Tag: Korean

The Ugly (얼굴, Yeon Sang-ho, 2025)

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Poets and philosophers have long debated the true nature of “beauty”. “Living miracle of Korea” Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo) has spent most of his life pondering it, not least because he is blind and is often told that the figures he carves on name stamps are “beautiful”. For his customers, “beauty” is rooted in the visual, and for those reasons it seems to them impossible for Yeong-gyu to experience it. It doesn’t occur to them that he may experience “beauty” in other ways or that beauty is not necessarily as connected with vision as they assume it to be. 

But then again, in Yeon Sang-ho’s dark fairytale The Ugly (얼굴, Eolgul), the concept of “beauty” is itself inverted to become something eerie and uncomfortable in symbolising the forced harmony of an authoritarian society. In the present day, a TV documentary crew is interviewing blind stamp carver Yeon-gyu, though it’s obvious the producer is becoming frustrated with Yeong-gyu’s evasiveness while simultaneously hoping to tell an inspirational story about how he overcame adversity that is in itself a little exploitative. She gets an ironic lucky break when, midway through filming, the remains of Yeong-gyu’s wife and the mother of his only son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min) are discovered following her disappearance 40 years previously.

Yeong-gyu had told Dong-hwan, who was a baby at the time, that Young-hee had simply run away and does not seem to have made much attempt to look for her. Though this might seem odd, it was after all a time when people just disappeared without warning and asking questions would only put those left behind in danger, so perhaps it’s understandable that Yeong-gyu, a man marginalised by his disability, simply accepted the fact of her absence and chose to believe that she had left him even if it conflicts with his description of her as “kind”. Everyone describes Young-hee of having been a “kind” person even while they otherwise scorn her as “ugly”, describing her as a monstrous creature with an appearance they find gruesome though almost comical rather than frightening. 

When Young-hee’s estranged family turn up at the funeral, they too are embarrassed by her ugliness and crassly make a point of clarifying to Dong-hwan that they don’t want to share their inheritance with him. According to them, Young-hee left home as a young child after telling their mother she’d seen their father with another woman. Their mother beat and her and refused to believe it, while the other family members resented Young-hee for raising an inconvenient truth and fracturing the harmony of this “perfect” family. Young-hee encounters something similar while working at clothing factory where she challenges the boss after finding out that he has raped an employee, but is again ignored and then silenced. Years later in the present day, the former workers claim that it’s thanks to the boss that they survived, echoing the defenders of dictator Park Chung-hee who credit him with curing the intense poverty of the post-Korean War society and turning the nation into the economic powerhouse it is today no matter how many died in his pet construction projects such as the Gyeongbu Expressway. 

Young-hee too works under these exploitative conditions similar to those seen in A Single Spark. When her boss refuses her a bathroom break, she is too frightened to defy him and ends up soiling herself earning herself the unpleasant nickname “Dung Ogre”. Yet when she sees injustice she tries to combat it and refuses to back down even when others shun her. Gradually we begin to realise that the reason Young-hee is called “ugly” is because she speaks the truth and reflects the “ugliness” of those around her. Years later, the colleague who told her she’d been raped by the boss blames herself for her death, knowing that Young-hee was only trying to help her and probably didn’t realise that exposing the boss would kill her only resultiing in a quest to identify the victim. “My shame became his forgiveness,” she reflects, regretting that she too scorned Young-hee and that her failure to speak enabled him to go on abusing other women with impunity. Afraid of the factory boss’ violent thugs and desperate to keep their jobs, no one challenges him least of all Yeong-gyu who tells his wife to shut up and keep the peace.

But for Yeong-gyu, Young-hee’s “ugliness” has other implications in that it reflects his own insecurities and marginalisation. Along with using various derogatory terms to describe Young-hee’s ugliness, the interviews throw in a series of ableist slurs and it’s clear that they also consider Yeong-gyu to be “ugly” because of his otherness. Yeong-gyu resents that they look down him, and learning that Yeong-hee is considered to be “ugly” is consumed with a deep sense of humiliation as if he were being mocked and laughed at for having such an “ugly” wife while, paradocxically, she must only have been interested in him as a means of bringing about his degredation. 

But then, this visual notion of “beauty” is meangingless to Yeong-gyu who has been blind since birth so it ought not to matter to him whether Young-hee is objectively beautiful to the sighted. Notions of visual beauty are socially and culturally defined and shift over time, but at this time and in this society being “beautiful” is it seems important, not least because it implies conformity. Young-hee’s “ugliness” is then transgressive and empowering in its defiance of the code of silence that defines authoritarianism, but within it Yeong-gyu finds only the undermining of his masculinity and humiliation in being found unworthy. That he’s now called a “living miracle of Korea” for overcoming those hard times is a cruel irony and a comment on the state of the contemporary nation forged in dictatorship and tempered by a hyper-capitalistic disregard for human rights in the quest for prosperity. Confronted by these truths, Dong-hwan finds himself with a choice, but in the end may take after his father after all in his own desire to tidy away unpleasantness and avoid having to accept the “ugly” reality. 

