Tag: Park Hyung-soo

Hi-Five (하이파이브, Kang Hyoung-chul, 2025)

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If you suddenly developed super powers, what would you do with them? Would you start using them for good to save the people around you, or would you become obsessed with the power itself and try to amass more of it while your using abilities only for your own ends? Those at the centre of Kang Hyoung-chul’s superhero comedy Hi-Five (하이파이브) are firmly in the helping others camp, but they’ve seen enough movies to know that every hero needs a villain and there’s someone else out there who wants their power for themselves.

That would be ageing cult leader Eternal Young-chun (Shin Goo), New God Resurrected. Young-chun is just ripping his followers off and doesn’t believe in anything he preaches but has, on the other hand, started to believe in his own divinity. He’s been keeping himself in good health through frequent organ donations from less fortunate people to the extent that his body’s a kind of Ship of Theseus. His daughter’s fed up with his longevity and hoping he’ll finally snuff it so she can take over, which is why she’s after the five in the hope of taking them out before Young-chun can steal all of their transplanted organs too. It turns out that the pancreas he was given was taken from a superhero who took his own life and has not only rejuvenated his body but given him the ability to suck the life force out of other people to empower himself in a more literal way than he’s already feeding off his followers by exploiting their devotion to convince them to give up all their money and assets or else work themselves to death for free.

The other five commonly transplanted organs were given other people who are all marked with a tattoo and have been given powers of their own, though one of them hasn’t figured out what hers is yet. In contrast to Young-chun’s soullessness, each of the five seems to have had their own problems that are only impacted by their transplants rather than directly caused by them. Teenager Wan-seo (Lee Jae-in) received the heart and is frustrated by her overprotective father who constantly asks about her friends though she keeps saying she doesn’t have any because she was ill for so long and had to skip school for treatment which is why struggling to make any new ones. He won’t let her do taekwondo either, though that’s what she most wants to do and possibly why she ended up with the all powerful, super speedy fighter skills. Ji-sung (Ahn Jae-hong), meanwhile, is a struggling screenwriter with an interest in the superhero genre. He doesn’t have any friends either, which may be to do with a poor career decision that alienated him from his community. Though he’s the first one to want to get the group together, he’s soon consumed by cynicism. Ji-sung got the lungs and can blow things away, but struggles to convey his emotions with words and gets into an alpha male hissy fit with Ki-dong (Yoo Ah-in), a super-sharp guy who got the corneas and can manipulate electricity but is actually a bit of a loser with gambling issues and similar interpersonal issues to Ji-sung.

Middle-aged yogurt lady Seon-nyeo (Ra Mi-ran) got the kidneys and can’t figure out what her superpower is but becomes the force who holds the group together. Even so, she’s battling mental health issues and some guilt about something that happened in her past and caused unintended harm to another person. Factory foreman Heel-han (Kim Hee-won) is a devotee of the cult, but frustrated and conflicted by the obvious disregard for workers’ safety and wellbeing. He got the liver, and can heal minor wounds caused by recent accidents. The reason he has no friends is that he cut off all of his relationships when he joined the cult, which is one other reason he doesn’t want to make a fuss about the abuse of workers and is originally flattered by Young-chun’s attention.

Nevertheless, it’s becoming part of the group that allows them to save each other and themselves figuratively and literally in combining their strengths to battle Young-chun, who is after all also sort of a part of them and a member of their family as another recipient of organs from the same person. Kang imbues their somewhat clumsy heroism with a quirky humour, even giving the occasional use of CGI a comedic, comic book aesthetic to lean into what might otherwise be a minor liability though production design and values are top-notch. It’s a shame the film was held up for four years by Yoo Ah-in’s drug arrest which has severely hampered his career and led to most of his unreleased work being shelved at the time, otherwise this might have gone on to become a fun movie franchise with deepening lore led by a likeable cast of everypeople using their powers for good in small but important ways. Still, just this episode alone is plenty of warmhearted fun as the gang come together to expose Young-chun’s vain and selfish cult leader for the conman he is, saving themselves and freeing those like them who fell victim to his lies.

Hi-Five screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Ballerina (발레리나, Lee Chung-hyun, 2023)

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“You’ve blown things way out of proportion,” according to a man who still doesn’t think he’s done anything to deserve dying for. But as his boss told him, though they may exploit women, sell drugs, and kill people, they have rules. Lee Chung-hyun’s pulpy action thriller Ballerina (발레리나) sees a former bodyguard go after the gangster who drugged and raped her friend with the consequence that she later took her own life.

In recent years there have been a series of real life scandals involving women being drugged in nightclubs and sexually assaulted with videos either uploaded to the internet or used as leverage for blackmail often to force women to participate in sex work. Ballerina Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), seemingly the only friend of bodyguard Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo), was raped by drug dealer Choi (Kim Ji-hoon) and thereafter quite literally robbed of the ability to dance. Preoccupied with her trauma, she missteps and injures herself ruining her dance career and leaving her with nothing. There is something quite poignant in the fact Choi sells the drugs in the small, fish-shaped bottles that usually house soy sauce in pre-packed sushi given that Min-hee later says that she wants to come back as a fish in her next life and live in the ultimate freedom of the sea. Dance to her seemed to be a means of finding a similar kind of free-floating freedom, but the trauma of Choi’s assault has taken that from her.

