2018

   The year 2018 was not a good year for blockbusters. With only a couple exceptions -- particularly Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days, the sequel to the hugely successful Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds from the end of 2017 -- the films with the biggest budgets and most lavish marketing campaigns were forcefully rejected by audiences. Some of the most painful examples include Kim Jee-woon's dystopian Illang: The Wolf Brigade, Kang Hyeong-cheol's musical Swing Kids set in a POW camp, Kim Byung-woo's military thriller Take Point, Choo Chang-min's murder mystery Seven Years of Night, Yeon Sang-ho's Psychokinesis, Woo Min-ho's The Drug King, and Lee Jeong-beom's corrupt cop drama Jo Pil-ho: The Burning Rage. Every one of these were from directors who had enjoyed at least one major hit in the past.

The Korean film from 2018 that may be remembered the longest was also a commercial disappointment, but Lee Chang-dong's Burning received such a rapturous reception during its Cannes premiere and later international release that it no doubt ranks as the film of the year. A loose adaptation of a short story by Murakami Haruki, the film was by most measures a triumph.

In a commercial sense, the success stories from 2018 were the mid-budgeted films that enjoyed positive word of mouth among the audience. Some of the best-received films include Intimate Strangers, Believer (both remakes, incidentally), The Spy Gone North, Default, coming of age story On Your Wedding Day and the rural drama Little Forest. Independent cinema enjoyed a strong year as well, with numerous standouts including Microhabitat, Last Child and After My Death.

     Reviewed below:     Psychokinesis (Jan 13)  -  Little Forest (Feb 28)  -  The Vanished (Mar 7)  -  Be With You (Mar 14)  -  Microhabitat (Mar 22)  -  Seven Years of Night (Mar 28)  -  Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (Mar 28)  -  True Fiction (Apr 25)  -  Believer (May 22)  -  Illang: The Wolf Brigade (Jul 25)  -  The Spy Gone North (Aug 8)  -  Last Child (Aug 30)  -  Monstrum (Sep 12)  -  The Great Battle (Sep 19)  -  Intimate Strangers (Oct 31)  -  Unstoppable (Nov 22)  -  Default (Nov 28)  -  Door Lock (Dec 5)  -  Swing Kids (Dec 19).

    Psychokinesis

Seok-heon (Ryu Seung-ryong, Seven Years of Night) works as a security officer at a small bank branch office. Not exactly the most reliable person in the neighborhood, he one day drinks stream water at a mountain park, and imbibes the fluorescent-blue substance that had just landed in a meteor from outer space. Pronto, Seok-heon becomes imbued with psychokinetic powers, able to first lift a lighter and a box of matches without touching them, then to fly through the air and crush an automobile like a gigantic vise. Crass and inconsiderate, he instantly hatches a scheme to haul bucket-loads of dough as Korea's new David Copperfield, until he learns that his divorced wife died in a suspicious circumstance. She suffered a fractured skull fighting off corporate-employed thugs trying to evict his daughter Rumi's (Shim Eun-gyeong, Miss Granny) successful fried chicken restaurant from a building purchased for redevelopment. Seok-heon reluctantly becomes a human weapon against the company thugs to help his straight-laced daughter, but neither the law nor the media is willing to buy his story that he is some kind of a homespun superhero.

Yeon Sang-ho, after dominating the 2016 summer box office with the zombie blockbusters Train to Busan and Seoul Station, has returned to a SF fantasy subject matter. He also switched the tone to emphasize comedy and slapstick, even though a certain level of anti-social impulse from his previous films is retained. The motion picture, distributed outside of Korea by Netflix, was panned by critics and internet wags but managed to collect approximately 980 thousand tickets, a middling score for a domestic genre film.

Taking into account the fact that South Korean film industry is not particularly adept at any kind of science fiction-inflected narrative, Psychokinesis is not badly made. Of course, those expecting something on the order of Spider-man: Homecoming or Thor: Ragnarok should scale down their expectations. Yeon is not particularly good with Hollywood-style CGI effects (the flying sequences are embarrassingly cut-rate), but there are scenes in which the physical effects combined with elaborate stunt action (supervised by Heo Myung-haeng and Jeong Jin-geun of the Seoul Action School) generate the desired emotional reaction from the viewers. Ryu Seung-ryong has been accused of being too goofy in his scenes of exerting himself to dredge up his psychokinetic powers (he looks ready to poo in his pants), but I did not find them particularly annoying: those things in many ways come with the territory. And there are plenty of dumb stuff going on in multi-hundred-million-dollar Hollywood projects like Guardians of the Galaxy or Green Lantern, too. Think of it as a contemporary, faster-paced, East Asian take on The Greatest American Hero TV series (they share the scenes of the protagonist pawing the air trying to fly expertly like, you know, Superman) then you got the right groove.