The Ugly screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Project Y (프로젝트 Y, Lee Hwan, 2025)

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The opening sequence of Lee Hwan’s Project Y (프로젝트 Y) seems to echo the iconic intro of Millennium Mambo as two women look back over their shoulders as they traverse a seemingly endless tunnel. Later we realise that the tunnel is their passage out of the underworld of the red light district towards escape and liberation, not only from patriarchal control and their impossible lives, but from a generational legacy of abuse and entrapment.

Indeed, Ga-young (Kim Shin-rok) the adoptive mother of Mi-sun (Han So-hee) and birth mother of Do-kyung (Jeon Jong-seo), is fond of asking who is saving who when we’re all the same, and insisting that your life is yours to save. It’s a message the girls have taken to heart, yet they remain devoted to each other in a relationship that also appears to be romantic or perhaps has already transcended romance in the depth of their connection. Mi-sun has been working as a karaoke bar hostess for a number of years while Do-kyung works as her driver and occasional courier for various shady types. They plan to leave the red light district now Mi-sun has saved enough money to buy a florist’s from its retiring owner along with a downpayment on a apartment, but it turns out half the girls in the red light district have been scammed by a dodgy estate agent at the behest of local kingpin Blackjack (Kim Sung-cheol).

It seems that Blackjack may have done this deliberately in a nefarious plot to increase the girls’ debts and prevent them from leaving. Blackjack’s callousness is signalled early on when he tells the girls’ manager to get rid of a drooping plant if she can’t manage it and space the others out to disguise the gap. But on the flip side, Blackjack has a young and very silly wife who has got into host clubs and has been spending all his money on a young man who is openly exploiting her. Though the men are ostensibly in the same position as the women, they still have a greater power in preying on female loneliness while the women, by contrast, may be indulging in this behaviour precisely because it gives them an illusion of control they ordinarily don’t have a patriarchal society. Blackjack’s wife throws expensive gifts at her favourite host in an attempt to persuade him to enter a deeper relationship while blabbing her husband’s secrets. The host doesn’t seem to have realised it might be a bad idea to be messing around with Blackjack’s wife, while stealing his secret stash is going to annoy him even more and Blackjack’s not the sort of man you want to be annoyed with you.

Blackjack watches a video of a dog drowning in a tarpit while he works out, and this particular tarpit acts as a kind of vortex drawing all the greed in the red-light district towards it. Hearing about the plot to rob Blackjack, the girls decide to rob him first and blame it on a local hoodlum. But after retrieving a bag with the exact amount they lost, discover a stash of gold bars. It’s taking them too that damages the integrity of their quest and sets them on a course towards a direct confrontation with Blackjack as they try their hardest to escape the red light district for good.

The implication seems to be that if they take the money, they’ll never really be free because it stemmed from the source of their exploitation. This might in a way be what Ga-young is trying to teach the girls in her otherwise hard to read behaviour, sacrificing herself to save them from their poor decision to cross Blackjack while trying to catapult them free of the red-light district though she knows she herself can never leave. Slick and stylish, Lee’s noir stays just on the right side of realism despite its recurrent grimness and larger than life characters such as the Blackjack’s icy female enforcer Bull and captures both girls’ desire for a “normal life” of working in the day and sleeping at night, along with the cheerful solidarity of the hostesses as they band together to take revenge on Blackjack and finally free themselves from this world of constant betrayal and exploitation.

Project Y screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The People Upstairs (윗집 사람들, Ha Jung-woo, 2025)

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A moribund marriage finds itself haunted in the reflective image of the couple upstairs in Ha Jung-woo’s take on the Spanish film, Sentimental. A very ’70s sex farce, the film is, in other ways, a refreshingly modern examination of contemporary relationships that ultimately comes down on the side of sexual freedom and personal fulfilment rather than encouraging its unhappily married protagonists back into a socially conformist cage of merely settling for an unsatisfying existence.

You can tell Jeong-ah (Gong Hyo-jin) is unsatisfied by the way she accidentally embarrasses the life model at the art class where she teaches part-time to the point he feels he has to cover himself up even though it defeats the purpose of him being there. Her work as a temporary art teacher is also a symbol of her defeated hopes having given up on her creative practice to focus on more practical concerns while her husband, Hyun-soo (Kim Dong-wook), is a struggling film director who is currently on the 48th draft of a project to turn an unsuccessful film pitch into a TV drama that he’s been working on for the last four years. 

Neither of them are getting much sleep because the rambunctious nightly lovemaking of the couple upstairs keeps them up at night, but these days Hyun-soo sleeps on a fold up mattress in his office which is full of empty boxes of instant ramen like some student bachelor pad. Though they’re only in adjacent rooms, they communicate through Kakao talk and are otherwise leading separate lives. That might be why Jeong-a is drawn to the self-help YouTube channel run by Soo-kyung (Lee Hanee), her upstairs neighbour, which assures that no one can cure the loneliness inside you and the fastest way to better relationships is to stop expecting too much from other people. 

