Tag: Korean

Time of Cinema (극장의 시간들, Lee Jong-pil, Yoon Ga-eun, Jang Kun-jae, 2025)

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Made in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Cinecube cinema in Seoul, Time of Cinema (극장의 시간들, Geugjang-ui Sigandeul) is an anthology film featuring three segments and bookended with a sequence set in the venue as a young woman takes lessons from the projectionist while classic films such as Ozu’s Late Spring play in the background. As such, each of the films has a kind of meta commentary on the nature of film, the industry and buildings as well as the impact it can have on people’s lives even if they happen to fall asleep during the movie.

This kind of reflexivity is evident in the opening segment, Chimpanzee, which features its protagonists recreating the dance from Godard’s Bande à part. This segment also is set across two time periods and is revealed to be “a film” based on the recollections of the director’s youth in which he spent time watching movies with two close friends while in the military. This sense of loss for shared experiences of the past is something that echoes through the other sequences and in the last seems as if it could in some senses be returned through unexpected reunion. In any case, the director appears to reclaim them through imprinting his memories in the film as a means of reliving them. Its protagonists also have a kind of truth revealed to them that something they assumed to be merely a legend was perhaps true after all.

The second sequence, meanwhile, directed by Yoon Ga-eun plays with the nature of film itself as we’re show several scenes that turn out to be in progress shots from the filming of another movie in which a collection of little girls are asked to repeat the same scene in a frustrated attempt to make it seem more “natural.” At the end, they all sit down to watch the film they’ve made, but this is also a part of the “film”, while we have also already been watching them, leading us to ponder on these many levels of refection within the video footage. Well known for her films featuring children such as The House of Us, Yoon gets the most from her young cast while at the same time demonstrating how difficult it can be work with child actors even if what she mainly does is to leave them to their own devices, capturing their spontaneity and enthusiasm in the most natural way possible.

The third sequence meanwhile is more firmly rooted in Cinecube and explores the less glamorous side of filmmaking in taking a leaf out of Goodbye Dragon Inn’s book as the cleaning lady walks up and down the aisles collecting rubbish even if, as they mentioned in the first segment, this place is too fancy to sell popcorn. Though the cleaning lady rarely has time to watch any films, she ends up running into an old friend who’s just come in to use the bathroom and pressures her into seeing whatever’s playing which happens to be a special screening of a movie with a director Q&A. The old friend’s name also has the same pronunciation of the word for “film”, and though she and everyone else in the cinema falls asleep, her time spent there seems to return something precious that she had lost while she also reunites with her old friend.

In this way it paints cinema as an interactive experience and all the more so when visiting a cinema rather than watching passively, or inattentively, though a TV screen. By the same token, it shows the cinema staff working hard from the put upon box office lady trying to tell a desperate cinephile that he’s arrived too late to enter the auditorium and, in any case, has booked his ticket for the following day, to the cleaning lady and projectionist who meticulously keeps an eye on everything, both digital and analogue, to ensure that the film is being projected as intended. Cinemas are in that sense social spaces in which people share experiences with both strangers and friends while in some ways unaware of the relationship that’s arising between themselves and the screen and the images that may also be changing them in ways untold.

Time of Cinema screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Accordion Door (아코디언 도어, Son Kyeong-su, 2025)

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A young man with an apparently prodigious talent for writing comes to doubt himself when past trauma provokes what may either be a strange delusion or a very real exit of the muse in Son Kyeong-su’s supernaturally tinged exploration of the pressures of the contemporary Korean society, The Accordion Door (아코디언 도어). Constantly berated by his overly demanding mother as a small child for not being good at anything, Ji-soo (Moon Woo-jin) lives in fear of being labeled “a dummy” but has simultaneously become almost entirely detached from the world around him.

This is partly because he has no memories of himself before the age of nine when he went temporarily missing. In the opening sequences, the young Ji-soo is taken around an exhibition explaining the precipitation cycle by his parents who are each too busy sniping at each other to pay much attention to him. His mother blames his father’s lack of effort for Ji-soo’s apparent inability to fill in a worksheet demonstrating that he’s understood that water from the river becomes clouds and that clouds become rain. Crying on his own in the toilet, he poetically wonders if he too has become a cloud only for a cloud-like, or perhaps wormlike, being to enter his brain through his ears, turning him into an apparently different person who is addicted to chocolate and can perfectly articulate his thoughts in writing.

