of course, this earns the stalker’s wrath because he too is another man who doesn’t like it when a woman answers back. 

But Soo-hyun has bitten off more than she can chew. This guy is seriously dangerous and into way more than just scamming people online by selling them broken appliances. We can see he has some kind of cyber lair and offers similar services to other men in which he agrees to provide a woman’s phone number, passwords, social media accounts and social security details to any man that wants them, for the right price. If he wants porn or videos posted, that’s extra. But it’s clear that a man with money can ruin a woman who says no with relative ease. Deep into his campaign, the stalker offers Soo-hyun the opportunity to end all this by paying him a large amount of money though as Soo-hyun knows there’s no guarantee he’ll keep his promise. Still after months of terror and constant harassment, she’s on the brink of giving in.

In this way, the stalker becomes an avatar of patriarchal male violence that slaps Soo-hyun right down in her place. She begins to feel insecure in the domestic environment as the stalker sends her nuisance deliveries of fast food at all hours of the day and night along with strange men who’ve been told to visit her for a good time and have evidently been given the code for the door lock. She’d only moved in here a week ago and moving out will incur a financial penalty she’s not well equipped to pay having been scammed in the first place. But the police seemingly can’t do anything while Soo-hyun is plagued by a sense of threat and unease that this person has so much control over her life and could turn up to cause her harm at any moment. Suddenly, she’s not a woman who answers back anymore but a timid and nervous zombie who can barely speak at all. 

Of course, this is exactly what the stalker wanted and what many of the men around Soo-hyun want too. They tell her to stop overreacting or that she brought this on herself by goading the scammer. They imply that she’s made herself an easy target by living alone and that buying goods second hand through apps which involve any kind of personal handover is inherently dangerous, but really they mean that like her friend Dal-ja (Lee Joo-young) she should have got married, chalked up getting scammed to experience, and above all kept quiet about it. Which is to say let her sleazy boss get away with making her feel uncomfortable as a kind of appeasement rather than challenge his behaviour or remind him that he does not have the right to make her feel this way, to abuse his position to interfere with her career, or otherwise oppress her. The message is, you don’t have to buy what they’re selling, faulty goods are after all not worth all this hassle.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Okinawa Blue Note (오키나와 블루노트, Cho Sung-kyu, 2024)

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If you run into someone who has the same name, same birthday, and was on the same flight as you to a random destination wouldn’t you call that fate? The protagonists of Cho Sung-kyu’s Okinawa Blue Note (오키나와 블루노트) prefer to think of it as mere coincidence, at least to begin with. They each have different reasons for coming to Okinawa, but then again perhaps fate sent them here to get a new lease on their lives if not to fall in love.

Love does however seem a little unlikely for the mismatched pair each named Kim Jungmin who are about as different from each other as it’s possible to be. Yet the male Jungmin’s (Kim Dong-wan) animosity is somewhat understandable given that his arrival in Okinawa has become chaotic thanks to the female Jungmin’s (Hwang Seung-eon) presence given that she mistakenly ended up with both his pre-booked car and room reservation because the staff members only checked the name and not the booking number. Jungmin isn’t the sort of person who copes well with complications, nor does he cope well with noisy, more extroverted people like the female Jungmin who is also annoyed by the whole thing but on the other hand doesn’t think it’s really her problem having merely assumed she’d been lucky enough to receive a free upgrade rather than actively nabbing someone’s more expensive package. Nevertheless, he’s forced to get along with her because he needs to borrow her rental car to get around which also means accompanying her on her touristic adventures and getting swept up in her enthusiastic exploration of the island.

The female Jungmin has a tendency to drink too much, say things she shouldn’t, and forget about them by the next morning. The male Jungmin, by contrast doesn’t drink because he is living with rheumatoid arthritis though he says he intends to drink again if his condition improves. He writes romance novels and doesn’t use the internet all that much. She writes webtoons and posts stories to instagram. They really have very little in common aside with a sense of dissatisfaction about their lives, their names, birthdays, and travel itinerary but you can’t deny that their meeting is like one of the male Jungmin’s novels as even he finds himself musing on a new story about someone who comes to Okinawa to patch things up with an old lover only to fall in love with a whale shark they met along the way.

Gradually it becomes apparent that the female Jung-min is here to confess her feelings to a boy from Korea who, it turns out, may have come to Okinawa in search of greater freedom rather than needing to be liberated from his tank which ironically may be more the case for the male Jungmin. Though it’s obvious from their second meeting with Taemin’s colleague Hiro that the two men are a couple, the female Jungmin can’t seem to see or accept it nor does he actually tell her outright that he’s gay only that all he wants from her is friendship as he’s explained several times before only she was too drunk at the time to remember she’s already declared her feelings and been rejected. What the female Jungmin saw as “fate” really was just coincidence and personal myth making as Taemin too had his own fate to follow that led him to Okinawa where he was freer to pursue his romantic desires, if only slightly, than in the still conservative Korea. When the male Jungmin floats an idea for a book inspired by his time in Okinawa the two men give their consent to be included but also ask their relationship remain a same sex one rather than the heterosexual casting Jungmin had given it possibly out of an attempt to disguise their identity but also an underlying squeamishness towards the inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues.