But it’s clear that Jeong-a, at least, is looking for something more which is likely why she decides to invite the upstairs neighbours over for dinner. Hyun-soo isn’t keen on the plan and tries to force her to cancel, then only agreeing to stay an hour while making passive-aggressive comments and veering close to telling the Kims that they can hear everything that’s going on upstairs and they don’t like it. Soo-kyung and her husband Mr Kim (Ha Jung-woo) are, however, the inverse of Jeong-a and Hyun-soo in their hyper-sexualised relationship and apparently solid marriage. They’ve come with something to say too, but while Jeong-a is increasingly receptive to their entreaties and open about her dissatisfaction, Hyun-soo is rude and indignant, resentful of what he sees as a perverse intrusion into his otherwise very “normal” life.

Indeed, part of this is that Mr Kim keeps making subtle digs at his masculinity in needling him about his lack of career success and inability to get this TV drama off the ground after apparently working on it for four years. This is also the root of Hyun-soo’s own insecurities and withdrawal from Jeong-a, unable to see himself as a man in the wake of his dissatisfying career. But Mr Kim is also a contradictory picture of masculinity. A teacher of Chinese characters who really wanted to be a calligrapher, he cuts a fairly authoritarian figure, but is otherwise a modern new man who is domesticated and open with his feelings. The Kims bring a dish to the dinner that Mr Kim has made while he orgiastically tears into pomegranate and suggestively squeezes lemons. He fixes drinks, makes tea, and gets out of the way while his wife does her work. 

But at the same time, the film seems to dial back on the inherent queerness of the Kims’ sexual practice by eliding the homoeroticism between Hyun-soo and Mr Kim who is keen to recruit him because his apparently explosive essence. This internalised homophobia is also a manifestation of Hyun-soo’s conventionality and desire for middle-class properness to bring order to his life, if only superficially, by continuing to live in a simulacrum of a marriage that leaves husband and wife unhappy. The recently remodelled flat is full of the signs of aspiration from the posh china to elegant modern decor. But it’s a row about the curtains that most obviously signals the cracks in their relationship. Jeong-a doesn’t want any because she wants a more open and transparent marriage, while Hyun-soo can’t live without them because he craves repression and can’t understand a life without it.

In any case, during their incredibly weird evening with the Kims, the couple hit rock bottom that is also a kind of epiphany liberating them from their misconceptions and the inertia of their married life. Hyun-soo, finally, begins to realise that Jeong-a is right when she says he uses sarcasm to run away from his problems and if he wants to save his marriage, he’ll have to be a little more emotionally honest and open to compromise. Despite his squeamishness, the film seems to come down on the side of the Kims who are living happy and fulfilling lives in embracing their sexuality, while it is Hyun-soo, by contrast, who must learn to open up even if he’s not quite ready to get in the lift.

The People Upstairs screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (no subtitles)

No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다, Park Chan-wook, 2025)

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Most of the time, when someone says they had no choice, they’re paradoxically admitting that they had one, but they expect to understand the choice they’ve made because we would have done the same or can’t reasonably expect them to accept the consequences of the alternative. “No other choice,” on the other hand, is self-contradictory, clearly stating that a choice does indeed exist. Perhaps that’s why it seems so irritatingly disingenuous every time it’s said to Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), even if he eventually succumbs to its self-absolving qualities.

In any case, it’s this sense of powerlessness that’s at the centre of Park Chan-wook’s satirical drama as a middle-aged man finds himself suddenly exiled from the upper-middle-class lifestyle he’s worked so hard to build for himself when his company’s taken over by an American firm who have “no other choice” than to shed some staff. Man-su is blindsided by this corporate betrayal, attending self-help sessions that remind him there’s no such thing as jobs for life any more. Losing his job wasn’t his choice, but in some ways perhaps that makes it worse. 

What connects him with the other men in his position is that he’s obsessed with getting another job in the paper industry rather than exploring other options. All of these men are fixated on getting back what they feel has been taken from them. Not only is Man-su dead set on getting another job in paper, but on holding on to the family home from which he was displaced as a child and has only just managed to reclaim. To that extent, what he wants is a return to a past that doesn’t quite exist any more or exists only in his memory and is therefore unattainable.

Losing his job also leaves him displaced within his family as his sudden inability to keep them in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed eats away at his sense of masculinity. They’ve already had to exile the dogs, leaving his young daughter distraught, while his wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), has started working again, further emphasising his failure as a provider. Witnessing one of the other men’s wives cheating on him with a much younger lover, Man-su too begins to fear that his wife no longer sees him as a man and will cheat on him too with someone who better fulfils the codes of masculinity. Yet it’s his stubborn male pride that undermines his positions much more than the unfortunate fact of having lost his job, which wasn’t after all something he had much control over. The wives are all much more pragmatic and come up with realistic solutions such as ruthless belt tightening and ceding a little ground by voluntarily giving up anything inessentials while encouraging their husbands to be a little more pragmatic and consider new directions rather stubbornly fixating on reclaiming the life they had before. 

That might be Miri decides to just sort of go with it even after beginning to suspect that Man-su has something to do with the disappearance of his rivals. At least he’s being proactive, even if it’s not really the best way to go about it, and by burying a few bodies there, he’s basically made it impossible to sell the house which is one goal achieved. It’s not losing your job that’s the problem, it’s how you deal with it, one of the other men’s wives insists as even Man-su ironically berates him for not listening to any of his wife’s “sensible” suggestions. Then again, the fact Man-su is eventually offered a job training AI replace him invites the suggestion that he’s basically killing all the other workers in the hope of clinging on to the wheel as soon as possible. The managers state they had “no other choice” about that too, and are grinning with the blinkered vision that prevents them from realising there’ll be no need for managers when there’s no one manage. 