But as good a writer as Ji-soo might currently be, having recently won a national competition, he carries a strong sense of inferiority and worthlessness that’s largely caused by the seemingly conditional nature of his mother’s love which may be withdrawn if he were to become “a dummy”. His mother has separated from his father under the rationale that this will help make Ji-soo a better writer and is constantly pressuring him about winning more competitions. In a way, her determination is self-reflective in that she does not want her son’s mediocrity to make her look like a mediocre mother. When Ji-soo asks what he was like as a child, she tells him that he was “ordinary” and now he’s “brilliant”. When she replaces the expensive phone he had that got broken after he finally agreed to have one, she remarks that it’s just the kind that “ordinary” boys have, in case it gets broken again thereby presaging the fall from grace he undergoes believing that his talent has left him and migrated into Hyeon-joo (Lee Jae-in), the football-playing transfer student that Ji-soo has developed a crush on.

Hyeon-joo was the reason Ji-soo agreed to get a phone, but he’s equal parts attracted and threatened by her. He doesn’t know much about football, but it seems like she might not be all that good. When she starts to get better all of a sudden, his jealousy manifests in the paranoia that his talent left him for her, and he desperately wants it back so that he won’t be a “dummy” even if it ends up ruining his relationship with Hyeon-joo. Hyeon-joo, meanwhile, is much more laidback if just as alienated as he is. For her, it doesn’t matter if she’s any good at football as long as she enjoys it. She tries to encourage him that it’s the same with his writing. It shouldn’t really matter whether or not he wins any prizes, it only matters if he felt good while he was doing it. Her poet mother is the polar opposite of his own, encouraging Hyeon-joo to do what she likes doing and be happy even if there is nothing more to be gained of it than that. Becoming ever more insecure, Ji-soo tries to ask her for writing lessons, but all she tells him is that writing is an art that can’t really taught by one person to another. He must simply learn to teach himself. After all, he didn’t follow any rules when was writing something he was later proud of.

His science-obsessed friend Jong-yoon is similarly cheerful, rejoicing in his curiosity rather than thinking about what it might lead to or be worth to him in the future. Ji-soo’s mother had also been preoccupied with height, taking him to a doctor who seemed to be giving growth hormones, only for his growth spirt to begin as soon as he thinks his talent has left and bits of the past, or his imagination of it, start coming back to him. In a way this literal growth maybe a sign that he has begun to unpack some of his trauma and is experiencing a breakthrough that is destructive in the moment but also allows him to move forward. His mother lets up and finally divorces his father formally, while he no longer needs to be constrained by the idea that whatever talent he had was given by some mysterious parasite that took root inside him, but perhaps came from himself if only he could learn to embrace his love for it rather than be scared into silence by his fear of not being good enough. The implications of Ji-soo’s dreams maybe rather melancholy if lending an elliptical quality to his existence, but Son’s quietly empathetic, abstract film, does for a time at least allow him to find solace in his art in a sometimes unkind and judgemental society.

The Accordion Door screens as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Journey to Gyeong-ju (경주기행, Kim Mi-jo, 2025)

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You know what they say, if you’re going to seek revenge, you’d best dig two graves. In a way, that’s what the bereaved mother at the centre of Kim Mi-jo’s familial vengeance comedy The Journey to Gyeong-ju (경주기행, Gyeongju gihaeng) ends up doing, but really what she wants is to repair her fracturing family which has been torn apart in the wake of her youngest daughter’s brutal abduction and murder. The killer was caught, but as the judge saw something in him that suggested he might be a candidate for rehabilitation, he handed him a comparatively light sentence that Ok-sil (Lee Jung-eun) in particular feels provides no sense of justice for her daughter.

For that reason alone, she decided to accept a cash settlement rather than press charges knowing that the killer, Sang-hyun (Byun Yo-han), would be released relatively quickly so she could kill him herself with the help of a shady underground fixer she met at a support group. To pull this off, she enlists her three surviving daughters, most of whom have their doubts about this plan, not only the morality of it but whether a group of four ordinary women who’ve never done anything like this before can really hold a brutal killer captive and torture him to death. They are, though, largely unable to directly defy their mother and are therefore looking for other ways to stop her from going through with this by pretending to play along. Ok-sil, however, feels like this is the only way that she will be able to move forward with her life.

The irony is that they frame this as a family trip to honour Gyeong-ju’s birthday, all of them piling into the now beaten up camper van father Mu-il (Kim Hak-sun) bought when Gyeong-ju was born hoping they’d take a lot more family holidays. The age gap between the sisters, however, meant that they only took one all together and that was, like this trip, impromptu and rolled in with a business obligation, or maybe the other way around. When oldest daughter Jang-ju’s (Gong Hyo-jin) husband and young daughter turn up announced, in a way, it’s like the family is restored with Seok-man (Kim Young-sung) taking Mu-il’s place while Yun-ji takes that of the absent Gyeong-ju. Waking up in the middle of the night at the remote villa they’ve rented, Ok-sil does a quick head count, realises someone’s missing, then looks over at Yun-ji and acknowledges there are the right number of people after all. They took this trip for the purposes of murder, but also ended up having a nice family holiday while creating “alibis” at various local tourist spots and posting pictures on social media.