Actually, the biggest problem I had with Psychokinesis was neither the movie's openly playful tone, Yeon's direction (which is reassuringly competent, if not always creative as in his better works) nor the level of technical expertise, but his insistence that this film should be yet another (groan¡¦) "redemption narrative" for a bum dad. For me, the movie would have worked many times better (and probably reached out to a larger share of domestic viewers) if Shim Eun-gyeong's Rumi (or at the very least, her fussy-nice lawyer friend Jeong-hyun [Park Jeong-min, Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet]) was the one endowed with superpowers. Why does her father, who had not displayed a shred of concern for her life before the movie begins, have to be the one with these abilities? So that the viewers could tear up seeing him learning the hardship his child had to put up with, and ultimately transforming himself into a politically conscious anti-chaebol activist? Even though this "paternal redemption" story is essentially the same narrative engine that propelled Train to Busan, that film had a bunch of truly interesting supporting characters and layers of story elements brilliantly orchestrated by the director. Psychokinesis, much simpler and linear in plot, is deprived of this support structure.

Casting Ryu Seung-ryong in the role of the father only compounds the problem. Again, I have little problem with the actor, who is certainly one of the more earnest character actor-stars working in Korea today (and superb in such subtler roles as the minister in Masquerade [2011] and the conflicted detective in Possessed [2009]). But the character of Seok-heon is frankly a callous scoundrel, and Ryu, looking like a bull-hound with a bad stomach problem, cannot project any charm or sociable qualities. He merely acts very hard, (his comic acting, I reiterate, is not as terrible as internet critics are blasting about) but is ultimately defeated by the shallow characterization.

Indeed, it is a sign of a talented filmmaker stuck with a stale conception of the "good guys" in a story of good-triumphs-over-evil, when the villains of the piece-- "president" Min (Kim Min-jae, The Truth Beneath), the boss of the service company (read: thugs) hired by the big business executive Deputy Hong (Jeong Yoo-mi, Our Sunhi)-- come across as more attractive, even more charming, than the protagonists. Ms. Hong, the head villain, is actually the most interesting, if not the most complex, character in the whole movie. Quite pretty and mad as a hatter, she is an intriguing combination of a Gangnam-style, chi-chi superficiality and a deeply sociopathic ego, a sort of merrily chatty female version of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. It was an inspiring move on Yeon's part to cast the beautiful but off-kilter Jeong as Deputy Hong. Her reaction to Seok-heon smashing her BMW and flying out of the police station is priceless: it would have been great if the movie contained more character-driven funny scenes like that.

Psychokinesis is not a terrible film: I can think a number of ways in which it could have gone much worse (insisting on being dourly "serious" would certainly have been one of them). On the other hand, it is demonstrably less powerful or creative than Yeon's previous works. I have enjoyed the movie for what it is, a middling SF fantasy with a light tone (most clearly exemplified by a silly TV-commercial-style denouement). I strongly suggest to Yeon that, however, he should write his next movie around the non-victimized characters playable by Shim Eun-gyeong or, for that matter, Jeong Yoo-mi (I certainly wouldn't mind seeing Deputy Hong come back as a supervillain!). No more redemption narratives for bum fathers, please.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Little Forest

When Hye-won decides to abandon the city, it may seem at first like she's running away. She's certainly going to a remote place - her childhood home is in a tiny farming village, completely cut off from the fast-paced, urban lifestyle that epitomizes South Korea. The house itself is empty. And for a woman in her twenties, there doesn't seem to be much to do there, except grow food on the land surrounding the house, and cook with whatever ingredients can be harvested. It's subsistence living, dictated by nothing more than the changing of the seasons.

She's not completely alone there. There's her elderly aunt, who lives in another part of the village. There's a dog named Ogu, adopted by Hae-won (or vice versa). And there are two childhood friends - Jae-ha who grows fruits and vegetables, and Eun-sook who commutes to a nearby town to work as a bank teller. The three rekindle their old camaraderie, filled with intimacy and tension, made stronger by the fact that in this remote place, they only have each other.