In any case, the fact that Man-su walks around for with toothache for a significant amount of time echoes the hero of Aimless Bullet and suggests that perhaps things aren’t all that much different in the Korea of today caught between deepening wealth inequality, exploitative working conditions, and employment precarity presented by the rise of AI and increasingly globalisation. There is something quite sad about the devaluing of these skills in that what Man-su and the other men share is reverence for paper, the beauty and texture of it, along with the craftsmanship and pride in their work that now seems to belong to a bygone era. It seems that the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism leaves Man-su with “no other choice” than to do what he did and leave others with no other choice but him, but all he’s really done is seal his own fate in a futile attempt to hold on to a past that is rapidly slipping away.

No Other Choice screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The World of Love (세계의 주인, Yoon Ga-eun, 2025)

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Lee Jooin (Seo Su-bin) is a cheerful young woman, always laughing and joking. She tells people she’s okay, though some of them think she shouldn’t be, as if she can’t be telling the truth or what happened to her can’t be all that bad if she’s otherwise unaffected by it now. It’s like they’re telling her that she has no right to be happy, but must continue to live in suffering to conform to their idea of what a traumatised person looks like, otherwise she must be making it up for attention. 

Put like that, it seems very unfair. But it’s true enough that director Yoon Ga-eun plays with our prejudices deliberately withholding whatever it is that happened in Jooin’s life until the truth of it gently unfolds and we witness the radiating effects it’s had on her family and those around her. We at first wonder if she might have done something bad she’s expected to atone for, especially with the talk of lawyers and court cases, the fact her friends and teachers seem to regard her as a compulsive liar, and her sometimes aggressive physicality that sees her rough house with the boys and repeatedly end up in altercations with classmate Su-ho (Kim Jeong-sik) whose sister Noori attends her mother’s daycare.

Later, we might wonder if Su-ho is carrying something difficult to bear too. His mother doesn’t seem to be around, and he’s stepped into a maternal role caring for his sister to a degree that may seem obsessive. He’s started a petition against a convicted child abuser being released back into their community and is fixated on getting the entire school to sign it, even though it’s not really anything to do with him and simply saying they don’t want him back here is not particularly helpful seeing as he’ll have to go somewhere. Su-ho thinks he’s doing a good thing, but Jooin refuses to sign because she doesn’t like it that he’s written that being a victim of sexual assault ruins people’s lives. She tries to explain to him why it’s offensive, that he’s robbing those who’ve experienced sexual violence of the right to assume agency and suggesting they must forever be defined by their victimhood. She resents his patriarchal attitude and insistence that someone’s life could be “ruined” beyond repair because of a traumatic event that occurred to them personally outside of the problematic framing Su-ho’s way of thinking lends it. Su-ho, however, does not really listen but merely forces her to sign the petition anyway to fit in with everyone else so he’ll get his unanimous numbers, not that it really matters. 

We might also start seeing some of Jooin’s behaviour as a trauma response. Her love of Taekwondo a means of self-protection, her prankster persona a way of rebelling against her sadness with aggressive cheerfulness, but in that we may not be much better than Su-ho. Perhaps she just likes Taekwondo and is a natural comedienne. Maybe she just doesn’t care for apples. Not everything in her life radiates from her trauma. Meanwhile, we catch sight of things in others that suggest they may be suffering too. When Jooin grabs her friend Yura’s arm, she pulls away as if it were injured, tugging at her sleeve as if trying to hide it. Someone keeps writing nasty notes questioning Jooin’s behaviour, which they find confusing, and her authenticity as if she might simply be playacting something which to them is real.

Not being believed is another aspect of Jooin’s trauma. Even when she tells the truth, others accuse her of lying. Other women around her experience something similar, asked why they accepted money from or did not cut of contact with a man they say abused them even if that man was a close family member. Jooin’s father has abandoned the family and does not reply to her messages, rejecting her because of his own sense of guilt, while her mother is doing the best she can but has taken to drink. She also has a younger brother, Hae-in, with a burgeoning career as a stage magician, who may at times get forgotten amid everyone else’s needs. As part of his act, he has a section where he asks the audience to write their fears and worries on a card so he can magic them all away. But as much as he’s been secretly protecting his sister, there’s no spell you can cast to make all of this disappear. Jooin, meanwhile, writes her vocation as “love” and is indeed surrounded by it. “You’ll never know who I am, but I’ll never forget you,” the note writer later signs off, thanking her for speaking out and making them feel a little less alone while simultaneously liberating Jooin from her sense of fear and isolation. “Lying makes it hurt more,” little Noori advises Jooin’s mother, while Jooin has at least unburdened herself and assumed control of the world around her.