What did they didn’t really know was that Sang-hyun had figured out they probably took the settlement money with the intention of killing him, and so is actually intent on killing them first. There is something bestial about him in the way that he can’t be subdued and immediately begins a crime spree after managing to escape. It’s difficult to see why the judge felt he might have a chance at reform given the nature of his crime and the probability that Gyeong-ju was not his first victim. The fact that Sang-hyun is actively trying to kill her lends a kind of moral justification to Ok-sil’s plan that might not otherwise be there, even as he pleads and wheedles, suddenly playing the mild-mannered fool who made a mistake, is very sorry, and is not going to do anything like this ever again.

Still, Ok-sil’s determination is born from a desire for vengeance rather than by the fact that Sang-hyun will go on creating more victims as long as he walks the earth. Confronted by her daughters, she has to face the ways in which her grief has caused her to shut out those who are still living while meditating on the dead. Killing Sang-hyuk won’t help her put her family back together in the way she thought it would, while strangely going on holiday together seems to have done the trick. Despite the absurd humour of the film’s early stretches as these very ordinary people try to get their heads around the practicalities of killing while largely trying to ignore the psychological pressure and affects of taking another person’s life, there is a genuine poignancy to its scenes final scenes in which Ok-sil realises she will finally have to let her daughter go.

The Journey to Gyeong-ju screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Paradise Lost (실낙원, Yeon Sang-ho, 2026)

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“I hope you can accept reality,” So-young’s (Kim Hyun-joo) well-meaning boss advises her on handing over a literal key to unlocking the source of her trauma, but for many reasons, reality does not seem to be something that So-young will ever be ready to accept. Less about AI than the pull of grief and the complicated relationship between a parent and a child, Yeon Sang-ho’s dark maternal drama Paradise Lost (실낙원, Sillagwon) asks if we can actually accept our children when they grow into something that we no longer recognise or cannot approve of.

Thirteen years previously, So-young’s young son Sun-woo was one of 13 children aboard a bus that was hijacked by its driver and abandoned in a former mining area. The body of their teacher was found close to the bus, with the bodies of five children recovered nearby along with evidence that the others, including Sun-woo, may have suffered a similar fate though their remains were not recovered as the abandoned mine in which the police suspected the killer had disposed of them was judged too unstable for rescuers to enter safely. As expected, the crime provoked national mourning leading to an AI company stepping in to help ease the parents’ grief by creating avatars of their children they could interact with in a virtual reality world.

This appears quite exploitative on behalf of the AI company which is clearly making use of the parents’ grief to promote their products. It’s later said that they deleted the avatar of one child when one of their parents was arrested for drink driving fearing bad publicity. But when So-young visits them later, they remind her that the programme was only supposed to be a temporary diversion to help her adjust to the loss of her child. Even they think it’s time she stopped using it so often, while other parents have apparently made the decision to give up the service or consented to their child’s avatar being deleted. But on the other hand, the virtual Sun-woo becomes sullen when So-young does not turn up at the usual time and tearfully begs her not to abandon him like the other parents, or at least not to do it without warning.

The film is pretty clear that it at least does not accept that virtual Sun-woo is a “real” entity that is capable of emotions such as sadness, and that So-young is delusional in believing that it is. She only does so because she cannot accept the reality of her son’s death, and the avatar is then more like a reflection of her grief, no different from a ghost and the AI company akin to spiritualists of dubious intentions. But on the other hand, the programme offers her a more convenient kind of parenthood or a maternal paradise in which Sun-woo will always be her perfect little boy, never growing older or changing in ways the displease or challenge her. When the flesh and blood Sun-woo (Bae Hyun-sung) reappears years later as a young man, he’s basically a stranger and she is incapable of accepting him, not least because she discovers that he himself has become a violent and sadistic killer who may be responsible for the disappearance of the adorable little boy next door who reminds her so much of the younger Sun-woo.