Hye-won often invites them to her home to share in the meals she prepares. She is an imaginative and proficient cook, having learned from her mother. Indeed, cooking became more of a necessity for her when, during her last year in high school, her mother abruptly left home. Years later, Hae-won is still recovering from this abandonment, even after growing up and becoming independent. And the cooking she does, suffused with old memories, is in part a way to work through her complicated feelings about her mother.

Little Forest is not a typical film. Honestly, it's just a wisp of a story, with much of its running time devoted to cooking and conversation. Nonetheless, it leaves its audience feeling full. Partly this is due to it being so well made: director Yim Soon-rye (Waikiki Brothers, Forever the Moment) has over two decades of filmmaking experience, and she's more than capable of instilling ordinary moments with life and meaning. As for the acting, Kim Tae-ri (who became an instant star in Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden) perfectly embodies the blend of independence and unpredictability that defines Hye-won's character. She's joined by Ryu Jun-yeol (A Taxi Driver), one of Korea's most exciting up-and-coming male actors; the acclaimed Moon So-ri (The Running Actress), who brings an enigmatic quality to the flashback scenes with Hye-won's mother; and talented newcomer Jin Ki-joo as the temperamental, flirtatious Eun-sook.

Little Forest is based on a Japanese manga by Igarashi Daisuke, and some viewers may know a four-hour Japanese adaptation of this book, which begins in the summer, and has an hour devoted to each season. That 2014 work is in some ways even more minimal, with its story structure determined not by plot twists, but by the seasonal ripening of fruits and vegetables. I myself am a committed, rabid fan of that Japanese movie, and so as much as I was looking forward to this Korean adaptation, I was also bracing myself for disappointment. But ultimately it was a pleasure to discover that Yim Soon-rye's version has its own particular strengths and concerns, and there's no real need to compare the two films.

Released in February, Little Forest had a surprisingly strong run at the box office, and captured the imagination of younger viewers in particular. Nonetheless, I think if it had been released a decade earlier, it might have struggled to find an audience. One senses a shift of attitude among young Koreans these days. Faced with an ever more competitive and stress-filled lifestyle, in crowded cities with polluted air, and with career goals that often lead to frustrating dead ends, the emergence of a film with values so fundamentally opposed to the norm brought a breath of fresh air. In a word, this is the kind of film to make you consider quitting your job, and leaving the city behind.      (Darcy Paquet)

    The Vanished

Dr. Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo, Tabloid Truth), a research scientist working for a big pharma company, has recently lost his older wife Seor-hee (the veteran TV actress Kim Hee-ae) to a heart failure. However, the latter's body disappears from the morgue in the National Forensic Service building, under a strange, possibly supernatural circumstance. Dr. Park, summoned to the morgue, is detained, to his consternation, by the disheveled detective Joong-sik (Kim Sang-gyung, The World of Silence) and his team, despite lack of any physical evidence that the former was involved in stealing or hiding the body. It turns out that our good doctor had been carrying on an affair with a college student Hye-jin (Han Ji-an) and used his newly developed medication that suppresses activities of the central nervous system, mixed into a glass of wine, to murder his wife. As the night progresses, Dr. Park begins to suspect that Seor-hee has somehow survived the assassination attempt, and is now seeking revenge by framing him for her own murder, or worse.

The Vanished is a remake of the Spanish mystery thriller The Body (2012), directed by Oriol Paulo, the hand behind the superb, classically-inflected whodunit The Invisible Guest (2017). The newcomer co-writer-director Lee Chang-hee (the other screenwriter is Lee Hee-chan, Run-off) is obviously a fan of the genre. He follows the original's plot rather closely, keeping the clues add up without ladling the Korean-style melodramatic conventions (until the climax, that is, to which I will come back shortly) on them. The movie initially does not inspire much confidence when it starts out like an antiseptic variant of Ju-On, but once latched onto the groove of the central mystery, it makes for a reasonably compelling viewing. Director Lee deploys the production team, spearheaded by the DP Lee Jong-yeol and Lighting Supervisor Jang Tae-hyun, to keep the visuals clean-cut, devoid of meaningless clutter, and emphasizing metallic anxiety creeping up on the main characters as well as their cold calculation. The dialogue is peppered with technical terms (forensic, pharmaceutical and otherwise) not always explained. Overall, the aura of a technically authentic mystery is carefully maintained, although some surrealistic visuals indicating subjective experiences and emotions of the characters are furtively inserted in a few sections.

