Tag: Korean

Smugglers (밀수, Ryoo Seung-wan, 2023)

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A collection of free divers decide it’s time to take control of the boat in Ryoo Seung-wan’s 1970s-set action drama, Smugglers (밀수, Milsu). The smoke rising from factory chimneys in the opening sequence as the fisherwomen pull into port ought to tip us off that this is partly a story of capitalistic corruption taking place during the economic miracle late into the rule of dictator Park Chung-hee. These factories may have made some rich and provided jobs for local men who can no longer make a living from the land, but it’s also destroyed the livelihood of these traditional divers. They return with a full haul, but are dismayed to discover that all of the shell fish is rotten because of the chemicals illegally spilled into the water by the local plants while the authorities have either been bribed or turn a blind eye.

This is, in a lot of ways, the prevailing culture, as customs officers can also be bought off or choose to turn a blind eye when it suits them. One man is seen arriving by boat wearing several pairs of jeans to sell on the black market, while others carry bags full of foreign cigarettes and other contraband items the customs officials would be within their rights to “confiscate”. A local man starts putting pressure on the captain of the boat that drives the divers to start picking up other things have been dropped into the ocean, as it seems that everyone’s doing it anyway and there aren’t any other ways to make money in the local economy. He isn’t very happy about it, but his daughter Jin-sook (Yum Jung-ah) and her friend Choon-ja (Kim Hye-soo) along with most of the other women are blinded by the vast amounts of money they begin receiving that allow them to start living the high life in a growing local culture of excess as symbolised by the presence of a nightclub. Even gangster Kwon, when he arrives a few years later, is surprised to discover that this rural backwater has its own cinema and entertainment scene.

Kwon (Zo In-sung) is also someone who has been corrupted by his time serving in the Vietnam War, having lost his humanity and become ruthless to the extent of sadistic violence. Nevertheless, he’s also someone whom Choon-ja later thinks that she can manipulate on returning to the harbour town two years after escaping from the scene of the arrest when the other women were captured by police. That she ran off and has not been seen again leads some to the inevitable conclusion that she sold them out and made a new life in Seoul on the proceeds. There is then a degree of mistrust between herself and Jin-sook who suffered personal tragedy and spent time in prison while Choon-ja bided her time, waiting to put her plan in action. 

For much of the running time, the audience is a long way ahead of the cast in figuring out what actually happened during the first failed smuggling mission which makes the final revelations fall rather flat, yet it comes to something that the women largely find themselves powerless and divided in the face of male authority. Jin-sook has not inherited her father’s boat as it has been taken over by Hammer (Park Jeong-min) who was only a lowly assistant when she was arrested. She continues to be at his mercy despite being the de facto leader of the divers without whom the smuggling operation would fall apart. The return of Choon-ja then gives them an opportunity to leverage female solidarity and turn the tables on the men who exploit their labour and offer little in return.

Jin-sook’s initial reluctance to work with Choon-ja results in one of the divers going out into shark-infested waters and losing a leg in desperation to feed her family. Ironically, her husband had already lost an arm in a maritime accident, preventing him from working. The mistrust she faces also bears out Choon-ja’s claim that when you’re poor, the blame will always fall on you even if you haven’t done anything wrong. In the end, these women have only themselves to rely on if they want to turn the boat around. The film really kicks into gear in the third act as it enters conspiracy heist mode and Ryoo engages in his characteristically well-designed action sequences including a mass knife fight in a hotel and an impressive underwater sequence in which the divers have to fend off both assassins and sharks while trying to retrieve the bounty. Where it really excels, however, is in period detail and the sense of camaraderie that arises between the women as they finally become determined to seize the wheel.

Trailer (English subtitles)

I Wish I Had a Wife (나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다, Park Heung-sik, 2001)

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A lonely bank clerk dreams of married bliss but ignores a promising match right under his nose in Park Heung-sik’s offbeat romcom, I Wish I Had a Wife (나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다, . As much about the loneliness and serendipity of city life at the turn of the century, the film takes its time in bringing its two leads together while subtly filling the air with a deep sense of melancholy uncertainty as each attempts to process their deep-seated childhood trauma.