In some ways, what this might really be about is the kind grief a mother might feel for a child that’s grown up or a mourning for a family life she longs to return to that only exists in the past. This is a fairly extreme example, but the film attempts to paint the flesh and blood adult Sun-woo as an avatar of the demonic, and the perfect child Sun-woo in the app as that of the angelic. So-young must choose between the “reality” of what her flesh and blood son has become and the “fantasy” of a perpetual childhood in which he will forever be her lovely little boy who just wants to eat his mother’s omelettes and play hide-and-seek. In the end it seems as if she cannot quite find it within herself to move on and prefers to stay in this purgatorial existence with each of her sons, ending up in both heaven and hell simultaneously. Intensely bleak, Yeon’s drama likens the abyss of grief to the shaft of a disused mine, descending forever into the darkness with no end in sight, while its heroine, in the end, has no desire to climb out.

Paradise Lost opens in US cinemas Nov. 6 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Ghost (령, Kim Tae-kyung, 2004)

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According to her university tutor, the anxiety of our present times stems from the identity crisis that we all feel, yet Ji-won’s (Kim Ha-neul) identity crisis is deeper than even she knows. Having lost her memory following an accident, she takes it as a good opportunity to start again, planning to leave her clingy, widowed mother behind to study overseas. Yet the unremembered past won’t seem to let her go as she’s haunted by a series of mysterious figures that push her towards investigating the person she may have been before.

This is not altogether welcome for Ji-won, as she begins to realise that prior to her accident, she may not have been a very nice person. She begins having visions of being told off by herself and comes to understand that she and her high school friendship group, who have now almost all been killed or gone mad, were involved with bullying another girl, Su-in (Nam Sang-mi), ostensibly because she was poor while they were all wealthy. Further flashbacks hint that she and Su-in may once have been friends, though Ji-won’s financial status improved markedly so that she could join the posh girl group and no longer wanted to associate with someone like Su-in.

Su-in laments that because of their poverty, neither of them had many friends besides each other when they were younger, and that now Ji-won is rich, she’s suddenly friends with everyone, hinting at the rather superficial nature of friendships and the snobbishness of the surrounding society in which relationships are often divided along the lines of social class. Ji-won, however, resents this, rejecting Su-in’s claim that no one was friends with her and insisting she’s nothing like Su-in in deliberately seeking to exclude herself from the ranks of the poor by suggesting she’s innately different. “I’m not who I was,” she ironically says, as if she had been somehow reborn following her parents’ financial success. But at the same time, Su-in has a similar mindset. When Ji-won asks her what she wants to be when she grows up, she replies only “you”, wishing this new future not only of financial comfort but friendship and acceptance for herself.

After joining the mean girl group, it’s as if Ji-won punished Su-in deliberately in order to make it clear that she is not like her and now belongs to this new elite class free of the stigma of poverty. Su-in meanwhile is willing to put up with a degree of mistreatment in order to be accepted by the group and remain “friends” with Ji-won, whom she still seems to care about. It does seem that college student Ji-won is a different, nicer person, who only has one friend in a boy a couple of years older who’s just returned from military service (Ryu Jin). Perhaps having lost her memories she’s essentially a blank slate who never learned these kinds of petty hierarchies as a child and as an adult has a better ability to see how arbitrary and unkind they really are. At any rate, she is not who she was, but is still targeted by a force she has not yet identified, just as she has still not identified herself.

The Ghost (령, Ryeong, AKA Dead Friend) seems to be drawing quite heavily from the J-horror phenomenon, though making its watery spirits and Ouija boards very much its own. The final twist is indeed quite ingenious and completely unexpected, proving that finding the ghost’s body doesn’t always lift the curse, especially if it’s not the one the ghost was after. The screenplay is extremely well constructed, lending a degree of psychological nuance and internal consistency in the constant mirroring of Ji-won and Su-in while hinting that the real terror here may be not just prejudice but what the fear of it will do to someone’s outlook and behaviour, causing them to act in terrible ways simply to prove that they are not the other but only one of us, which is to say someone worthy of respect. That kind of rage, it seems, is not cured by death. Kim Tae-gyeong’s eerie ghost story is drenched in a particular kind of loneliness that suggests all along they could have been friends if it weren’t for social exclusion and the arbitrary stigmas of a highly stratified society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Fin (지느러미, Park Sye-young, 2025)

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A young woman working for a government service tracking down illegal “Omegas” begins to wonder if she’s on the wrong side after becoming suspicious of another young woman much like herself in Park Sye-young’s dystopian drama, The Fin (지느러미, Jineureomi). Following some kind of ecological disaster, Korea has been plunged into a post-apocalyptic existence in which water has become scarce. The nation has been reunified, seemingly with the North in control, while “protected” by various walls which keep the majority population “safe” from an underclass of “mutant” workers who are permitted to exist in return for clearing “toxic waste”.

