Tag: London Korean Film Festival 2025

Red Nails (홍이, Hwang Seul-gi, 2024)

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A not quite middle-aged woman watches as her mother takes an aerobics class with other similarly aged people at a nursing home. The attendant turns to her and remarks that it can’t have been an easy decision, leading us to think that she has reluctantly decided her mother may be better off living where she can be properly looked after. But Hong (Jang Sun) has actually arrived to take her mother home. Not because she’s had a change of heart, and not exactly because she’s having a hard time and can’t afford to pay for the home any more, but because she’s realised her estranged mother’s a cash cow and the only one she has left to tap.

Hwang Seul-gi’s complex drama Red Nails (홍이, Hong-i) never shies away from its heroine’s flaws even if it tries its best to empathise with her. Hong is clearly irresponsible with money. The piled up boxes in her living room hint that she may have fallen victim to a multi-level marketing scam, but whatever the root causes are, she’s pretty much bankrupt with the bailiffs about to be sent in to seize her goods due to her phenomenally large debts. Even so, we later see her going on shopping sprees as if she were trying to fill some sort of void through guilty consumerism that is really just punishing herself by making her situation even worse. 

Hong’s borrowed money from an ex-boyfriend who has since married someone else but continues to sleep with her while badgering Hong for his money back, claiming his wife’ll throw a fit if he doesn’t get it. Meanwhile, she’s engaged in a fantasy romance with a man from an app, Jin-woo, whom she misleads about her financial circumstances and later uses when she needs a free ride. Hong has a habit of taking advantage of people, including her mother’s old friend Hae-joo who agrees to watch her in the day. Hong often messes her around, staying out late without calling and just expecting Hae-joo is figure something out. Hae-joo eventually confronts her about her unreasonable behaviour while taking advantage of her free labour, but Hong tries to give her money as if that was the problem. Hae-joo is insulted, and bringing money into the equation only threatens to change the nature of the relationship. It makes Hae-joo feel cheap and used when she had been doing this as a friend because she cared about Seo-hee. 

Seo-hee, meanwhile, seems ambivalent about her new living standards and, at times, berates Hong complaining that she wishes she’d never been born. It’s not clear what happened in Hong’s childhood, but they evidently did not get on and still don’t now. Seo-hee wants to go home, complaining that there’s a thief in the house though whether or not she knows that Hong has been dipping into her savings to pay off her debts, she’s still aware that she brought home because she needed money rather than companionship. 

But then Hong is also lonely, and her romance with Jin-woo is an attempt to escape her disappointing circumstances. Her ex suggests she once dreamed of becoming a teacher, but is currently teaching a literacy class for a group of older woman at a local institute where she also cleans the toilets. She also has a second job directing traffic at a construction site where the foreman hates her, docking her pay for neglecting her duties by using her phone while on the job. She cannot her escape her debts through any legitimate means, though that hardly justifies stealing from her mother. 

Even so, it appears that on some level Hong wanted comfort and companionship along with her mother’s approval. As they live together, they begin to draw closer but at the same time it’s clear that they remember things differently, though whether Hong is right to blame Seo-hee’s dementia or has misremembered herself is destined to be an eternal mystery. Hong tries to fulfil her mother’s dream of lighting sparklers, but the pair are yelled by some kind of environmental officer and forced to put them out. Hong looks on forlornly as the glow fades away as if symbolising the flame going out of the relationship between the two women. Despite their growing closeness, there are some things that it seems can never really be made up and all Hong really has is a frustrated memory of a longed-for closeness that can never really be.

Red Nails screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hero (영웅, JK Youn, 2022)

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An Jung-geun is a key figure in modern Korean history whose story has been dramatised numerous times and given rise to its own legend. JK Youn’s Hero (영웅, Yeong-ung) is, however, the first movie musical devoted to his life and adapted from a stage hit that has been running since 2009. It has to be said that structurally the musical owes a fair amount to Les Misérables with a dramatic first act closer that is more than a little reminiscent of One Day More, while a number about meat buns echoes the kind of comic relief provided by Master of the House, though the rhythm might hint at Sweeney Todd’s meditation on pie making.