The performances are okay to good. Kim Kang-woo is pretty well cast as an elite intellectual who, despite the practiced air of arrogance and nonchalance, soon finds himself out of his depth. Kim Sang-gyung, on the other hand, presented as an Akechi Kogoro-Lieutenant Columbo type, is closer to a typical Korean detective character in the sense that there is little hint that his uncouth countenance and vulgar behavior are masking a sharp intelligence or a superior power of observation. At least his sob-story background, a terrible cliché of its own, is organically tied to the film's central mystery of the missing body. It is too bad Lee could not have reconceived the whole story with Seor-hee and Hye-jin at the forefront rather than these two male leads: Kim Hee-ae in particular has a few decent set pieces in which she gets to show off the icy authority of a woman who cannot imagine having her opinions questioned.

I enjoyed watching The Vanished, its hackneyed characterization and other problems notwithstanding, up to the big climax. At that point, the movie unfortunately goes into an automatic drive and 1) begins to show a tiresome montage of "this is really what happened," with that "poignant" um-cha-cha um-cha-cha waltz music copied from the Oldboy score (the variants of which should be permanently banned from all Korean crime-mystery-horror-thrillers henceforth) in the background, 2) that involves yet another hit-and-run car accident as the crucial plot point (which also should be banned from all Korean crime-mystery-horror-thrillers. Do the Korean drivers in movies ever put on brakes when people walk into their paths? On the second thought, considering the I'd-rather-die-in-a-horrible-crash-than-be-five-minutes-late way they drive in real life, perhaps this is realism), and 3) ends with another "poignant" shot of a necklace (or a pendant, or a ring, or a fountain pen, or a handkerchief¡¦ so on and on) shakily held by a character. The plot of The Vanished cries out for the kind of dry, thoughtful resolution that tests our acknowledgement of the limits of the rational justice system: knowing that this is a South Korean film, you could be rest assured that such an ending does not materialize. I am not even going to talk about the loose threads left hanging at the end, which, as I recollect, The Body, the original, was not exactly free from either.

The Vanished is one of those recent South Korean mystery thrillers, competently made and attractively lensed, that nonetheless never really push the envelope, much less break through it. In the early part of the movie, a psychiatrist tells Joong-shik, "You are just working out your resentment of the 'haves.'" Turns out it is all that the movie has to say, too, that the 'haves' will get away with anything (and we are supposed to be hopping mad about it). Like horror, a good mystery thriller ought to be able to speak about the things- including the truths that challenge social conventions and political designs masquerading as self-evident morality- that a hectoring conspiracy thriller or a cop-busts-psycho-killer kind of exploitation nonsense cannot. Every once in a blue moon we get a film, like, say, The Truth Beneath, that actually does that or at least aspires to do so. It is hoped that director Lee's next film would jump the hurdle and sprint toward that direction.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Be With You

Woo-jin is a single father living with his elementary school-aged son in a small town, working as a janitor at the town swimming pool. Each morning as they leave their home, they plant a kiss on a photo that hangs by the door, showing the two of them with the boy's deceased mother, Soo-ah. Both Woo-jin and his son desperately miss Soo-ah, who passed away the previous year. But just as the rainy season starts, a miracle happens.

From an abandoned train tunnel, Soo-ah re-appears, looking just as she did before her untimely death. She seems to recognize Woo-jin, but she has no memory of her life spent with the two of them. Confused but overjoyed, they take her home and the three of them start to live together once more. For Soo-ah, it is as if getting to know them for the first time. For the boy and his father, it is a deep, healing joy that washes away their grief, but they both suspect that her time with them may be temporary.

Be With You is based on a Japanese novel by Ichikawa Takuji, which in turn was made into a 2004 film by Doi Nobuhiro. Both the novel and the film won over many fans in Korea, so it was a smart move to re-adapt this story for a new generation of Korean viewers. Debut director Lee Jang-hoon proved fortunate in his casting as well, landing not only the popular film and TV star So Ji-sub (showing a very different side of himself than he did in Ryoo Seung-wan's The Battleship Island), but also the queen of melodrama herself, Son Ye-jin.