The World of Love screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ms. Apocalypse (세기말의 사랑, Lim Sun-ae, 2023)

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It’s funny to look back now at how worried we were about the millennium bug and the birth of a new century, but it’s true enough that the anxiety and desperation were enough to make people act in strange and incomprehensible ways. The first part of Ms Apocalypse (세기말의 사랑, Sekimalui Sarang) is filmed in black and white hinting at the dull incompleteness of the heroine’s life even as she finds herself overcome with dread and begging the man on whom she’s developed a crush to run away with her so she won’t die here, at her aunt’s funeral, where her obnoxious cousin wants her to pour drinks for his boorish friends. 

Young-mi (Lee Yoo-Young) is a mousy, shy woman who keeps herself to herself. At the factory where she works as a bookkeeper, they’ve nicknamed her “Ms Apocalypse”, because her face is “chaotic”, while the men make fun of how unattractive they find her behind her back. The only one of them that’s nice to her is Do-young (Roh Jae-Won), a driver who started five months ago. Young-mi has developed a crush on him, but is too shy to do anything about it and ends up rebuffing most of his overtures such as the precious gift of extra sausages from the canteen. But Young-mi has also discovered that Do-young has been embezzling the cash he’s supposed to be collecting for deliveries. She obviously doesn’t want him to get in any trouble, so she’s been making up the shortfall out of her own pocket by taking on sewing on the side. Unfortunately, when a remorseful Do-young turns himself in, Young-mi ends up going to prison too for failing to report his crimes.

It’s on her release that colour returns to the film, as if Young-mi as had been spiritually and emotionally set free to start a new life in the new century. Yet the only person who comes to meet her is Do-young’s spiky wife Yu-jin (Lim Sun-Woo). Yuj-in is living with a degenerative illness that has left her paralysed from the neck down though she maintains sensation in the rest of her body. Though they are opposites, the two women share a strange affinity and have more in common than they might care to admit. While Young-mi’s life had largely been in service of her aunt to set her cousin Kyu-tae (Heo Joon-Seok) free, Yu-jin has a complicated relationship with her niece, Mi-ri (Jang Sung-Yoon), who has currently run away from home and is imprisoned by her condition in the same way Young-mi is trapped by shyness. While Young-mi is all too aware of the way that others see her as “weird” and unattractive, Yu-jin is a beauty who radiates elegance and imperiousness. She has what her friend Jun (Moon Dong-Hyeok) describes as a nasty personality but is basically a reasonable person who knows full well how dependent she is on the kindness of strangers. 

Young-mi is a kind person, but there’s a question mark over whether she stays with Yu-jin because she wants her money back and has nowhere else to go after discovering Kyu-tae has sold her aunt’s house, or has come to genuinely care about her. It seems at first that they’ve both been betrayed by Do-young, though it’s not as simple as it seems and it may be a misguided gesture of kindness that’s landed them all in this very messy situation. They are nevertheless united in their outsider status as women at the mercy of a patriarchal society. Just as Young-mi is mocked for her appearance, the carers hired to look after Yu-jin make crass and inappropriate comments about her body while even her closest friend, Jun, has exploited her disability to get a discount on his car as well as swapping some of her favourite designer shoes for fakes, though Yu-jin knows she can’t say anything or risk Jun abandoning her. Though Young-mi was the one looking after her aunt who had dementia and a drinking problem, she was always at the mercy of Kyu-tae as her closest male relative and unfortunately he chose to betray her.

Kyu-tae’s not quite ex-wife blames the Asian Financial Crisis, but it seems Kyu-tae was always a selfish and unpleasant person emboldened his position in the patriarchal society and the meekness of Young-mi who he knew would not be able to stand up for herself. But it’s a new century now, and Young-mi’s world is certainly more colourful, if perhaps no easier. She’s learned to fight her corner, but also to make space in it for others in warming to the complicated Yu-jin whose loneliness and vulnerability all come out as meanness though she is a kind soul too and like Young-mi looking for ways to begin moving forward. Now they’ve got over their millennium bug, they’re ready to join the new century and embrace whatever it is that it has to offer them.

Trailer (no subtitles)

No Parking (주차금지, Son Hyeon-woo, 2025)

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A small negligence can come back to bite you, according to the violent stalker at the centre of Son Hyeon-woo’s No Parking (주차금지, Juchageumji). Ho-jun (Kim Roi-ha) likes to punish the “rude”, though some might like to argue that whacking people with wrenches is also at the very least impolite, while his overall manner is distinctly unfriendly. It is, however, inconsiderate parking practices that eventually do for him when he becomes fixated on a neighbour of his wife’s who asks him to move her car while he’s in the process of murdering her. 

Yeon-hee (Ryu Hyun-kyung) was already fed up with the parking situation and has been trying to move though is struggling to do so for a variety of reasons. There’s a lot going on in her life, including a recent divorce and starting again after returning to Korea and the workforce after a 10-year absence. That’s perhaps why she’s stuck in a contract worker position which means she won’t be approved for the loan she needs for a lease on another property until she’s made a full-time employee. But, as someone suggests to her, her boss may have had an ulterior motive for offering her the job and, sure enough, begins sexually harassing her immediately after her welcome party. 