It is certainly out of keeping with the intensity surrounding it as the focus is, after all, on an attempt to stop the Japanese colonising Korea and practising even more cruelty. An Jung-geun abandons his family in the early part of the film, but this isn’t seen as a moral failing or irresponsibility so much as evidence of his devotion to the cause that he sacrifices a peaceful life as a husband and father. His revolutionary activity is furthermore filial because his mother encourages it, later writing him a letter while he is imprisoned urging him not to appeal his sentence but accept his death as a martyr. To appeal would mean accepting the Japanese’s authority in begging for his life. Jung-geun had wanted to be tried not as a murderer, but as a soldier fighting a war and therefore sees his trial as illegitimate. He insists he is a political prisoner, a rousing number outlines 15 reasons why the man he assassinated, Ito Hirobumi Japan’s first prime minister and resident-general of Korea, deserved to die which include dethroning the Emperor Gojong, assassinating the Korean Empress Myeongseong (Lee Il-hwa), lying to the world that Korea wanted Japanese protection, plunder, and massacring Koreans (all of which the Japanese had done). 

It’s the assassination of Empress Myeongseong that motivates the film’s secondary heroine, Seol-hee (Kim Go-eun), a former palace made now operating as a resistance spy in Japan under the name Yukiko. Seol-hee’s impassioned songs have curiously homoerotic quality and take the place of a central romance which the piece otherwise lacks except in the tentative relationship between Jin-joo, sister of one of An’s closest men, and the youthful recruit Dong-ha. Even if “Myeongseong” is effectively “Korea”, Seol-hee’s passionate intensity is quite surprising while her motivation is more revenge for her murdered mistress than it is saving the nation and eliminating Japanese influence. In this, her arc might not quite make sense in that her final actions almost derail Jeun-guen’s mission in putting the Japanese on high alert. 

But at the same time the film leans in far harder on Jeun-geun’s religiosity than other tellings on his story in which his faith presents only a minor conflict as evidenced by his offering an apology to God for killing Ito while justifying his actions as those of a righteous man in the courtroom. While placing him at odds with the left-wing ideology of other Independence activists, his religiosity is aligned with his humanitarian decision to release Japanese prisoners rather than execute them, abiding by the commonly held rules of war while his men are eager for blood. The decision backfires, but is depicted more favourably than in the narratively more complex Harbin and Jung-geun is otherwise an uncomplicated hero who makes no wrong decisions and never fails even if he is at the mercy of the Japanese.

As such, the musical sticks to the familiar beats of Jung-geun’s story from the Japanese counterstrike to his talent for calligraphy and the letter from his mother instructing him to go bravely to his death. Anchored by an incredibly strong vocal performance from Chung Sung-hwa who originated the role on stage, the film portrays Jeun-geung as the hero of the title, defiant to the end and thereafter wronged by the Japanese who buried his body in an unknown location and prevented him from ever returning home to a free Korea. It also glosses over the possibility that Ito’s assassination may actually have accelerated the course of Japan’s annexation which it failed to prevent and otherwise had little lasting effect. Nevertheless, despite its overt patriotism, the film does present the rousing spectacle of Jung-geun’s embodiment of the good son of the nation who fought hard for a liberated Korea he never got to see.

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

SAVE (생명의 은인, Bang Mi-ri, 2025)

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There’s an old adage that if you save someone’s life, you become responsible for it, but equally perhaps some have come to expect reciprocity and the act of being saved places you into a debt you can never hope to repay. There are definitely different kinds of salvation on offer in Bang Mi-ri’s empathetic maternal drama Save (생명의 은인, Saengmyeong-ui eunin), but each of them comes with a cost both literal and spiritual in trying to draw lines in the complex interplay of guilt and gratitude.