Son Ye-jin is an absolute pro, and it's no criticism of the other actors to say that Soo-ah outshines everyone else in the film. Despite being curiously passive for much of the running time (for reasons that become clear in the surprising reveals that emerge in the second half), Son carries the role with her presence, never expressing more than she needs to. The other actors tune their performances to hers, making the scenes with her feel natural and genuine.

The genre of melodrama used to be a pillar of Korean cinema, so much so that it was a key part of the industry's identity. But over the years, as investors and studios switched their allegiance to thrillers and social dramas, melodramas have fallen by the wayside. Simultaneously, the explosive growth of the Korean TV drama sector, where melodrama is king, has left film melodrama looking displaced. One might fault filmmakers for not developing their own, distinct style to distinguish film from TV melodrama. But clearly, there is still interest in such works among the theatergoing audience. Sure enough, Be With You opened at #1 at the box office and showed unusual staying power, resulting in a profitable run.

Be With You is not without its weak points (I'm not sure I will ever find it in my heart to forgive Woo-jin's pink jacket... those who see the film will know what I'm talking about). But in its intricate web of flashbacks, reunions, tears and revelations, it builds towards an emotional and satisfying conclusion. It will certainly not appeal to viewers who actively dislike melodrama, or to cynics. But for those more open to the genre's charms, it is a safe recommendation.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Microhabitat

Moving to Japan for family reasons in 2017 has resulted in a major change in my film-watching habits. Basically, I don't have any such habits anymore. I've drastically dwindled down from around 150 movies in theaters to maybe, if I'm lucky, 10. There are many reasons for this drastic drop—my significantly reduced income, vacation, and free time since the average worker in Japan works inhumane hours and is paid poorly (but thankfully has fairly affordable national healthcare and, in the large cities, transportation); my lack of linguistic access to films since learning to read Japanese has been painstakingly slow and my Korean has always been poor; and my self-limiting preference to experience film in a theater rather than on a TV or computer screen. All of this contributes to the hilarious irony that I have been writing here at Koreanfilm.org since 2000 documenting many lesser seen gems of South Korean cinema in hopes of influencing wider notice in the US and elsewhere, yet once the US finally acknowledges the South Korean film industry through the multiple awarding of Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, I still have yet to see that very film that culminates all the work I and many others have done. I've "watched" Parasite in that I watched the film on New Year's day 2020 here in a Toho Cinema in the Hibiya neighborhood of Tokyo, but with Japanese subtitles. The problem is I haven't had the benefit of truly "seeing" it since most of the dialogue was lost to me without the accessibility of Darcy's English subtitles in the version released in places like my home country. (I knew enough to catch the dialect shift to North Korean in the film, at least.)

In March 2022, I finally came around to getting one of those contraptions that turns your TV into the internet. My wife had convinced me that we should subscribe to Netflix rather than continuing to participate in the less cost effective ritual of maintaining a relationship with our neighborhood corporate DVD rental store. (This was originally a Tsutaya, but after that closed down, we shifted to Geo, pronounced 'Gay-oh', not 'Jee-oh'.). Sadly, the Korean films on Netflix geo-curated here are either the type I'm not really that interested in or they are only subtitled in Japanese. As a result of the latter, I still can't see Parasite.

But in addition to Netflix, we downloaded the free service TUBI owned by the democracy-destroying Fox corporation. And in spite of how they are bringing my country closer and closer to fascism, turns out TUBI has a few fairly good South Korean film selections, particularly one I've been wanting to see for some time—Jeon Go-woon's Microhabitat. Yet that access was temporary. When attempting to see Microhabitat a second time to refine my recall of the plot for this film essay, I discovered a message telling me now that TUBI is not available in my region. Down, down, down like a Bong film goes the irony upon irony upon irony.

My inability to watch the film a second time leaves me unsure of the narrative trajectory. I am at the mercy of Wikipedia, a website that still refuses to spell Hong Sangsoo's and Bong Joon Ho's names correctly. (Wikipedia's arrogant editors are quite resistant to such a change, offering up excuses that expose their ignorance about Korean cinema.) Unfortunately, plot points important to my discussion of the film are missing from Wikipedia's summary. (As of January 17th, 2023, there is no mention of the sex worker who plays a significant role in the movie.) So if I mess-up on some of the chronology of events, my apologies, but this also becomes an example of how we remember films in ways that are "incorrect". Sometimes how we mis-remember films results in a need to change our arguments. Sometimes chronology matters. Other times it doesn't. I think this is one of those latter times where time has no impact on meaning.