Sujin (Kim Pureum), a member of the Korean Freedom Youth Civil Service, attends a lecture on how to identify Omegas at which she is told that they look like everyone else except for the fact they have three birdlike claw toes and a fin-like appendage at the bottom of the spine which helps them exist in water. The fin is the source of all their toxins, and their bodies are radioactive, so must be disposed of immediately. What’s more, if they scream outside of the water, it could kill you.

It appears that such people actually exist and have become an oppressed underclass, but it’s never clear how much else is true and how much convenient propaganda designed to spread fear and make people suspicious of each other to prevent them from challenging this apparently authoritarian regime. The film is peppered with propaganda announcements and videos which seem to be played to saturation to point so that they’ve become a part of the environment. Looking more closely, some of them seem as if they may have been AI generated, which creates a further sense of doubt in the “reality” presented by an otherwise absent authority which may not even in itself actually exist at all. There’s no way to know what’s on the other side of the great wall, or if the “toxic waste” and water shortage are real. Citizens are encouraged to appear with dirty faces as an act of patriotism to demonstrate their efforts to conserve water.

But the “water shortage” is also a means of fuelling resentment towards the Omegas who are blamed for “stealing” it, rather than towards the regime who apparently cannot provide the populace with adequate resources. Sujin’s mother, a hollowed-out figure glued to her TV screen, is forever shouting that they should all be “eradicated” and that their destruction is the only way back to the world of before. This desire to go back is symbolised by the Golden Faith fishing emporium that decadently contains a large pool of water and a selection of fish that people can eat there and then if they catch one. It reminds people of the time in which the sea was blue and open to all, and reflects their yearning to return to a simpler time.

Mia (Yeon Ye-ji), the young woman who works there, is one of many Omegas hiding their identity by cutting off their toes and concealing their fins. An unnamed Omega (Goh-Woo) risks his own life to bring back to her her father’s fin so that she can give him a dignified funeral, only she had no idea her father had been arrested and sent beyond the wall. “It’s because of cowards like you that we’re treated like this,” the man tells her, while crowds rage outside calling for the eradication of all Omega and begging the government to protect them from this mutation.

Outside of the city, which appears to have been at least partially reclaimed by nature, the landscape has taken on a scorched, reddish hue to the extent that the once blue ocean now resembles a sea of fire. The inside of Golden Faith is, however, cooler. Not quite so bland as the brutalist buildings that surround it but light and colourful. Sujin seemingly has a choice to make, or perhaps she doesn’t. In any case, Park’s dystopian vision hints at the compromises we might be able to make in service of preserving a comfortable “reality”, throwing others to the wolves in the hope that they will not come for us.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tazza: The Song of Beelzebub (타짜: 벨제붑의 노래, Choi Kook-hee, 2026)

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“Luck” is a funny thing. You might think you’ve come out on top, only to realise that perhaps you haven’t been quite so lucky after all. Choi Kook-hee’s Tazza: The Song of Beelzebub (타짜: 벨제붑의 노래, Tazza: Beelzebubui Norae) is the latest instalment in the thematic series that began with 2006 manwha adaptation Tazza: The High Rollers, though otherwise a stand-alone tale. This time around, gambling is more a means of revenge as two men, who are in effect two sides of the same coin, find their roles constantly reversed.

Indeed ParkTae (Roh Jae-Won) characterises them as Beelzebub and Lucifer vying for control with Beelzebub the apparent loser. He and JangTae (Byun Yo-Han), who each share the name Taeyoung, met in high school and became friends, though ParkTae came to resent JangTae for apparently having charmed luck in which everything seemed to go his way and he always came out on top. The boys develop a shared love of gambling, but ParkTae is experiencing a difficult home life in which his mother is a religious fanatic who seems to have an alcohol problem. She regularly beats him with a crucifix and refers to him as the antichrist, which perhaps fuels his characterisation of himself as Lucifer. JangTae, meanwhile, has lost both his parents but shares a warm familial environment with his older sister Tae-hee (Lim Se-Mi). They later take in ParkTae too, but he soon develops unreturned feelings for Tae-hee that see him almost long to push JangTae out of the next.

Filled with self-loathing, ParkTae sees himself as unlucky and feels hard done by, resentful of the ease with which JangTae seems to live his life and what he sees as the way JangTae’s “luck” often ends up making him look foolish. ParkTae seems to be the more the rational side of the crypto casino business the guys start together while JangTae is readier to make decisions on gut instinct. JangTae later asks him if it wasn’t ParkTae who was the lucky one all along. He was smart, talented, and had people who loved him, though he was too consumed with resentment  to notice. While the guileless JangTae only offered him support and friendship, ParkTae dreamed of ruling alone and taking the entire prize for himself. 