As the film opens, Se-jeong (Kim Pureum) is being interviewed for a television programme about young people leaving care. The interview is being film at the hair salon where she has been working for the last few months in the run-up to graduating high school to prepare for “self-reliance”, but it’s obvious that one of her colleagues resents the intrusion and does not want to appear on camera with her. The young woman later rolls her eyes, claiming that she understands her circumstances but that’s she’s causing too much inconvenience, while her boss is unsympathetic when she’s distracted by the difficulties she’s facing and burns herself on a pair of curling tongs that she subsequently drops to the floor. 

Se-jeong’s friend from the children’s home gives up on studying at a university in Seoul because of the cost and goes to one locally instead, using the settlement money they’re given on leaving to buy designer clothes and telling her new classmates that she’s from a wealthy family to avoid the stigma of having no parents. Se-jeong has no such recourse, but it’s obvious that she’s bright and conscientious. She often has a notebook with her to jot down advice and instructions and is very thorough when searching for an apartment that’s within her means but ticks all of her boxes. Nevertheless, she is naive and has no one to help her, so it’s no wonder that she gets scammed out of her money by accepting an offer that’s too good to be true and falling for a landlord’s false reassurances that it’s fine to rent privately rather than through an estate agent because scammers only go for high value apartments. All of that does, however, leave Se-jeong even more isolated with no money or place to stay forcing her to rely on a woman who approaches her claiming to be the person who saved her from a fire at a home for single mothers in which her birth mother died.

Se-jeong wants to believe her, even if her friend advises her not to. Eun-sook (Song Sun-mi) too is after her settlement money, she claims for an operation to treat her lung cancer. “Can’t you save me this time?” She manipulatively asks, as if she meant for this debt to be repaid in kind. But Se-jeong has to wonder if she’s really telling the truth or is also trying to con her. Isn’t it a little too convenient how her “saviour” resurfaced in her life at just this moment?  Eun-sook can also be quite scary and knows a suspicious amount about how to manipulate social media and root out someone who values their reputation in the eyes of others and is on some level ashamed of making their money by deceiving people. In any case, Eun-sook offers the source of maternal warmth that Se-jeong has been craving while dropping hints about her birth mother and early life that further add to her credibility.

But on one level at least, Eun-sook doesn’t really want “saving” and isn’t looking for the same kind of salvation as Se-jeong who is looking for a new home while otherwise presented only with “self-reliance” and no other way to anchor herself in a society which is hostile to people like her and offers very little in the way of support. When she graduates high school, Se-jeong and her friend look on as the other girls take photos of their families with no one there to celebrate with them, except for Eun-sook who unexpectedly arrives to fill this vacant space. What she may be trying to do is save herself spiritually in saving Se-jeong, repaying an old debt and giving her the roots she needs to establish herself in adulthood. Her constant coughing is a symbolic reflection of her trauma from the fire that suggests she never really escaped it. Yet what she tells Se-jeong is that there’s no need for her to feel guilty. Her survival, just like their meeting, is just something that happened like fate or destiny, and she has a right to live her life to its fullest. Poignant in its implications of maternal sacrifice and intergenerational healing, Bang’s moving drama is infinitely forgiving of its flawed antagonist and suggests that, in the end, salvation is found only in saving others. 

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

Silver Apricot (은빛살구, Jang Man-min, 2024)

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Money ruins everything. It eats away at even the most fundamental of human connections, rendering them all, in their way, transactional. But you need it, in the same way a vampire needs blood and it might be that the only way to get it is to suck it out of someone else’s neck. Or at least, that’s how it is for Jung-seo (Na Ae-jin) in Jang Man-min’s familial drama Silver Apricot (은빛살구, Eunbitsalgu). 

At 32 years old, she’s still being held on a temporary worker contract with her sleazy boss, who is low-key sexually harassing her, using the prospect of full, salaried employment to manipulate her working life. She works “overtime” making posters to advertise other exploitative jobs, such as gig economy delivery driver, with the cheerful slogan “anyone can do it” which she later acknowledges is probably “insulting” to those who do actually do it and are fighting for proper pay and recognition. Secretly, however, she’s working on a webtoon about a vampire, which is how she works out her anxieties and what she actually wants to do and would be doing if money wasn’t getting in the way.