Both Bong-soo (Sul Kyung-gu) and Won-ju (Jeon Do-yeon) are each in their way arrested in childhood have not yet really fully grown up despite being fictional adults with jobs and responsibilities. Bong-soo’s sometime girlfriend, with whom he first reconnects while she’s attending a funeral, remarks that he hasn’t really changed since they were at school though she has been married and divorced. Having lost his mother as a small child, at least part of Bong-soo’s desire to be married seems to have to with searching for a maternal connection and wanting to be taken care of. When the train he is on breaks down and he’s stuck in a tunnel in the dark for over an hour, it saddens him that unlike the other passengers he doesn’t have anyone to call. No one is immediately worried him, nor can he ease his own anxiety by hearing a familiar voice. Though his friend and roommate Hongtak (Seo Tae-hwa) says he could have called him, Bong-soo didn’t want to. He wanted this specific connection with a woman rather than the brotherly camaraderie he has with Hongtak. Nevertheless, he’s irritated when he realises that Hongtak, a confirmed bachelor, is going to get married before him.

Won-ju similarly lost her father in childhood and is also to some extent looking for a reliable male presence which is something she detects in Bong-soo with his dull if stable position at the bank. Like him, she is likened to a child and often depicted on an equal level to those she teaches at the school opposite where Bong-soo works. She finds one of the little girls she teaches crying in the classroom because the other kids said she looks like her and turns it around saying she’s flattered to be compared to someone so pretty before pointing out that it’s probably because they have a similar hairstyle. Won-ju still wears hers in a youthful way that that adds to her air of unsophisticated innocence which stands in strong contrast to the earthy sexuality of Bong-soo’s childhood friend Tae-ran (Jin Hee-kyung).

Like a child, she tries to ask Bong-soo out through a cutesy manoeuvre by using a paying in slip as a confession letter, but he rejects her in an overly harsh way by typing his reply on a receipt and reprimanding her for not taking banking procedures seriously enough. Even so, like many similar films of their era their romance is facilitated by the new technology of video as each is seen to talk into security as a way of communicating with themselves or delivering a message they don’t really intend to be delivered. Bong-soo also does this through the video diaries he records for his future wife, though why he thinks she’s want to watch hours of his monologues is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, it’s not until he sees Won-ju’s speech to the ATM security camera that he begins to take her seriously as a romantic prospect despite the video not picking up any sound. 

After his relationship with Tae-ran ends badly, Bong-soo gives up doing his magic tricks and becomes cold and cynical, swearing off romance and closing himself off from the serendipity of city life. He might have found Won-ju’s ditsyness irritating with her tendency to drop her change and generally get into some kind of amusing mishap, but later warms to it after seeing her from another angle through the CCTV footage at the bank. Even so, she is not unaware in the irony of Bong-soo’s desire for “a wife” while idly exclaiming she’d like one for herself while Bong-soo points out that what she’s describing is basically a slave which is how wives have been seen even if he insists it’s not that way anymore. Their view of romance is therefore more clear-eyed and realistic, and in its way magical as the edge their way out of monsoon into the relative serenity of the autumnal skies.

Salmokji: Whispering Water (살목지, Lee Sang-min, 2026)

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Is there something a little bit uncanny about a manmade lake? Despite the sign warning of deep water and potential loss of life, the area surrounding the Salmokji reservoir is otherwise idyllic, its ominous “dead tree lake” name not withstanding. You wouldn’t necessarily know that it was only created in 1982 for the purpose of storing water for agricultural use. Its modernity seems slightly incongruous with the presence of a ghost.

Perhaps this is why it has become a tourist hotspot following the surprising success of Lee Sang-min’s low-budget indie horror Salmokji: Whispering Water (살목지), having previously mentioned on late-night TV show Midnight Horror Story. The location’s sense of eeriness ironically seems to stems from its disconnection from the modern world. A physicist who claimed not to believe in the supernatural reported that she nearly drove into the reservoir after her car’s GPS malfunctioned and subsequently suffered misfortune after visiting the area. The inability to get a phone signal or connect to cloud networks etc may of course be due to the fact that is surrounded by mountains and rocky terrain rather than the presence of a malevolent spiritual entity who is actively blocking digital signals. Yet its also true that the natural silence of this tranquil environment can be disquieting to those used to the ambient noise of a city.

In any case, within the world of the film the lake is a popular fishing destination as demonstrated by the couple visiting it in the opening sequence who are on what seems to be quite an early date in their relationship. The woman’s aversion to the worms used bait is also reflective of a new squeamishness regarding the natural environment that is also echoed when producer Su-in drops a box bait brought by her cameramen who were planning on staying behind once their job is done. Su-in’s irritation stems from a different source. They’re supposed to be here to work, and in fact to fix an urgent problem, though no one is taking it seriously and the team are largely behaving as if they’re here on a day trip. Junior producer Seong-bin has brought an intern with him he is clearly pursuing romantically, while she secretly plans to moonlight by filming footage for her personal horror vlog.

