Tag: Park Sye-young

The Fin (지느러미, Park Sye-young, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra (다섯 번째 흉추, Park Sye-young, 2022) [Fantasia 2022]

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A strange fungus growing on an old mattress slowly takes human form while feeding on loneliness and misery in Park Sye-young’s melancholy experimental feature, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebrae (다섯 번째 흉추, daseos beonjjae hyungchu). The Fifth Thoracic Vertebrae is near enough the one closest to the heart, and the one the growing creature is prone to rip out of its unsuspecting victims as it travels towards its uncertain evolution. Yet there is a strange sort of wistfulness that accompanies the mattress’ journey as if a new world were being born, one birthed in pain and anguish but with a yearning for love and connection even in the depths of its loneliness. 

The mattress is to begin with one purchased by a young couple about to move in together but soon becomes a symbol of their doomed love. While the mattress leans against a pillar outside an apartment building, a rude removal man swears at the young woman on the phone apparently unable to gain access. The boyfriend was supposed to let them in, but as we discover he’s fallen asleep and the girl must now abandon her plans to carry the mattress up the stairs herself and position it around his sleeping body. The film had explained to us that we are still some days away from the creature’s birth but we can soon see spores collecting on the mattress as a symbol of the relationship’s demise. When the couple finally break up, the boyfriend notices the mould but simply flips the mattress over as if that will solve all of his problems. 

Slowly but surely, the mattress travels all around the contemporary society in which many are it seems remarkably unfussy about the condition of a mattress they do not intend to sleep on themselves. It first ends up in a love hotel where it witness another breakup, resentment between the lovers soon giving way to sorrow and finally neediness as they consent to part. Now grown enough in strength the mattress creature rips out their vertebrae though it’s unclear whether it does so to relive them of their pain or merely to consume it. 

Abandoned again by the irritated landlord cross with his customers for being too stuck up for a mattress which he thinks is perfectly fine if you just flip it over and forget about the admittedly “disgusting” growths on the underside, the creature finds a new home with a terminally ill woman who seems to have some kind of rare disease which requires her isolation though seemingly because of some kind of stigma rather than for any medical cause. It’s distressing to think that anyone would give such a soiled, unsanitary thing to a dangerously ill woman though she seems to have become aware of the creature and views it almost as a friend reaching out in her own loneliness and charging it with a letter for her daughter she fears the nurses will otherwise burn with her body. It seems they do not burn the mattress, but seek to get rid of it while recommending it be purified through exorcism but of course the removal people are far too cheap for that. 

In any case, the mattress creature soon finds an affinity with the van driver who is celebrating his 37th birthday alone on the road with a sad slice of cake and a single candle while listening to teach yourself English tapes in search of meaningful connections. Perhaps it makes sense that along with sweat, dead skin, and other things we unknowingly shed, we leak sadness and pain into a space of comfort and safety feeding a creature of loneliness and desire with the physical remnants of our emotional selves. What survives of us is less love than its unanswered call, an undeliverable letter becoming a sort of holy text for a new form of life that may long survive us. Filmed with a dreamy poeticism and sudden shocks of eeriness in its ominous lighting and sci-fi score, Park’s oneiric drama nevertheless beats with a melancholy pulse of frustrated desire in which all connection is fleeting and love births only loneliness in a world in which a mattress knows us best of all. 

The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. 

Trailer (English subtitles)