Hae-cheol (Kim Jang-won) and Ho-jun are both, in their ways, representatives of the patriarchal society. They both berate Yeon-hee for being “rude” to them, and react angrily when they feel disrespected. Hae-cheol is in fact already married with children, and repeatedly stresses his secure financial position and assets he insists would be Yeon-hee’s if she came over to him. He later describes his wife as a “fat pig” and moans that she let herself go after the marriage and children. “Yeon-hee needs to meet a guy like me,” he says, while refusing to take her refusal seriously. She asks him why he’s doing this to her and says that she’s going to quit her job, but that doesn’t stop him wandering around outside her home and declaring he’ll stay there until she comes out. 

Ho-jun hangs around outside her house too, though unfortunately, you can’t report someone to the police for loitering. He gets her name from a business card she’s left in the window of her car, which seems ill-advised, but he obviously knows where she lives anyway. He insists on having an apology for her having been “rude” to him when she asked him to move the car, though as she points out, it was “rude” not to park it properly and in any case she’s at the end of her tether with the traffic, her work situation, and precarious living conditions. Nevertheless, Ho-jun’s attitude is reflective of a wider misogyny in which he expects subservience from women and becomes violent when he doesn’t get it. He’s evidently been stalking his ex-wife and murders her on realising that she’s found another man. 

Yet Ho-jun also resents Hae-cheol, insisting that it’s because of men like him that women have become “arrogant”. Hae-cheol too expects Yeon-hee’s deference and repeatedly stresses that he’s a nice guy and can’t understand why she’s treating him this way. He doesn’t leave her any room to refuse and rejects her right to choose. Like Ho-jun, he fixates on her “rudeness” in not stopping to say goodbye to him when she was trying to leave work after realising he lured her there on false pretences at the weekend when no one else’s around so he could pressure her into going to dinner. He describes her as a “gift” from the universe to cure his loneliness, complaining that his family don’t care about him because he prioritised work and now has no emotional outlets. He repeatedly drops hints about making Yeon-hee full-time, while misusing his power and suggesting that doing so is contingent on her agreeing to the affair with him. Nevertheless, when rumours spread around the office it’s Yeon-hee who gets suspended even though none of it is true and it was Hae-cheol who was harassing her.

The film seems to suggest it’s this general level of frustration and anger with the contemporary society that leads to acts of violence over things which might be thought “trivial” such as parking provision, but then again inconsiderate parking is also a sign of selfishness or at least that everyone is so consumed by their own problems that they don’t have time to consider the effects of their actions on others. Or, maybe some people are just rude or like Ho-jun trying to assert their dominance by flouting the rules. In any case, small acts of negligence may indeed come back to strike you from unelected directions and the only real cure is to try to treat other people as people who are also tired and frustrated but whose lives would be made infinitely easier if people didn’t keep parking in front of their driveways.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

The Villagers (동네사람들, Im Jin-soon, 2018)

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Trying to make a fresh start after being fired as a boxing coach in Seoul for challenging match fixing practices, a rookie teacher finds himself embroiled in small-town conspiracy in Im Jin-soon’s Ma Dong-seok vehicle, The Villagers (동네사람들, Dongnesaramdeul, AKA Ordinary People). Unlike the big bad city, this rural backwater is mired in feudalism and corruption as if it were stuck in the authoritarian past in which everyone keeps their head down and minds their own business rather than challenging injustice or trying to improve the lives of those around them.

What Ki-chul (Ma Dong-seok) and high schooler Yu-jin (Kim Sae-ron) have in common is that they’re both outsiders. Yu-jin transferred to the high school from Seoul and has been branded a troublemaker by the judgmental teachers. But despite the school’s seeming authoritarianism, the pupils have little respect for the school system and openly flout the rules by smoking on school premises and being rude to the staff. It transpires that Ki-chul has basically been hired as a kind of muscle, charged with getting students who haven’t paid their fees or dinner money to cough up ahead of an upcoming audit of the school’s finances. Many of the students he approaches brush him off as if they simply don’t intent to pay, but the school doesn’t seem to be interested in finding out why they might not be able to or if there are problems at home. Yu-jin too rolls her eyes he asks her, but in her case she’s unwilling to finance an institution that’s not doing anything for her even if as Ki-chul advises her they won’t let her graduate if she doesn’t.

Ki-chul seems uncomfortable with his new role and tries to do what he can to help, but encounters resistance from the teachers who tell him there’s no point worrying about kids like these. If they skip school, they’re branded runaways and no attempt is made to look for them. The teaching staff lowkey threaten Ki-chul by reminding him his job’s to get the money and he doesn’t want to make trouble for himself when he was lucky to be employed here in the first place. And so he finds himself conflicted when he spots Yu-jin in town getting herself into dangerous situations trying to find out what’s happened to her friend Su-yeon (Shin Se-hwi) who’s been missing for days but the police won’t seem to do anything. Yu-jin tells him that adults can’t be trusted, especially not the police, but he thinks it’s teenage alienation before trying to report the case again himself through a friend on the force and having it rejected.

The fierce resistance to even mentioning Su-yeon ought to tip them off that’s something bigger’s going on, but everyone is focussed on the upcoming election in which the headmaster of the school is standing for governor that nothing’s getting done at all. Ki-chul tries to report another teacher for harmful behaviour towards students, but is yelled at for exposing the school’s business by going to the police “over some runaway”. He’s reminded to keep his head down and mind his own business, even while Yu-jin continues to be in danger and Su-yeon is still missing. An orphan whose parents had massive debts to loansharks, Su-yeon was forced to work in a bar to support herself and her grandmother. She dreamed of being beautiful and free as an adult, but was badly let down by many of those around her including the school who decided that girls like her weren’t worth helping.