That might be why he sets up a honeytrap with the help of Korean American lobbyist Linda Park (Stephanie Lee) who’s supposedly agreed to give them the lowdown on how to clear the way for a physical casino in Vietnam. JangTae has to bet his life on the toss of coin where both sides spell death only to find himself lucky once again when it somehow ends up standing on edge. Taken in by a former card sharp hiding out in Vietnam (Jo Woo-Jin), JangTae is co-opted into another battle for revenge in which a young woman (Ayaka Miyoshi) plots against the man who shot her father (Tsuyoshi Ihara) who foolishly bet his life after getting too into a poker game. The lure of odds seems to drive men mad with each begging for just one more game to turn it all around. It is, however, a battle of wits as much as anything else in which the pair engage in a kind of psychological warfare over the gaming table.

As JangTae says, maybe ParkTae was always luckier than he was. He just isn’t able to see why a particular outcome benefits him while fixating on winning or being a conventional success. ParkTae wants to knock JangTae off his perch to satisfy his ego, but cannot shake his inferiority complex and attributes all his shortcomings to his unluckiness rather than accept the consequences of his own actions. As JangTae’s mentor taught him, the luckiest man at the table is the one who knows when to walk away. That’s something that seems to have eluded ParkTae who doesn’t know when to quit when he’s ahead. Rather, he fixates on his chosen income unable to see clear where real “luck” lies. In any case, the dynamics between the two men are continually in shift as they find themselves quite literally staking their lives on the cards while wondering whether either of them has the courage to see things through. In the end, the real winner maybe the one who knows when it’s time to call it quits, rather than allow themselves to be manipulated by the constant allure of the odds.

Tazza: The Song of Beelzebub opens in US cinemas October 16 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hope (호프, Na Hong-jin, 2026)

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A decade on from The Wailing, Na Hong-jin returns with a piece of baffling hokum, Hope (호프), in which a small town close to the DMZ is assaulted by humanoid giants during the 1980s. Playing out like a satire of Hollywood monster movies, by the film’s abrupt cliffhanger ending we begin to get the impression that we’ve been watching from the wrong side of the screen. The “real” movie was a space fantasy revolving around the fall of an alien empire and the fate of a “chosen one”, while we’ve been seeing things from the perspective of an indigenous community witnessing the arrival of strange, new beings.

In any case, the first indication that something is “wrong” is the discovery of a mutilated cow by police chief Bum-seok’s (Hwang Jung-min) cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung). Sung-ki’s gang of hunters seem to think a tiger could be responsible, convincing Bum-seok that local wise man Hae-sul (Im Hyun-sik) said he saw one out in the mountains. Hae-sul did indeed see something, but according to his own reports, it was not a tiger. In any case, the hunters split off to investigate the mountains while Bum-seok returns to the town and finds it in a state of chaos. Bodies line the streets while buildings have been destroyed. Occasionally, he hears strange roars and sees cars flying overhead, thrown by some unknown force. 

The town itself has a frontier aesthetic like something out of an American western and unlike the Korea usually seen in the movies. There are signs reminding people to report spies and frustrate infiltration, reminding us that this is a paranoid place that has been on a war footing for around 30 years. Most of the residents are elderly and were, therefore, adults during the Korean War which explains why so many of them are so familiar with military weaponry and why there’s so much of it around including things like grenade launchers which aren’t generally used by the police. This is clearly not an invasion attempt from the North, though it explains why everyone is so keen to shoot first and ask questions later after decades of fearful vigilance.

This is first the hint we have that perhaps the heroes are the bad guys after all. While the first half sees Bum-seok and gung-ho policewoman Seung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) desperately chasing the monster in their patrol car, Bum-seok begins to feel pity for it after looking into its human-like eyes and noticing that it appears to be crying. The idea that the real monsters maybe the heroes and, by implication, we in the audience isn’t a particularly original idea and is played with such unsubtlety that Na appears to be poking fun at the trope. There’s an unpleasantness to the degree with which the hunters in the particular rejoice in the idea of killing something so unusual. They aren’t so much brave young men of the village going off to kill the monster, as bloodthirsty animals little different from their prey. 

In fact, this whole mess started because one of the village’s more unusual residents killed something he shouldn’t have. Outside of the action sequences, the film is at its best exploring the weirdness of the small-town environment. There seems to be a running gag that where the men are panicked and confused, the women are ready to meet this moment with crazed determination such as Sung-ae turning up announced with machine guns, grenade launchers, and even a missile, or the female pathologist hacking away at the body of a fallen “monster” with a chainsaw. As the film concludes, the humans are on the run and in a panic with Bum-seok admitting he has no idea what to do, while Sung-ae at least as a kind of a plan even if it might not have much chance of success. There is, then, a rather thin line between defence aggression. In some respects, they may already have crossed it in their determination to fend off this “incursion’ and expel the “foreign elements” from the town. Nevertheless, there is a small ray of hope I the residents’ sudden coming together to resolve the unknown threat, even if their initial response to it is motivated by fear and ignorance.

