The real and the unreal. In the era of fake news, it’s become ever harder to draw a clear line between the two but when you live online, the borders are even more permeable. Twelve years after the wartime comedy Welcome to Dongmakgol, director Park Kwang-hyun finally makes a return to the director’s chair with an action packed cyberpunk thriller which joins the ranks of recent Korean films bemoaning the country’s hardwired tendency to social inequality where the rich and powerful are free to run roughshod over the merely ordinary. Fabricated City (조작된 도시, Jojakdwen Doshi) refers to more than just the literally manufactured online world, but to the social reality in which unseen forces govern and define the lives of others, operating in secret behind a government backed curtain.
Kwon Yoo (Ji Chang-wook) was once a national athlete – a rising star of the Korean Taekwondo team. Starting fights when he wasn’t supposed to put paid to that dream and now Kwon Yoo is an aimless wastrel. Too sad and ashamed to have anything more to do with Taekwondo, Kwon Yoo spends all his time in gaming cafes, living a more successful life online. In his favourite game he’s known as the Captain, and the dashingly heroic leader of his party known as Resurrection.
One evening someone leaves their phone behind. It rings and Kwon Yoo answers it. Irritated, he’s about to hang up on the frantic sounding woman who wants him to bring the phone to her but her offer of money changes his mind. Kwon Yoo delivers the phone but the whole thing seems weird especially as the door was open and the woman in the shower when he arrived. Next thing he knows, Kwon Yoo is arrested for a brutal rape and murder. The police have a lot of evidence against him, and so Kwon Yoo winds up in jail where he’s branded a sex offender. Luckily a crazed serial killer realises this kid is no killer and helps him get out whereupon his loyal Resurrectionists valiantly come to the aid of their Captain in the real world, exposing the impressive fit up job that got him put away in the first place.
The deeper Kwon Yoo and his team dive the more corruption they discover. Kwon Yoo is not the only innocent sacrificed for someone else’s grand plan, there are others and the pattern is disturbing. Like Kwon Yoo, the other victims are usually people living on the margins – ones that no one would miss or the uncharitable might say were “unnecessary”, lives that can be exchanged for those of the rich and famous finding themselves in a fix. Kwon Yoo’s fate becomes an extreme version of that meted out to the young men and women of Korea unlucky enough to have been born without wealth, connections, or familial status – expendable and condemned to live without hope.
The fabricated city, in its more literal sense is the online world Kwon Yoo and his team have chosen and in part created for themselves in an attempt to escape the aspects of their lives and personalities which most disappoint them. Kwon Yoo, kicked off the Taekwondo team, has made a warrior hero of himself online, backed by a similarly escapist squad he doesn’t really know. His saviour turns out to be a shy computer genius who can only bear to talk via telephone even when in the same room yet has broken out of her self imposed isolation in order to save the life of her online friend. Other members of the team follow suit bearing similar backstories, attempting to live up to their fantasy selves for real with varying levels of success. Yet the fantasy world was all they had, locked out of all means of escape or advancement by the rigid social codes which make their present predicament possible, even if the fact remains that Kwon Yoo was doing a pretty good job of wasting his life all on his own.
Fabricated City’s biggest selling point is in its unusually well developed production design which takes its cues from the video game world with fantastical images from a prison carved into a mountain to the relatively more familiar cyberpunk influenced technological hybridity as floors become giant computer screens and everything really does exist online. Jumping genres from the classic wrong man to prison drama and eventually techno thriller, Fabricated City bites off more than it can chew but its well choreographed action and typically Korean sense of subtly ironic humour help to smooth over some of the film’s more outlandish moments.
Fabricated City was screened at the 19th Udine Far East Film Festival.
International trailer (English subtitles)
If you think you might have moved in above a modern-day Sweeney Todd, what should you do? Lee Soo-youn’s follow-up to 2003’s The Uninvited, Bluebeard (해빙, Haebing), provides a few easy lessons in the wrong way to cope with such an extreme situation as its increasingly confused and incriminated hero becomes convinced that his butcher landlord’s senile father is responsible for a still unsolved spate of serial killings. Rather than move, go to the police, or pretend not to have noticed, self-absorbed doctor Seung-hoon (Cho Jin-woong) drives himself half mad with fear and worry, certain that the strange father and son duo from downstairs have begun to suspect that he suspects.