Of course, Ki-chul can’t help standing up for justice through the medium of his fists and smashing his way to the truth while trying to keep Yu-jin safe. If someone disappeared Su-yeon, they won’t think twice about doing the same to Yu-jin, though she of course thinks she’s invincible and is too young to think sensibly about her own safety while desperate to find out what’s happened to her friend. They are both, however, trapped by the legacy of an authoritarian era in which the police works only for the powerful and dirty local politics taints everything around it as everyone desperately tries to ingratiate themselves with the new regime while avoiding stepping out of line and endangering themselves. Ki-chul, however, has not much interest in that and is determined to smack some sense into gangsters and law enforcement alike in an effort to show that the world doesn’t necessarily need to be this way if only more people were willing to stand up to cronyism and exploitation.

The Villagers is released Digitally in the US Oct. 7 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

4PM (오후 네시, Jay Song, 2024)

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What is the proper etiquette for dealing with an unwanted house guest? It is acceptable to ask them to leave directly, to usher them out of the house by making an excuse that you are leaving yourself, or are you duty bound by virtue of your place in society to put up with it and wait politely until said guest leaves of their own accord, assuming that they ever do? At the end of the day, perhaps it’s foolish to allow our time to be wasted on petty worries about propriety when the best thing to do is really to be direct and explain that you do not enjoy this person’s company and would appreciate it if they did not call on you again.

Based on a novel by Amélie Nothomb, Jay Song’s increasingly absurd psychological drama 4PM (오후 네시, Ohu Nesi) is indeed about the suffocating qualities of politeness, but also in the ways that it interacts with class and masculinity along with the very image of ourselves. As a character in an Ibsen play once said, to take away a man’s life lie is to take away his happiness, and professor Jung-in (Oh Dal-su) is keen to caution against looking too deeply into one’s own soul for the only gifts of self-knowledge are unbearable shame and misery. “I am defined by my kindness to others as a educated man,” Jung-in reminds himself, but in saying so he also makes it clear that his politeness is a conscious affectation rather than an innate character trait. He behaves in a certain way because he fears judgement and wants others to approve of him as a nice person who has been raised well to have good manners. Fulfiling this image is key to his idea of self in the persona of a cultured professor and marks him out from those he may secretly see as “lower” than himself, in being “uneducated” and “rude”, ignorant of the “proper” way to behave. 

But whatever way you look at it, Yook-nam’s (Kim Hong-pa) behaviour is “impolite” despite his apparently being a doctor, though we’ve really got his word for it. Having taken a sabbatical, Jung-in and his wife Hyun-sook (Jang Young-nam) have bought a house in the country, but unusually for such a property, it’s overlooked by an adjacent home positioned a little too close for comfort. The couple figure they should introduce themselves, but the lights are always out and the place doesn’t look lived in, so they leave a note inviting the occupant to visit at their convenience. Unfortunately, Yook-nam takes them at their word, shows up at 4pm, barges his way in, and then just sits there for two hours snapping at them with monosyllabic answers to their questions as if he were burning with rage. He does the same thing every day until it begins to drive the couple out of their minds. 

Of course, they have to ask themselves why they allow this. Why can’t they ask him to leave, or refuse to open the door? They find it impossible to break the psychological barrier of politeness by stating pointe-blank that Yook-nam is a bore and they wish him to leave. They are in a sense suffocated by the need to conform to these deeply ingrained social codes of what it means to be a good person even when others are clearly not abiding by the same set of rules. The absurdity eats away at them as they find themselves humiliated by their own cowardice in becoming complicit in Yook-nam’s oppression. Jung-in begins to realise that his civility interferes with the demands of socially defined masculinity in that he is failing to protect his home by being unable even to eject an unwanted guest and in effect ceding power to him even within the safe and personal space of the domestic environment which should also be free of such oppressive rules for being.

Jung-in anfd Hyun-sook may be getting an idea of why the last person moved, but there’s also a kind of symmetry in the two houses which are in their way each haunted. Both couples say they have no children, but there’s a family photo with a little girl in Jung-in and Hyun-sook’s house that does not appear to be of their surrogate daughter, Jung-in’s former student So-jung (Min Do-hee), just as there’s a family photo with a little boy in Yook-nam’s house that hints at a buried tragedy. While Jung-in and Hyun-sook’s house seems to be full of light, uncluttered, clean and tranquil, Yook-nam sleeps in soiled sheets in a room that apparently smells in home that is filled with unwashed dishes while the walls are coated in grime. The whole place is covered in loudly ticking ticks in contrast to the silence of Jung-in’s home which brings new meaning to his words about living in the present. 