Microhabitat follows Mi-so (Esom, The Last Blossom, Samjin Company English Class). Mi-so is a housekeeper and a cleaning lady for a salon. Because her valuable labor is devalued through its feminization and failure to extract wealth from other laborers, she is not paid a living wage. When her rent is increased along with the tax that impacts one of her primary joys and sources of anxiety-reduction, cigarettes, she has to make a decision. (Whiskey is important to her as well, but not in a need to get drunk, more like the aesthetic joys of drinking good whiskey in a bar, similar to the joy I find when drinking coffee in coffeehouses or Japanese kissatens.)

American Republicans like Mitt Romney would tell Mi-so to ask her uncle for a $20,000 interest-free loan. But Mi-so has no family to buffer her for even $20. She did have a network of friends from college, free-spirited bandmates. (Something I can't verify is whether Mi-so may have not been able to finish college due to financial problems, but I think that was the case.) As for her boyfriend, he can't house her because he lives in an all-male dormitory that his factory employer subsidizes. Since the employer controls the key chains, she cannot live there. All told, Miso is a member of the enlarging precariat class where certain life happenings result in one falling quickly into insurmountable poverty. Considering her financial limitations, Mi-so makes a decision to tap into her friendship network to see who can temporarily house her until her life becomes less precarious.

Although almost all of her crew are delighted to see Miso—the only male band member is too depressed to express delight about anything—they have each ventured onto life paths that have distanced themselves from the plight Mi-so has found herself in. We meet a friend who has to hook herself up to an IV drip to survive the inhumane demands of corporate life. We meet a friend who lives a suffocating life with her in-laws. We meet a man whose wife committed him to an expensive lease of a condo only to leave him soon after. We meet a woman who married 'right', now living in opulent splendor.

Mi-so is able to empathize with all of her friends' various situations, yet they don't appear to possess the capacity to empathize with her. This is perhaps because she is what they fear for themselves, a loss of financial capital that results in the loss of social capital that prohibits one from climbing back into ones previously held social standing. This is most prominently displayed in her final friend visit where they eat at either end of a long royal table, disallowing the physical closeness that enables emotional connection. It's as if in some ways Mi-so's friend doesn't want to get too close to Mi-so, or else the social filth of Mi-so's predicament will rub-off on her.

This is why it's interesting that the Wikipedia plot summary excises the sex worker character because Mi-so's relationship with the sex-worker is so important to laying out the kind of person Mi-so is. Somewhere in the chronology Mi-so meets a customer at the salon where she worked who is presented to be an escort or hostess club worker. Mi-so begins cleaning that woman's fancy apartment, making more money as a result. Eventually Mi-so's benefactor loses her own benefactor at some point, making her financially incapable of continuing to employ Mi-so. Yet unlike her bandmates, Mi-so refuses to socially distance herself from the sex-worker. She isn't worried about the social 'taint' that might rub off on her because she doesn't perceive the sex workers work as 'tainted'. Mi-so works in dust and dirt and grime and grease and piss and shit. She understands all is part of life and ones proximity to it should not define ones value.

As a result, Mi-so empathizes with her now former benefactor's plight. Mi-so does not get angry at her. Mi-so understands the choices that societies like South Korea pressure folks to make in order to survive financially, especially for women. Mi-so's final richly married friend is particularly upset with Mi-so mentioning the friend's 'wild' past, which implied consensual sexual pleasure. Mi-so's friend is worried her husband will jettison her because of the 'stain' of being associated with a woman who actually chose to engage in freely-chosen pleasure prior to meeting him. If he does dismiss her due to his misogynistic mannerism about manners, Mi-so's friend might lose all the financial and social capital she's built up via beliefs and contracts that have left someone like Mi-so in such a precarious predicament. It is this secret revealed that causes Mi-so's friend to lash out at Miso. It's as if she is saying, 'Why don't you lie for me?! Why don't you at least lie through omission so I can stay in my social position?!' Mi-so's friend kicks her out of her house just as Mi-so's friend has kicked out her past to maintain her present and bring about her future. Mi-so's friend's treatment of Mi-so is in stark contrast to Mi-so's treatment of the sex worker. Unlike her social distancing dining table friend, Mi-so identifies with the sex worker. The sex worker's plight is Mi-so's plight. The sex worker's precarity is Mi-so's precarity.