The particular way it’s getting in the way right now is that she’s won an apartment lottery and urgently needs to get the money together for a deposit. Jung-seo plans on going halves with her fiancée Gyeong-hyeon (Kang Bong-sung), but he seems reluctant to put the money in and is clear he won’t make up the shortfall when she’s turned down for the permanent position and won’t be earning as much as she hoped. All that’s left to her is the bank of mum, but her mother’s fed up with her always asking for money and claims she’s saving too with the hope of opening her own restaurant despite the fact that Jung-seo suspects the owner of the place she works at now is romantically interested in her. Perhaps like Jung-seo, she’s lost the ability to trust anyone after having a bad experience with Jung-seo’s father who left them for another woman and still lives in their home town with a new family. 

Jeung-seo’s father Young-joo may also have had artistic dreams in that he was once a saxophonist but gave his sax to her mother as security for a loan he never repaid. Her mother suggests she ask him for the money back instead, but that means opening old wounds that may be better left unresolved. Young-joo (Ahn Suk-hwan) is like a vampire himself, draining those around him of their cash to fund one harebrained scheme or another from stock market speculation to spurious property investments that he swears will pay off but almost never do. Gyeong-hyeon may not be much better in this regard, himself dabbling in stocks despite Jeung-seo making him promise he wouldn’t in a way that makes it hard for her trust him and suggests that men are always hung up on potential future gains rather than what they have concretely right now. 

Predictably, Young-joo doesn’t really want to pay up and insists on meeting Gyeong-hyeon first in and old-fashioned bit of patriarchal nonsense which makes even less sense considering how little of a father he has been to her for all these years. Gyeong-hyeong, meanwhile, is instantly taken in by him and has all but fallen for one of his scams. Maybe it makes sense on paper to abandon the city and live in an area with a lower cost of living doing a less prestigious kind of job like running a cafe which would lessen your financial burden and allow more “free” time to practise your art even if would still be a side hustle, but Jeung-seo knows better than to believe her father’s lies and knows full well that he’s only changed his tune because he overheard how much profit they could make with the apartment and thinks he’s entitled to some of it if he gives them the money.

But it’s not even like Jung-seo is asking for money from him. She’s only asking for money that actually belongs to her mother. Money ruined their relationship too, and it even interferes in her connection with her younger half-sister Jung-hae (Kim Jin-young) who idolises her but also frames her for stealing her mother’s savings after asking her to secretly sign a lease on an apartment she could use for her own art, music, and as a safety net in case her mother really decides to leave Young-joo this time when his plan to redevelop a building in a nearby town inevitably goes belly up. Joo-hee (Choi Jung-hyun) may have this in the back of her mind herself, which explains her coolness toward Jung-seo, fearing her sudden need for the repaying of old debts will destabilise their family and mess things up for Jung-hae. 

Despite the familial tension, being back in her hometown where Gyeong-hyeong’s spineless pragmatism is all the more obvious forces Jung-seo to think about what the apartment actually represents and whether that’s what she wants. Once she signs, she’ll be locked into that very conventional life which is what everyone in Seoul strives for, but might not actually be right for her. Her friend in her hometown, Tae-joo, has joined the navy for the financial security and will be able to get a military apartment when he marries. He’s given up drawing webtoons, and possibly also on his romantic hopes for Jung-seo. When she makes overtures towards him, he replies that he’s not ready to give up on his civil servant girlfriend, suggesting that he isn’t brave enough to break out of this conventionality either. Jung-seo is essentially in a relationship of convenience with Gyeong-hyeon that is not based on love but solely on the ability to buy the apartment which is what he really wants from her. The question is whether she has the courage to get off this train or is willing to settle for a life of dull humiliation submitting herself to the whims of her bosses while gradually abandoning her hopes and dreams to live in an apartment that is itself not a home but an investment in a future that will never really be hers.

Silver Apricot screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)