They’ve come to Salmokji because a ghostly figure has been spotted in a photo they uploaded, though it does not appear to have been one that was taken by them. As such, they urgently need to replace with a photo that is not cursed, because they’ve been getting complaints from the locals. It’s not really explained why they can’t just stop with deleting the original photo, but for some reason Su-in’s boss insists the image must replaced immediately. He even insists they stay overnight when it turns out further equipment is required and won’t reach them until after dark. This perhaps bears out another lingering horror in contemporary urban life with the pressure of workplace heirarchy and exploitative employment environments. The cameramen immediately resent Su-in for telling them off for bringing the fishing gear and subsequently reject her authority by disobeying her commands and belittling the idea of their actually being a ghost even when strange things start happening.

Su-in is also exposed as having tried to palm this job off on a colleague after visiting the area herself previously and deciding it was too creepy. Some suggest this is all then her fault, that the lake did this to make her come back and now she’s dragged all of them into it. She meanwhile seems to have been dealing with a potential crush on her team manager, a widower who may have been attracted to the lake by the rumours of it being somewhere that the worlds of the living and the dead intersect. The lake then also becomes a metaphor for a more literal drowning in grief, as if her co-worker willing embraced oblivion by walking into it in order to be reunited with his wife if in death rather than in life. The creepy old lady living nearby tells them to place a stone on a cairn and make a wish, but in reality this seals their fate just as getting even a toe wet later will. The real horror is that once marked by whatever is in the lake, there is no real possibility of escape and even if you think you’ve made it out, in reality you may not have. Incorporating some elements of food footage horror, Lee piled on the sense of supernatural dread right until the ambiguous ending that suggests all this has happened before and will happen again.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese & English subtitles)

Sorum (소름, Yoon Jong-chan, 2001)

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There are different types of ghosts, according to frustrated novelist Lee (Gi Ju-bong) in Yoon Jong-chan’s supernaturally tinged noir, Sorum (소름). Some don’t know they’re dead yet, others possess the bodies of living people. In their own way, the residents of the Migum apartment block all seem to be wandering ghosts themselves, stuck in this place that’s somewhere between life and death that they otherwise seem unable to escape while the building saps the life out of them with its depressing decor and flickering lights.

One might ask themselves why it is that taxi driver Yong-hyeon (Kim Myung-min) has chosen to move in here given that the building is scheduled for demolition. Obviously, the rent is cheap, not least because the previous tenant died in mysterious circumstances, though Yong-hyeon appears to have been unaware of that. Not that it bothers him. For all intents and purposes, he is our hero, a newcomer to this strange and lonely building meeting its ghostly inhabitants for the time. But gradually, we start to wonder about him. Police start sniffing round in connection with the disappearance of a woman said to have embezzled money and borrowed signifiant amounts from friends for no clear purpose. Suspiciously, Yong-hyeon has a bag of women’s jewellery including a ring hidden in his fridge, which would at least have paid a deposit on a nicer apartment if he were able to sell them. 

It’s the ring that attracts the attention of his neighbour, Seon-yeong (Jang Jin-young), who is trapped in an abusive relationship with a man who has a gambling problem. Whether driven or drawn here, Yong-hyeon develops a fascination with Seon-yeong that he later finds difficult to categorise. When she appears before him covered in blood, he helps her bury her husband’s body and then enters a sexual relationship with her that is equally ill-defined. Hearing her say that anyone would have done while arguing with her friend and neighbour Eun-soo (Jo An) causes him to doubt her motivations. Perhaps she’d been waiting for an opportunity to kill her husband and merely made use of his attraction to her to help her do it.

But at the same time, there’s a curiously incestuous quality to their relationship in that Seon-yeong is trapped in the inertia of grief having “lost” her son. Yong-hyeon is an orphan who has no place to call home and on some level is in search of a mother, latching on the maternal quality he sees in Seon-yeong. She buys a scarf for him, as a mother might for a son, while he is touched by her bending down to tie his shoelaces, wondering if his mother would have been kind like her had he had one. Their connection is also echoed in the mysterious history of the apartment in which a woman is said to have been murdered by her husband 30 years previously. The couple had a baby who was left alone there and likely would have starved to death if it had not been for a fire which led to his rescue by other residents. 