Meanwhile, the loss of Min-hee has robbed Ok-ju of something similar. On first re-connecting with her former high school friend, Ok-ju says she worked as some kind of corporate bodyguard but the organisation is clearly larger than that and involved with some additionally shady stuff that suggests her job may actually have involved some sort of spy and assassin work. In any case, it had left her feeling empty as if she were slowly dying inside. Only on meeting Min-hee does she finally start to feel alive again and has apparently left the organisation she was working for in order to live a more fulfilling life though she may not actually have achieved that just yet. There is nothing really to suggest there is anything more between the two women than friendship, though the intensity of Ok-ju’s feelings suggests there might have been.

Even so, there’s more to Ok-ju’s mission than simple revenge as she finds herself taking down the entire organisation in order to make her way towards Choi. She’s aided by another young woman dressed as a high school student (Shin Se-hwi) who looks to her for salvation, explaining that she has a plan, she’s just been waiting for someone like Ok-ju to show up and help her while the former handler Ok-ju turns to in search of support is also a woman making her mission one of female solidarity against ingrained societal misogyny. “You thought we were easy prey,” Ok-ju challenges Choi making it clear that he made a huge mistake though he continues to taunt her about Min-hee and deflect his responsibility insisting that he hasn’t done anything to warrant this kind of treatment because the abuse and trafficking of women is not something he regards as a big deal.

Ok-ju and the girl obviously feel differently. There’s something very satisfying about the way Ok-ju methodically cuts through a host of bad guys without granting them any kind of authority over her. The action sequences are often urgent and frenetic while showcasing Ok-ju’s skills and the lack of them in the male henchmen, but there’s also a fair bit of humour such as her using tins of pineapple to block knife attacks in the convenience store opener. The film indeed has its share of quirkiness such as the geriatric couple who arrive to supply Ok-ju with weapons but mainly have buckets full of revolvers that look like something out of the wild west before grabbing a flamethrower from the back, while the aesthetic also has a stylish retro feel with its purple and yellow colour palette. Pulpy in the extreme, the film’s stripped-back quality provides little background information and keeps dialogue to a minimum but more than makes up for it in its visual language and often beautiful cinematography.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Call (콜, Lee Chung-hyun, 2020)

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The call is coming from inside the house. It’s a final revelation intended to chill, the idea that the source of threat is located in the very place where you ought to feel safe, protected, invulnerable. Of course, there are many reasons someone might not feel completely safe at home, those who perhaps live with hidden threat every day, a hidden darkness that lies at the centre of twisty Korean thriller The Call (콜). Another in a small series of time travelling communication, The Call makes connection through outdated technology, an almost literal ghosting in a voice from the past that, like an inverted Strangers on a Train, offers the tantalising promise of mutual salvation only to prove extremely unreliable. 

28-year-old Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) has just returned to her rundown country home because her mother, whom she intensely resents blaming her for the death of her father in a fire, is suffering with a brain tumour. Though her strawberry farmer uncle Sung-ho (Oh Jung-se) describes the place as the most desirable property in town, the home in which Seo-yeon finds herself is cold and austere, a creepy old mansion decorated in an outdated style and filled with gothic furniture. To make matters worse, Seo-yeon has left her phone on the train but unexpectedly assures Sung-ho that she’ll be fine with the landline, later calling herself and getting through to a woman who claims to have found it but asks for a reward and then hangs up presumably to assess her options. Then, the landline starts ringing with calls from a young woman trying to reach a friend and claiming that her mother is planning to set fire to her. Though obviously disturbing, Seo-yeon assumes the calls are a simple wrong number until she discovers a hidden room with what looks to be some sort of tiled experimentation area along with a box of memorabilia which lead her to think the phone is somehow connecting her to the girl who lived in her room at the turn of the millennium. 

Also 28 only born 20 years earlier, Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo) claims to be at the mercy of a wicked shamaness step-mother convinced that she has a dark destiny. The two women engage in a strange act of intergenerational bonding between two people who are the same age, Seo-yeon mystified by the meaning of the word “Walkman” while Seo-yeon struggles with the concept of the multifunctional smartphone. The force which unites them is parental dissatisfaction as Seo-yeon claims a hatred for her mother she does not perhaps really feel and cannot in any case compare with that of Young-sook for the religiously abusive stepmother who fully believes she is possessed by the devil. In in this the time difference proves useful, Seo-yeon realising that Young-sook has the power to prevent her father’s death, but only latterly that she also even from the future has the ability to change her new friend’s fate. 