Corruption has become a major theme in Korean cinema. Perhaps understandably given current events, but you’ll have to look hard to find anyone occupying a high level corporate, political, or judicial position who can be counted worthy of public trust in any Korean film from the democratic era. Cho Ui-seok’s Master (마스터) goes further than most in building its case higher and harder as its sleazy, heartless, conman of an antagonist casts himself onto the world stage as some kind of international megastar promising riches to the poor all the while planning to deprive them of what little they have. The forces which oppose him, cerebral cops from the financial fraud devision, may be committed to exposing his criminality but they aren’t above playing his game to do it.
South Korean cinema has a fairly ambivalent attitude to its policemen. Most often, detectives are a bumbling bunch who couldn’t find the killer even if he danced around in front of them shouting “it was me!” whereas street cops are incompetent, lazy, and cowardly. That’s aside from their tendency towards violence and corruption but rarely has there been a policeman who gets himself into trouble solely for being too nice and too focussed on his family. Confidential Assignment (공조, Gongjo), though very much a mainstream action/buddy cop movie, is somewhat unusual in this respect as it pairs a goofy if skilled and well-meaning South Korean police officer, with an outwardly impassive yet inwardly raging North Korean special forces operative.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, as the old saying goes, but for four down at heels street kids even their meagre attempts to evade a desperate situation land them in even more trouble than they’ve ever been in before. The debut feature from director Lee Sung-tae, Derailed (두 남자, Doo Namja) is bleak and gritty though underpinned by an ironic sense of love and connection which is itself often “derailed” or subverted as genuine feeling becomes a tool to be exploited in the ongoing war between those fighting amongst themselves to get a hand on the bottom rung of the ladder.
Since ancient times drama has had a preoccupation with motherhood and a need to point fingers at those who aren’t measuring up to social expectation. E Oni’s Missing plays out like a Caucasian Chalk Circle for our times as a privileged woman finds herself in difficult circumstances only to have her precious daughter swept away from her just as it looked as if she would be lost through a series of social disadvantages. Missing is partly a story of motherhood, but also of women and the various ways they find themselves consistently misused, disbelieved, and betrayed. The two women at the centre of the storm, desperate mother Ji-sun (Uhm Ji-won) and her mysterious Chinese nanny Han-mae (Gong Hyo-jin) are both in their own ways tragic figures caught in one frantic moment as a choice is made on each of their behalves which will have terrible, unforeseen and irreversible consequences.
The Korea of the mid-1980s was a society in flux though you might not know it looking at the sleepy small town about to be rocked by the country’s very first publicised spate of serial killings. Between 1986 and 1991, at least ten women ranging in age from schoolgirls to grandmothers were murdered while the killer seemingly got away with his crimes, either dying, fleeing or perhaps getting arrested on other charges explaining the abrupt end to his crime spree. Bong Joon-ho’s fictionalised take on the case, Memories of Murder (살인의 추억, Salinui Chueok), is not so much interested in the killer’s identity, but wants to ask a few hard questions about why the crimes took place and why they were never solved.
Review of Zhang Lu’s A Quiet Dream (춘몽, Chun-mong) first published by 
It’s a sorry enough tale to hear that many silent classics no longer exist, regarded only as disposable entertainment and only latterly collected into archives and preserved as valuable film history, but in the case of South Korea even mid and late 20th century films are unavailable thanks to the country’s turbulent political history. Though often listed among the greats of 1960s Korean cinema, Sorrow Even Up in Heaven (저 하늘에도 슬픔이, Jeo Haneuledo Seulpeumi) was presumed lost until a Mandarin subtitled print was discovered in an archive in Taiwan. Now given a full restoration by the Korean Film Archive, Kim’s tale of societal indifference to childhood poverty has finally been returned to its rightful place in cinema history but, as Kim’s own attempt to remake the film 20 years later bears out, how much has really changed?