The apartment’s previous tenant, aspiring novelist Gwang-tae, had been investigating the murder as material for a book before he died in mysterious circumstances, apparently the victim of a hyper-localised fire which occurred only in the centre of the room. Gwang-tae had claimed that the apartment was haunted by the ghost of a woman singing a lullaby who insisted her son would soon return. Gwang-tae told his girlfriend Eun-soo, pregnant with their child, that he needed to leave this building or something bad would happen to him, but like everyone else, he found himself unable to. His story then becomes fodder Lee, whose latest attempt to make a literary comeback may not all be his work though he continues to try to write the story we are currently watching by constructing a fanciful narrative around Yong-hyeon and the apartment and then convincing himself that what he’s writing is coming true. 

In that sense, he may have an authorial god complex or extreme main character syndrome, while for Yeong-hyeon it’s the opposite. He’s learned to live a carefree life by acting on his impulses and then giving them no more thought. The last thing he wanted to be was the protagonist of this story, though he begins to discover strange and unexpected connections with the building and the tragedy that occurred there 30 years previously. This is the “invisible fear” that Lee proclaims as the high point of his novel, a noirish sense of dread that suddenly reorders an ordinary person’s existence. Yeong-hyeon is no longer someone who exists within the world. The world now exists around him. Lee suggests the ghost in 504 is trying to trap her adult son within this purgatorial space in order to escape her loneliness, just as everyone else is trapped in this building by irresolvable despair. Yeong-hyeon knows he has to get out, but at the same time, where else is there to go? All he can see is the building blinking back at him, refusing to give up its ghosts.

My Name (내 이름은, Chung Ji-young, 2026)

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An ageing woman’s internalised anxiety and inability to remember her childhood stand in for a nation’s wilful amnesia in Chung Ji-young’s gentle contemplation of the legacy of the massacre that began on 3rd April 1948 on Jeju Island. Set mainly in the late 90s a decade or so after Korea’s transition to democracy, the film emphasises the importance of reckoning with the buried past in order to prevent its mistakes occurring again.

Those mistakes are largely reflected in the life of cheerful teenager Young-ok (Shin Woo-bin) who is embarrassed by the fact his single mother is much older than all the other parents while she also gave him a name that is customarily given to girls. On the first day of the new term, Young-ok’s teacher Mr Hwang (Heo Dong-won) mockingly refers to him as “Miss Young-ok” with exaggeratedly feminine gestures. Hwang is, in many ways, a relic of the authoritarian past and his mocking of Young-ok’s name bears out the toxic masculinity of a militarised society. Min-soo (Choi Jun-woo), Young-ok’s more astute best friend, takes the teacher to task for skipping over the massacre in their contemporary history classes. Hwang tells him that it is “unimportant” as it does not even appear on the university exams, brushing off Min-soo’s protests that the city wouldn’t be gearing up to commemorate the 50th anniversary of an “unimportant” event. If it were important, it would be in the text book, Hwang insists demonstrating his lack of curiosity and authoritarian mindset. Of course, it later turns out that he is also corrupt. Young-ok’s mother Jeong-sun (Yeom Hye-ran) brings a “gift” to parents’ day, but ends up not giving it to him after noticing that his desk draw is full of other envelopes while he makes veiled comments about all the kids being “equal”, but some being more equal than others depending on how thick those envelopes are.

The film seems to equate this masculine jockeying for power with the origins of the massacre as the boys engage in slapping games similar to the way in which the army forced the villagers to slap their friends who had been accused of being communist sympathisers to prove their own loyalty. Rich kid Kyung-tae (Park Ji-bin) has just transferred in from Seoul having apparently caused some trouble there due to his violent outbursts. He too makes the kids engage in slapping games to define hierarchy, while using picking up on Young-ok as a useful stooge too naive to see that Kyung-tae has manipulated him into becoming class president because unlike Min-soo he will be easy to control. Young-ok is too concerned with being liked and is happy to have been co-opted into Kyung-tae’s gang, going along with his violent rule and even betraying Min-soo by siding with Kyung-tae even when he makes him lie on his behalf. This is where it starts, as the film would have it, by failing to stand up to a thuggish teen leveraging his wealth and status to dominate those around him.

Jeong-sun, meanwhile, is encouraged to address the cause of her anxiety rather than suppress it with medication by a doctor newly arrived from Seoul. Delving into the source of her trauma awakens memories of the massacre that it had long been taboo to talk about. The subsequent connections to both Korea’s involvement with the Vietnam War and the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 in which ordinary people were once again murdered by the state echoing what had happened in Jeju hint at a destructive legacy of militarised authoritarianism infecting all areas of society. In order to fully progress into the new democratic future, the nation will need to reckon with its autocratic past which begins with the act of remembrance. 