Essentilally a Strangers on a Train scenario, the two women agree to save each other, Young-sook dutifully restoring Seo-yeon’s imagined fairytale future, the creepy mansion transformed into an elegant modern dwelling, her mother and father now both healthy and happy. Seo-yeon, however, begins to neglect her promise, too busy enjoying her repaired family life to remember that Young-sook is imprisoned in the house suffering horrifying abuse. Young-sook is, in a sense, the embodiment of Seo-yeon’s familial trauma, the violent resurfacing of a long buried memory that threatens to tear to her life apart but also has the ability to repair it in revealing the truth that allows her to reconnect with her mother who, we learn, has repeatedly sacrificed herself for her daughter’s sake. Nevertheless, you begin to wonder if the shamaness had a point and the lid was best left on Young-sook as her hurt and resentment in being neglected by her new friend eventually take a turn for the dark. 

In essence, Seo-yeon’s decision to interfere with the past engineers a chain of disastrous events robbing her of her illusionary happiness while eventually landing her right back where she started if perhaps with a little more insight and having healed her relationship with her mother. Part tale of millennial anxiety, part gothic nightmare, The Call may not always be internally consistent but charts a dark tale of trauma and response as a haunted young woman finds herself stalked by the psychopathic embodiment of her buried guilt only to discover that a call from the past is always hard to ignore. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Kingmaker (킹메이커, Byun Sung-hyun, 2022)

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It’s the political paradox. You can’t do anything without getting elected but to get elected you might have to abandon whatever it was you wanted to do in the first place. Loosely based on the real life figures of Kim Dae-jung and his political strategist Eom Chang-rok, the heroes of Byun Sung-hyun’s Kingmaker (킹메이커) are obsessed with the question of whether the ends justify the means and if it’s possible to maintain integrity in politics when the game itself is crooked while the film suggests that in the end you will have to live with your choices and your compromises either way and if it’s a better world you want to build perhaps you can’t get there by cheating your way to paradise.

The son of a North Korean migrant, Seo Chang-dae (Lee Sun-kyun) is an embittered and frustrated pharmacist with a talent for spin. When his friend complains about a neighbour stealing his eggs from his chicken coop and denying all knowledge because he’s well connected and knows he can get away with it, Chang-dae’s advice is to plant one of his own chickens in the other guy’s coop and catch him red handed. Impressed by the impassioned political speechmaking of labour activist Kim Woon-bum (Sol Kyung-gu), he writes him a letter offering his services and then marches down to his office to convince him that he is the guy to break his losing streak and finally get him elected so they can “change the damned world”. 

The problem is that all of Chang-dae’s ideas are like the chicken scam, built on the manipulation of the truth, but you can’t deny that they work. He plays the other side, the increasingly authoritarian regime of Park Chung-hee, at their own game, getting some of their guys to dress up as the opposing party and then set about offending a bunch of farmers by being generally condescending and entitled. They stage fights and perform thuggish violence to leave the impression that Park’s guys are oppressive fascists while asking for the “gifts” the Park regime had given out to curry favour back to further infuriate potential voters. Later some of their own guys turn up with the same gifts to send the message that they’re making up for all Park’s mistakes. At one point, Chang-dae even suggests staging an attack on Woon-bum’s person to gain voter sympathy, an idea which is met with total disdain by Woon-bum and his team many of whom are at least conflicted with Chang-dae’s underhanded tactics. 

But then as he points out, if they want to create a better, freer Korea in which people can speak their minds without fear then they have to get elected first. It may be naive to assume that you can behave like this and then give it all up when finally in office, but Chang-dae at least is committed to the idea that the ends justify the means. Woon-bum meanwhile is worried that Chang-dae has lost sight of what the ends are and is solely focussed on winning at any cost. He has an opposing number in slimy intelligence agent Lee (Jo Woo-Jin) who serves Park in much the same way Chang-dae serves Woon-bum, but Chang-dae fatally misunderstands him, failing to appreciate that for Lee Park’s “revolution” is also a just cause for which he is fighting just as Chang-dae is fighting for freedom and democracy. In an uncomfortable touch, Lee seems to be coded as gay with his slightly effeminate manner and tendency towards intimate physical contact adding an additional layer to his gradual seduction of Chang-dae whose friendship with Woon-bum also has its homoerotoic qualities in its quiet intensity. 

The final dilemma lies in asking whether or not Woon-bum could have won the pivotal election of 1971, preventing Park from further altering the constitution to cement his dictatorship and eventually declaring himself president for life, if he had not parted ways with Chang-dae and tried to win more “honestly”. If so, would they have set Korea on a path towards the better world they envisaged or would they have proved little different, their integrity already compromised by everything they did to get there poisoning their vision for the future? The fact that history repeats itself, Woon-bum and his former rival Young-ho (Yoo Jae-myung) splitting the vote during the first “democratic” presidential election and allowing Chun Doo-hwan’s chosen successor to win, perhaps suggests the latter. In any case, it’s Chang-dae who has to live with his choices in having betrayed himself, as Woon-bum had feared too obsessed with winning to remember why he was playing in the first place. “All my ideas about justice were brought down by my own hand” he’s forced to admit, left only with self-loathing defeat in his supposed victory. Some things don’t change, there is intrigue in the court, but “putting ambition before integrity will get you nowhere” as Chang-dae learns to his cost. 

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

International trailer (English subtitles)