It isn’t really clear what Yam-nook wants out of all this, whether he’s just looking for some kind of escape or actively rebelling by being deliberately unpleasant while exerting his power through wasting Jung-in’s time. “He was still my guest,” Jung-in insists emphasising the roles they are each playing along with his own determination not to deviate from them. Perhaps Yook-nam actually wants them to break protocol by telling him to go away, but instead they live in tyranny of 4pm and sit quietly until Yook-nam abruptly leaves at six rather than say anything or at the very least tell their unwanted guest that he’s free to stay but they’re going to get on with their business. Meanwhile, Jung-in’s civility is slowly eroded, exposing the primitive man inside who fantasies about killing Yook-nam and is suffocated by his his hate for him. But in seeing this true side of himself, Jung-in discovers only shame rather than authenticity or empowerment, and in creating another persona is again ironically suffocated, silenced in his own rebellion. Quietly unsettling, the film suggests that we all, in a sense, live in tyranny of 4pm by allowing ourselves to be oppressed for propriety’s sake rather than risk being “rude” in the knowledge that to do so would be to risk releasing the monster inside us that “politeness” alone keeps at bay.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hidden Face (히든페이스, Kim Dae-woo, 2024)

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The obvious irony in the title of Kim Dae-woo’s erotic thriller Hidden Face (히든페이스), is that it refers both to the heroine, Su-yeon (Cho Yeo-jeong), who conceals herself within a secret bunker in her home to spy on her indifferent social climber boyfriend Sung-jin (Song Seung-heon), and to the sides of themselves that people choose not to reveal to others. As Su-yeon’s mother (Cha Mi-kyung) says, it’s what people see that matters, but the hidden corridors of Su-yeon’s home symbolise the ways in which she has imprisoned her true self or at least has locked a part of herself away from prying eyes while continuing to pry into the secret lives of others.

It’s in this forbidden space, apparently added to the house by the previous father’s owner who was a member of notorious Japanese Unit 731 during the war and feared exposure, that Su-yeon first kissed fellow student Mi-ju (Park Ji-hyun) with whom she’s been in a long-term, but apparently secret, relationship. While Mi-ju is patiently renovating the house she thinks they’ve bought together, Su-yeon has decided that she wants a “real life that people recognise”, which she evidently doesn’t believe a same-sex relationship can be. The forbidden space of “cold room” is then where she’s locked her queerness, and a manifestation of her fears of the consequences of exposure. The problem is that she doesn’t even like Sung-jin and the points of attraction he seems to hold for her are that he doesn’t like her either and is otherwise easy to manipulate because of the vast class difference between them. 

Part of the reason that Sung-jin keeps Su-yeon at arms’ length is that he resents the power that she holds over him. He resents both her and himself in knowing that he’s really only with her for material reasons, while simultaneously aware that his current success has nothing to do with his own talent and everything to do with Su-yeon’s privilege. Su-yeon’s mother congratulates him on working hard to build an image of himself, while otherwise needling him about his working-class background in which his mother ran a small restaurant and really knows nothing of this elite world of classical music, mansions, and honeymoons to resorts that charge some people’s annual wage for a single night’s stay. But the facade can’t really cover up Sung-jin’s insecurity and the fear that he couldn’t make it on his own though he so desperately wants to be a part of this world and to feel himself worthy of it. He feels emasculated and humiliated in assuming that other people can see that he’s just a puppet while Su-yeon, her mother, and their advisor discuss policy decisions he’s technically responsible for out in the open, he assumes to deliberately embarrass him and keep him under control. 

Yet the truth is that these kinds of hierarchal power structures of class and gender are less relevant when it comes to desire than otherwise might be assumed. Su-yeon refers to Mi-ju as her slave or underling and adopts a dominant role in the relationship yet eventually has the tables turned on her when Mi-ju decides to rebel. The power dynamic of desire is a push and pull between the desire and the desired mediated by the depth of yearning. It may seem to Su-yeon that she is in control, but equally Mi-ju derives power from her willing submission and can overturn the dynamic at any time she chooses upending Su-yeon’s delusion that Mi-ju is a mere plaything, or “tool”, she can take out and put away at will. 

Nevertheless, the question is whether anyone could be content with this shadow life or if Su-yeon, vain, psychopathic, and probably incapable of understanding other people’s feelings, is content to imprison herself within the hidden corridors of her home which come to stand in for the need to conform to the heteronormative, patriarchal, class-based social codes other people see as “real” and “normal”. Sung-jin is apparently all too willing, considering just leaving Su-yeon trapped behind their walls to continue enjoying this life of privilege with a little more freedom without considering that without Su-yeon he has no entitlement to it as her mother later suggests after becoming worried on realising that Su-yeon hasn’t used her credit in days which is extremely uncharacteristic behaviour.

Sung-jin would trade his pride as a man, his sense of self-worth, and even betray his moral code to appear wealthy and successful and deny his working-class origins. Su-yeon would also, it seems, rather be in a conventional marriage to a man for whom she feels only contempt and resents for not liking her, than live an authentic life as a lesbian and face her internalised homophobia along with that of the wider society. Thus she confines Mi-ju to a forbidden space of her mind in an attempt to have her cake and eat it too, while Mi-ju seemingly fulfils herself in wilfully becoming a prisoner of love, even if it may only be in Su-yeon’s fantasy. Perhaps they get what they wanted all along, affirming the primacy of privilege, but only at the cost of their authentic selves and trapped inside the prison of their own self-loathing.

Hidden Face is released Digitally in the US on September 16 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)