This is really what Jeong-sun begins to do in unlocking the traumatic memories of her childhood and with them reclaiming her authentic identity that also informs that of Young-ok. As she told him, she dances when she’s happy and also when she’s sad, but there is something quite poignant in her dancing her in the memory of those who lost their lives during the massacre as if she were liberating both their souls and her own by resolving to go on building a better, kinder world that remembers its past and is mindful not to repeat it.

My Name screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Wild Sing (와일드 씽, Son Jae-gon, 2026)

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A once-famous K-pop trio reunite for one last performance 20 years after their careers imploded in a plagiarism scandal in Son Jae-gon’s zany comedy Wild Sing (와일드 씽). Exploring the Wild West days of the turn of the century popular music industry, the film ultimately seems to say that it’s never too late to follow your dreams while success is perhaps not quite as important as the personal fulfilment found in performing if only for a small audience.

In the early 2000s, street dancer Hyun-woo (Gang Dong-won) thinks he has all the moves and is thrilled to be recruited by A&R man Park Yong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) only to discover he works out of a tiny basement office in a rundown building and has no other artists signed to his label. Forming a trio with rapper Sang-gu (Um Tae-goo) and singer Do-mi (Park Ji-hyun), Triangle becomes one of the biggest acts of the day. But this kind of industry doesn’t really like it when you get too big, and the band is eventually brought low by its hubris and naivety. Like many pop stars of their time, they were excited to join the music industry and didn’t pay too much attention to their contracts. 

Yong-gu is effectively a conman who withholds their pay and forces them into exploitative working practices. He also fosters discord within the group by pushing Hyun-woo as the leader while falsely claiming that he writes and composes all their songs. In reality, Yong-gu is buying in tracks from outside for the band to perform leading to a plagiarism scandal when it turns out their latest track is actually a cover of a hit Bulgarian pop song. After Yong-gu skips town with their money, Sang-gu and Do-mi quickly sign with other labels while Hyun-woo is left to carry the can alone. 

At the same time, the band’s rival, ballad singer Seong-gon (Oh Jung-se) is frustrated by his inability to take the top spot while his brand of sentimental pop is losing out to the kind of dance-inspired tracks performed by bands like Triangle. When he’s offered drugs, apparently for the first time, at an industry party and begins behaving strangely, it causes a major scandal than puts an end to his career and to an extent his personal life as he’s made an example of and sent to prison for an extended period of time highlighting the hypocritical unfairness of Korea’s hardline stance against drug use especially as regards those with a public profile. Seong-gon is cast so far out of the mainstream, that he becomes an effective exile hunting wild animals in the mountains in a total reversal of his sensitive, feminine image as an idol star specialising in sappy love songs.

In the present day, Hyun-woo has fallen on hard times as his stint as a radio DJ comes to an ignominious end. Not particularly good at the job, he no longer has any cachet as Triangle has faded into the past now that younger people no longer recognise the name. A producer advises him he should have made a move into variety television to keep his celebrity active as another boy band star they used to mock, Tae-poong, seems to have done. Though Hyun-woo looked down on Tae-poong and never even bothered to learn his name correctly, he seems to be the one who worked out how to ride the waves of fame through changing times as TV star with a current profile. Sang-gu, by contrast, is in huge debts to loan sharks who financed his failed solo projects and is currently selling insurance that promises huge payouts if the policy holder is diagnosed with cancer. Do-mi has married into a chaebol family, but is effectively a prisoner of her overbearing mother-in-law and barely allowed to leave the house.

There are then reasons why they would all agree to join Hyun-woo for a comeback performance as part of a retro concert to promote a local bid to host an expo even if they parted on bad terms and have not been in touch since. For various reasons, the gang unexpectedly ends up in a police chase after a road trip goes awry that forces them into a reckoning with their desire to perform. Meanwhile, the producer on the other threatens to cancel their perforce in fear of the negative effect on his own career after convincing himself the only possible reason they could be late is because they must have been involved in a hit and run. The ironic conclusion might paradoxically suggest that the only true freedom comes from access to limitless and unconditional access to money as Do-mi harnesses her new status to support the group, but that does at least suggest that conventional success might not be the be all and end all of performing which offers a kind of liberation just in itself.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Seoul Guardians (서울의 밤, Cho Chul-young, Kim Jong-woo, Kim Shin-wan, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

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Normality is such a fragile thing. It only takes a few seconds for everything to fall apart and the life you’ve known until now to completely disappear. Facing intense personal scrutiny and frustrated with opposition lawmakers doing exactly what they’re supposed to do in a democracy by opposing policies they disagree with, President Yoon Suk-Yeol announced martial law via a television broadcast late at night after many people had already gone to bed or at any rate were not particularly paying attention to the news. 