Trailer (English subtitles)

First Love (첫사랑, Lee Myung-se, 1993)

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Expectations were high for Lee Myung-Se’s third film, First Love (첫사랑, Cheot Sarang), given that My Love, My Bride had been a runaway success. First Love proved to be, however, one of the worst box office disasters in Korean cinema history, selling fewer than 6000 tickets in Seoul during the Lunar New Year holiday. The film was however well received by the industry with star Kim Hye-soo picking up best actress at that year’s Blue Dragon Awards. Lee had originally intended to cast Choi Jin-sil, the female lead of My Love, My Bride, who had even turned down a TV drama series to do the film, but she apparently didn’t take to the personality of the character after reading the script and withdrew. Casting former child star Kim Hye-soo was seen as a left-field choice, but paid off in spades as Kim perfectly embodies the innocence and heartbreak of first love in charming fashion.

In some respects, the film is structured in a similar way to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town which first-year university student Young-shin’s (Kim Hye-soo) theatre club is performing. As the Stage Manager explains in the play, the first act will deal with everyday life, the second with first love, and the third with something else he assumes the audience will be able to guess, in case of the play, death. The film, however, ends with something more like continuity as the street where Young-shin lives turns from summer into autumn, winter, and then comes full circle into spring as one of the poems that pepper the screen pops up to remind us that everything begins and ends with nothing, or in other words, life goes on.

Set in the 1970s, the film opens with Young-shin taking a trip to Seoul from her rural hometown where she is a student in order to recruit a director for their play. She is immediately disappointed by Kang Chang-Wook (Song Young-chang), reflecting that she was expecting someone much more literary and poetic who in contrast to the local men wouldn’t smoke and drink excessively. Chang-wook even has an off-putting habit of rubbing his hair to shake the dandruff out which suggests poor hygiene. Nevertheless, her initial aversion to him soon transitions into attraction and an all-consuming, obsessive love, though she is only 19 and he 32. 

Much of the film takes place within her romantic fantasy and flights of fancy in which she develops superpowers such as invisibility or telekinesis while pursuing Chang-wook, her bicycle seemingly moving on its own under the vibrant cherry blossoms. She frequently addresses the camera directly to explain aspects of her life, particularly how boring it is in this rural town where the height of excitement is sending her younger sister out on an illicit late night mandu run. This thrill of romance is also, in that sense, a way of passing the time, though it’s often difficult to see what she sees in Chang-wook who is often patronising and has a bad drinking habit. When the pair go on a kind of date to a historical temple, he drinks so much that they miss the last train and Young-shin has to take him to a hotel, booking into a rent by the hour type place without realising and having to lie about her age on the register. 

But while she is experiencing her first love, so are others. Her childhood friend Moon-su (Jo Min-ki) is clearly in love with her, trying to declare his feelings by giving her a copy of Tugenev’s First Love, though this proves too obscure a clue for Young-shin who is still wrapped up in her own romantic drama. The deliberately artificial set design, mostly taking place on a studio set, evokes a strong sense of nostalgia for an idealised youth. Young-shin and her friend fancy Gregory Peck and Jean-Paul Belmondo, while there are posters for South Pacific in the background, echoing the ways in which Young-shin has also turned her life into a romantic melodrama. The saturated colour scheme also echoes the Technicolor past, golden light pouring in through the studio windows as Young-shin ponders her romantic dilemma. Only once are we reminded of the less cosy side of the ‘70s as the sirens blast to mark the start of the curfew, trapping Young-shin in the motel room with a passed-out Chang-wook waiting for the first train. Young-shin’s story may be tinged with melancholia as her romantic illusions are smashed by an unexpected discovery, but she still holds on to the memories of this magical time while knowing that there are other loves to still to come as time marches on.

Trailer (no subtitles)

My Love, My Bride (나의 사랑 나의 신부, Lee Myung-se, 1990)

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Following his anarchic debut Gagman, Lee Myung-se’s My Love, My Bride (나의 사랑 나의 신부, Naui sarang, naui sinbu), might seem like a more subdued affair recalling the technicolor rom-coms of 1960s Hollywood, yet makes use of innovative stylistic techniques to explore the lives of a newlywed couple in a newly democratising Korea. Like many similarly themed films, it is keen to poke fun at the protagonist’s chauvinistic perspective and self-involvement, but cannot completely condemn them either in expecting at least a degree of audience identification with this Korean everyman.