Nevertheless, the male Jungmin is able to re-envision the situation by turning his life into fiction and exploring a relationship between himself and the female Jungmin with the roles somewhat reversed in which he is a stereotypically hard drinking, chain-smoking writer and the female Jungmin a put upon woman with rheumatoid arthritis helping someone else achieve their romantic desires. Is this life imitating art, or art imitating life? Whatever it is, it seems the trip to Okinawa with its tranquil streets, picturesque environment, friendly and laid-back people has offered each of them opportunities both romantic and creative in a moment of unexpected serendipity, or perhaps this time it really was fate after all.

Okinawa Blue Note had its World Premiere as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

Project Silence (탈출: 프로젝트 사일런스, Kim Tae-gon, 2023)

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“It’s a nation’s duty to protect its citizens wherever they are,” according to a more earnest politician, though Blue House security advisor Jung-won (Lee Sun-kyun) counters him that actually their duty only extends to those who voted for them, and they expect wise political judgment. Jung-won is a classic political lackey in that he’s intensely cynical and his every living thought is about how best to spin any given circumstances so that his boss, Hyun-baek (Kim Tae-woo), will become Korea’s next president.

There’s something quite remarkable about the extent to which Jung-won has erased himself from this equation and dedicated his life to making Hyun-baek’s a success while otherwise leaving conventional human morality at the door and pursuing a doctrine of doing only that which is most politically expedient. Some of his detachment might be explained by the fact he lost his wife some time ago to a lengthy illness and is about to send his daughter, who views him with contempt, to study abroad in Australia thanks to a few strings pulled by Hyun-baek. 

But as he later says, if Hyun-baek were actually there and seeing this for himself, he would make a different decision. Despite his cynicism, Jung-won eventually becomes a voice of authority during a moment of crisis and determines to set about rescuing the survivors rather than communicating with Hyun-baek about how best to turn this situation to their advantage. Paradoxically, he redeems the government in the eyes of those stranded on a bridge after a multi-car pileup in the middle of a particularly thick fog who come to realise that the authorities are not all that invested in rescuing them and may even be partly responsible for putting them in danger.

The Project Silence of the film’s title turns out to be one of creating genetically enhanced attack dogs who can chase a target with a specific voice. Apparently developed originally by the US and EU, the project is being researched in Korea but rendered a failure with the current batch of dogs set for “disposal”. That is, if they hadn’t been set loose by the accident and the possibly malicious actions of their handler who claims he was researching rescue dogs but was forced to reprogramme them to kill on the orders of the military. As he points out, the leader of the dogs, who has a head injury suggesting their programming has been disrupted, is only taking their revenge for their constant mistreatment at the hands of humans.

Then again, one of the ironies of Project Silence is that there is quite a lot going on from the unusually thick fog, the multi-car pileup caused by a live streamer driving recklessly for views, the toxic gas flowing from a crashed lorry, to the fact the bridge itself may collapse after the military helicopter sent to retrieve the dogs crashes and damages the support cables. All things considered, it is too much all at once considering the outlandishness of the evil dog plot. Though there are an assortment of survivors to become invested in as is usual in these kinds of films, we don’t always get to know them well enough with a series of subplots left unresolved such as the creepy behaviour of a Buffalo Bill-esque trucker who nevertheless becomes a kind of comic relief figure and eventual saviour of the group while becoming a reluctant buddy to Jung-won. Similarly, the dementia of an elderly woman (Ye Soo-jung) is intermittently brought up but never for any real reason nor is it ever fully explored, not even in her relationship with her husband who is responsible for her care. The younger of two bickering sister’s golf career does however turn out to have a practical application.

The conflict between Jung-won and his daughter, meanwhile, is largely mediated through her contempt for his callousness and resentment towards him for failing to address her mother’s death. Of course, saving the passengers is also a way to redeem himself in Kyoung-min’s (Kim Su-an) eyes much like the father in the similarly themed Train to Busan, though the awakening that Jung-won undergoes is more like the fog gradually lifting as he realises he is also being played by political manipulators while it is as he said different if you’re actually there and much harder to make the “sensible” decision to let the bridge collapse and take the potentially embarrassing evidence of their rogue science experiment with it. Perhaps that’s the real meaning of “project silence,” making sure there’s no one left to speak. But Jung-won is used to playing this game from the other side so he’s a few steps ahead and knows his best weapon is noise, tell everyone and do it right away so they don’t have time to shut you down nor can they deny it later. He may have been party to lingering authoritarianism, but has now realised that a nation’s primary duty is to protect its citizens after all, even if they voted for the other guy. 

Project Silence is available in the UK on 4K UHD courtesy of Altitude.

Trailer (English subtitles)