This was the first time that Martial Law had been declared since Chun Doo-hwan’s military coup in 1979. The democracy that the nation had carefully nurtured since Chun’s downfall in 1987 was under threat while Yoon ironically described opposition parties as a “legislative dictatorship” for blocking his policies. Following the declaration, ordinary citizens began to make their way to the National Assembly building to protest, but at the same time Yoon’s faction dispatched the police and army to encircle the building. Once martial law is declared, the president is supposed to attend the assembly for a free vote confirm its deployment, which Yoon failed to do while police and army made it difficult for lawmakers to enter the building and take their place to vote leading many, often not so young, officials to vault walls simply to enter the building. 

Comprised almost entirely of on-the-ground and stock footage and television news broadcasts, Kim Jong-woo, Kim Shin-wan, Cho Chul-young’s documentary viscerally depicts the sense of chaos and desperation of that night as the general population and lawmakers trapped inside the budding begin to realise that they have only this moment to stop the impending tragedy that Yoon has set in motion. “Remember Gwangju” some of the protestors shout. Interspersed with footage from 3rd December are flashes of newsreels from the Gwangju Massacre in 1980 in which state forces fired on protestors asking for the lifting the martial law that had been reinstated by Chun’s regime after he took power in a military coup shortly after the previous dictator, Park Chun-hee, was assassinated by the head of his own security team. 

The similarities between the two protests are striking as both utter near identical chants with the only real way to tell which footage is from 1979 and which from 2024 is by the video quality and the clothes that people are wearing. The night of 3rd December could have turned out so differently if even a single thing had gone wrong. A soldier’s gun going off or policeman losing his temper could have provoked further violence and brought about a world of nightly curfews and curbed freedoms that seems almost unthinkable in the present day. A curfew has already been declared active from 11pm, so all of these people are already breaking the law, but they choose to stay anyway in order to defend this fragile democracy.

There are also, of course, those who are there to support Yoon and feel as if he’s been unfairly treated. To them, he’s only right to do what he’s done because those “commies” on the other side wouldn’t let him get on with his work. By including footage from Yoon’s impeachment hearing, the documentary makes clear that this is not something that ended in the early hours of 4th December with Yoon recognising the unanimous vote to lift martial law, but an ongoing battle to resist authoritarianism and protect democracy however imperfect that democracy may also be. The question then is how robust these systems really are and if Yoon actually will be removed for having committed this offence against the normal functioning of government with a blatant power grab that effectively constitutes and attempt coup.

All that was really standing between Yoon and martial law was the will of the people who were willing to risk their safety and comfort and preserve their freedom and democratic rights. They looked back to those who had lost their lives in Gwangju and said, “We will remember you. We will not allow this to happen again.” In this way, as the voiceover from co-director Kim Jong-woo points out, the dead save the living in a very real living memory of the costs of authoritarianism. Though the film may play out like a thriller as those inside the assembly set up baracades fearful that paratroopers will storm the building and others call out to the young soldiers to obey their conscious and walk away, it is never flippant about the serious of this moment, nor the truth that a significant minority continue support Yoon and his policies which leaves ordinary people once again the guardians of a fragile democracy that maybe shattered at any moment.

The Seoul Guardians screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Colony (군체, Yeon Sang-ho, 2026)

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“Can you handle the freedom to be an outcast?” asks the villain of Yeon Sang-ho’s zombie-esque drama Colony (군체, Gunche) who believes that tragedies are caused by “imperfect communication.” He may not be entirely wrong, but his instinct to destroy all traces of individuality and replace them with a hive mind might not necessarily solve the problem in the way he implies it will, especially as it transpires that everyone will effectively be pulled into his own consciousness.

To that extent, the “zombies” in this film are representatives of social conformity, but perhaps they could also be read as an AI army with “psycho” scientist Suh (Koo Kyo-hwan) as the prompter. His big idea is bringing about a second cognitive revolution that emerges from a desire to repair the body so that those who have developed a disability would be healed. This is also, it turns out, a byproduct of being inducted into Suh’s hive where humanity must start from scratch evolving all over again. But at the same time, it seems like members of the hive still need to actively share information rather than simply having access to it. Suh gives them commands by shaking his head, while the zombies often stop dead and stare at the ceiling with their mouths open as if they were uploading something to the cloud. At one point, they’re seen accessing a computer to get the location of a room where one of their targets is hiding which demonstrates how far they’ve evolved in their ability to use tools, but at the same time they already have members of the security team in their hive. One would assume that they would already be familiar with the building’s layout and so the closest zombies could just start making their way there. This communication is still “imperfect” and Suh may choose not to share what he knows with the others anyway.