The film opens boldly with Young-min (Park Joong-hoon) directly addressing the camera to introduce himself and explain that this is the most important day of his life as he plans to propose to university girlfriend Mi-young (Choi Jin-sil). She, however, has got the wrong end of the stick and is convinced that he’s going to dump her. This set of mismatched expectations and miscommunication sets the tone for much of their early marriage as they struggle to settle into the rhythms of co-habitation and gendered expectations of married life.

Mi-young has given up work on her marriage, though Young-min often stays late at the office and expects Mi-young to take care of all the domestic responsibilities. When Mi-young tells him that she’s going to stay overnight after visiting her mother, his first question is what he’s supposed to do about his dinner. Mi-young has already prepared it and left it in the fridge for him to warm up later, specifically instructing him not to stay out too late drinking. Young-min, however, takes this as an opportunity to rebel against the constraints of his newly married life and fill the temporary feminine absence by pursuing a colleague, Seung-hee (Kim Bo-yeon).

Seung-hee is in many ways portrayed as the polar opposite of country girl Mi-young whom Young-min occasionally mocks and looks down on for what he sees as her lack of sophistication and poor cultural knowledge. Seung-hee is a poet who dresses in smart suits exuding confidence and power that suggest she will not be subservient to men but assert her power over them. She shows Mi-young up first when everyone at the office suddenly invites themselves over to Young-min’s apartment for a “house warming”, expecting Mi-young to conjure up a dinner party to show off her domestic skills at moment’s notice. Seung-hee is a fine singer and offers a poignant rendition of Love Me Tender, prompting Young-min’s boss to insist Mi-young entertain them with a song. She obliges with a popular love song, but her singing voice is much more ordinary and her inability to hit the high notes provokes horrified faces from Young-min’s colleagues who continue to make fun of the pair because Mi-young had spelled out “I love you” in peas in the lunchbox she made for Young-min. The older men, meanwhile, all go to lunch together reflecting that they can hardly expect the same from their own wives after so many years of marriage.

Young-min is also constantly asking himself what love is and wondering if his married life will continue to be happy. Split into a series of chapters, the film focuses a number of episodes in which the couple must confront various issues from a fairly traumatic honeymoon and wedding night to Young-min’s wandering eye and irrational jealousy. Though he tells Seung-hee that marriage should be about love rather than ownership, on spotting Mi-young in a cafe with another man he jumps to the immediate conclusion that she must have met with an old lover who is trying to win her back. In fact, it was her old boss whom she ran into by chance while waiting for Young-min, and the reason that she’s crying is that he informed her one of their former colleagues has passed away. Young-min makes no attempt to talk to Mi-young about any of this, but starts giving her the cold shoulder for no reason endangering their growing bond as newlyweds. Mi-young, meanwhile, looks back on first love after receiving a letter from an old boyfriend who moved to Canada. He is no longer the handsome young man she once knew but portly middle-aged father of two. 

To escape the boredom of her married life she takes a trip to a random rural town where she buys cigarettes, has her photo taken, and is offered an unexpected job opportunity after wandering into a cafe that is clearly a front for a delivery coffee service. Though Young-min is often quick to pride himself for his emotional intelligence as a writer, he’s often inconsiderate of Mi-young. When he wins the New Writer’s Award, he insults Mi-young’s outfit moments before they leave implying that she looks cheap and common and that people will expect a writer’s wife to look sophisticated. At the party, she’s sat sadly on her own ignored by everyone including Young-min, while he expects to trot her out for interviews as his loyal and supporting wife. Even when, she’s taken ill, his mind flashes to the scenario of her death on which his main thoughts are that he’s too busy for all this right now, and though it might be nice to live alone, who’s going to take care of his laundry?

Nevertheless, Mi-young’s temporary absence does make him realise that he misses her in ways other than the practical and seems to paper over the other cracks their relationship so that they can put all the petty disagreements to one side and love and accept each other. Lee uses a series of humorous devices including onscreen graphics and speech bubbles to reflect the protagonists’ thought processes, while the fantastic production design gives their world a sense of cosy unreality. Meanwhile, he uses the changing of the seasons to reflect the changing dynamics of couple, embracing romantic imagery such as the moon rising and snow falling as Young-min and Mi-young fall into a more settled rhythm and an older Young-min reflects that he is still in the process of finding out what love is, but is grateful for the happy life he’s been able to make for himself as a husband and father.

Trailer (no subtitles)