Professor Se-Jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), however, has never been one to go along with the group. Her exasperated ex-husband (Go Soo) complains that she’s always doing things that make people hate her, but still cared enough for Se-jeong to try to set her up with another steady job before he moves to America with his current wife and child. Which is all to say, she is very much prepared to be an outcast in a society in which challenging the system or disrupting group harmony are often taboos. She’s disadvantaged in her career because she turned another professor in for exploiting his research staff and misappropriating funds, meaning that others don’t necessarily want to work with her. She will, however, stand up for what’s right even when others won’t.

The government, meanwhile, is portrayed as another kind of group think if one paralysed by indecision because, unlike Se-jeong, they aren’t prepared to be hated by the public for making a call they disagree with even if it’s the right thing to do. With the building sealed off, orders have been given not to harm any of the infected in case they can be saved when they retrieve the vaccine from Suh, but it quickly becomes clear that the victims are most likely braindead and cannot be healed. Nevertheless, the policeman who takes Suh into custody eventually begins shooting his own team members, sacrificing them to protect Suh, while rescue teams deliberately leave other survivors behind. “It’s a shame,” one of the officers in control laments after seeing Se-jeong dart into a storage cupboard when the rescuers retreat with Suh, making it clear they have no intention of going back for her even though she’s been helping them retrieve the vaccine.

Her best ally turns out to be another female scientist, her ex’s wife Gong (Shin Hyun-been). Though you might expect the two women to loathe each other, they in fact get along quite well and have some affection for each other that makes Gong increasingly unwilling to toe the government line and leave Se-jeong to be devoured by the zombies. They are at least willing to stand up for the scientific argument and do what’s right, even if it’s not going to be popular and will make them outcasts for the rest of their lives. Someone has to be willing to make these difficult decisions from a position of rationality, the film seems to say. Nevertheless, it also argues for a slightly less prejudicial, more equal world in championing other kinds of outsiders such as a woman who uses a wheelchair and finds an ideal fit for her skillset in the zombie apocalypse and an old man who proves to be far more physically adept than an ageist society gave him credit for.  “I guess we have a lot of work ahead of us,” Se-jeong admits acknowledging that it will not end just with the quelling of this particular zombie horde.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Mutation (사랑의 탄생, Shin Su-won, 2025) [Fantasia 2026)

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Two people largely excluded from mainstream society bond over a shared sense of loss and loneliness in Shin Su-won’s lighthearted road trip movie, The Mutation (사랑의 탄생). Though the English-language title may sound a little harsh, hinting at some kind of science fiction dystopia, the film is in other ways as the Korean title “The Birth of Love,” implies about self-acceptance and mutual solidarity among those that society has continues to other and reject.

The Korean title is quoted in each of the lives of the protagonists, Se-oh (Han Hyun-min), a man with dark skin who was born to two Korean parents, and Sora (Lee Zoo-young), a gay woman whose former partner took her own life after being pressured into a heteronormative marriage by her conservative mother. Se-oh has been rejected by his family as his father refuses to accept him as his son despite his mother’s assurance that she has remained faithful him. He tries asking an old friend of his mother’s for answers, but she tells him that what matters is only that he was born from love. Sora, meanwhile, discovers a letter written by her late partner Min-ji as a omechild that she titled “the birth of love” and recorded her growing feelings for a female classmate along with the fear that her parents would find out.

Sora’s difference is not visibly obvious in the way that Se-oh’s is, but she still finds that she is excluded from mainstream society. She says that she makes tables because they’re something to be shared rather than used selfishly, but it seems that few people are willing to come to hers despite her instructions to Se-oh that if he got a bigger table for his apartment people would soon come to sit around it. It does however signal her own openness and desire for connection, even if that desire is often rejected or goes unmet. After agreeing to accompany Se-oh on his trip, she too has somewhere she does not have the courage to go alone. On returning to the town where Min-ji lived, she discovers her mother being hassled in the market by a group of religious people who appear to be aware of exactly how her daughter died and why but berate her for not raising her “better”. Min-ji’s mother had thought that if she married, Min-ji would settle down and live a “normal” life, but in the end Min-ji could not live that way. Her mother is now filled with regrets wishing she had accepted her daughter for who she was despite what others may have said in their small and conservative town where the local pastor holds sway.

Min-ji’s mother did not tell Sora of her death for some time nor did she invite her to the funeral, hoping that no one would find out. Se-oh wasn’t invited to his mother’s funeral either and his name is conspicuously absent from the list of official mourners at the funeral hall. He is continually treated as an outsider as strangers automatically address him in English. It never occurs to them to someone who looks like him may have been born and raised in Korea and know no other language, and as such they reject his Koreanness. This has also meant that he has struggled to find employment and has been restricted to doing a series of precarious casual labour jobs, the latest of which is ironically playing the white tiger at a local amusement park. People like me better when I wear a mask, he says, which perhaps something Sora can also understand.

But she also says that Min-ji was the only person she ever knew who didn’t wear one, implying that it may not be possible to survive in this society as an authentic person without some kind of boundary between oneself and others. Nevertheless, through their gentle road trip, the pair begin to come to terms with the past and also with themselves in gaining a level of self-acceptance that allows them to move forward, together or apart. Warm and gentle in spirit, the film makes the most of its idyllic country settings while focusing on the simple power of human connection in the face of a world that can often be harsh and unforgiving of those it perceives to be somehow other.

The Mutation screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀, Kwak Jae-yong, 2001)

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A smash hit and social phenomenon on its original release, My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀, Yeopgijeogin geunyeo) is one of a small number of films from the early 2000s that like Japan’s Densha Otoko drew inspiration from the new media of online blogging and message boards. In a meta touch, the film includes these origins within the action as the hero, Gyeon-woo (Cha Tae-hyun), begins writing about his relationship with a strange and intimidating young woman (Jun Ji-hyun) on the internet only to see his work optioned for major feature film.

In some ways, these meta themes play into the central ideas of fate and time travel while giving the love story a sense of epic, romantic heft. It could be said that in the character of the unnamed woman, the film undercuts contemporary notions of gender roles and traditional femininity, but at the same time even in subverting them perhaps leans into a societal sense of misogyny. Gyeon-woo paints himself as a feminised man, raised for a time as a girl which is why he is mild-mannered, submissive, and lacks ambition in life. All qualities he associates with traditional femininity. He is attracted to the girl, but also disgusted by her unfeminine behaviour and most particularly by her public drunkenness. Her chewing of her own vomit on the train is apparently inspired by a real-life event and the reason for designating her the “bizarre and freakish” woman of the title. 

Gyeon-woo also suffers physical violence at the hands of most of the women in film including his mother, further marking him out as weak and hard done by in comparison to these strong women while most of the men, such as his own father and that of the girl who is a habitual drinker, are ineffectual and go along with their wives for a quiet life. The girl continues to boss him around, ordering for him in cafes, making him wear her high heels while she takes his trainers when her feet hurt, and generally telling him what to do in the relationship. Gyeon-woo appears to have a slightly masochistic streak and despite describing his discomfort this rejection of traditional femininity, actually seems to like being bossed around and physically abused by the girl, even later seeking out similar women, though the film does also include a transphobic joke that is very of its time. 

Eventually, he begins to realise that the girl’s violence and demanding nature are awkward ways of expressing love while she works through issues of her own that exist to one side of him. There are reasons that all her screenplays are about a heroic woman travelling in time to save someone she loves while simultaneously convinced she is destined to meet someone from the future. Gyeon-woo, meanwhile, an engineering student, is more grounded and down to earth. He nurtures their love in another way, replanting a damaged tree solely so the girl won’t be sad if she returns to find that it has died. Fate deliberately keeps them apart as their paths repeatedly fail to cross with a series of near misses before a fateful encounter, implying that romantic timing is much about the readiness for love as anything else, or as someone puts it, building a bridge of chance. Only once the girl has begun to work through her feelings, and Gyeon-woo has accepted his filial responsibilities, can their love be fulfilled. 

This is perhaps most obvious in the episode in which they become involved in a military siege when a soldier takes them hostage in an amusement park after deserting because his girlfriend has left him for another man. While the soldier’s obsessive love turns dangerously destructive, the girl is able to talk him down by reminding him that if he really loved his former girlfriend he’d set her free and rejoice in her happiness. The film’s quirky atmosphere with its series of weird events in a strange way recall the world of Tomihiko Morimi with its cosmic coincidences and tiny ironies that are nevertheless underpinned by a genuine sense of poignancy and warmth, willing these two star-crossed lovers to finally find each other at the right time as past and future finally coalesce into a more perfect present. 

My Sassy Girl screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)