In spite of what I might be mistaken about the plot thanks to not having access to a second viewing, and in spite of my only having access to watching the film Parasite but not having accessing to seeing it, Jeon's micropiece is an interesting film to parallel with Bong's masterpiece. Bong has always placed certain characters down into deeper dwellings. The wide reception of Parasite led many news outlets to elaborate on the significance of banjiha, what such cheap basement housing is called in South Korea and which were frightening deathtraps for so many during the floods in the summer of 2022 resulting in federal legislation to outlaw them. As Julie Yoon reported for BBC Korean in an article on February 10th, 2020, banjiha get "so little light that even [a] little succulent plant couldn't survive." That quote resonates metaphorically to the poor economic state of those who reside in banjiha, as does the downward direction into the unknown of precariat lives that was the Parasite secret cellar dwelling.

But director Jeon goes upward, causing confusion with the standard up-down metaphor. While looking for a cheaper apartment, Mi-so has to walk up more and more flights of steps to reach fewer and fewer affordable housing units. This physical upward trajectory is counter to our usual downward trajectory that Parasite easily situates. And not only that, there is a great deal of counter-metaphor regarding the idea of growth. In Microhabitat, it's not a life-giving plant, but life-threatening black mold. The final dissonance is provided by the fact that these apartments reaching for the sky are as dark as the dwellings digging into the ground. The only typically congruent metaphor director Jeon provides is the fact that these upper dwellings lack reliable power—literally electrical, but also metaphorically financial and social.

Jeon's film also lacks physical violence. The violence of Korean films and the TV show Squid Game has delighted Western viewers so much that violence is how many Westerners primarily imagine Korean films. As the borderline sociopathic fund manager Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis, Romeo & Juliet, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) says in one episode of season two during a discussion about destroying a small town by imposing the financial violence of austerity measures, "We'll be gutting them for their organs, like in a Korean horror movie." The violence Mi-so experiences in Microhabitat is a similar financial violence to the one Axelrod wields, the everyday microaggressions of poverty, a poverty clearly feminized. This is one of the many points where Microhabit resonates with the greatest South Korean film ever made—not Parasite, but Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat.

Interestingly, whereas Microhabitat differs distinctly in metaphor from the globally popular Parasite, Microhabitat also differs slightly from its fore-mother Take Care of My Cat in its elliptical non-resolution. (That's a spoiler alert if you need one.) Mi-so doesn't have a financially privileged Tae-hee to help her leave her predicament by leaving South Korea as Ji-young did in Take Care of My Cat. Mi-so is left with her own drastically limited devices to camp out and survive and see what might happen should her boyfriend return from his transfer to the Middle East and should either be able to find each other in a place where a new life might be possible. Take Care of My Cat and many films at the time it was made had Korean women leaving South Korea to evade sexist barriers. Microhabitat follows a woman who has no means to leave the political island she is trapped within.

Please understand that my contrasting Microhabitat here is not meant as a passive-aggressive way to slam Parasite. I love Bong Joon Ho! Unlike Wikipedia, I respect the guy. I spell his name right. As far as I can tell, not being able to "see" it, Parasite is a great film, a film worthy of all the awards it received. I mean, come on, Song Kang-ho is in it, making it great by default.

But the clear difference in the distribution and reception of Microhabitat versus Parasite in Western worlds reminds me of the hope I had as an earlier observer of South Korean film. I was struck by South Korean films for many reasons. If you know one of the directors I focus on, Hong Sangsoo is a major influence. But there was another big influence. Although I appreciated the operatic violence of films like Nowhere to Hide, I didn't stay with South Korean cinema for the spectacle of splatter in films like Shiri or Oldboy. A big part of why I stayed for the eventual ride to global popularity were the feminist struggles of the great triumvirate of women directors, Byun Young-joo, Yim Sun-rye, and the aforementioned Jeong. They were touching on aspects of Korean societies that resonated with aspects of my American societies along with making sure I understood the differences from the macro in the micro-worlds of various Korean women.

It was the feminist takes that I very much tried to highlight as a reason that South Korean films were worthy of greater consideration before Tarantino and Harry Knowles got their intersecting fan boys to drool over the blood dripping in other South Korean films. So it is with great irony that I return to Koreanfilm.org after a long absence caused by life changes limiting my access to the South Korean films I want to see. Microhabitat is the film I wanted to take care of when writing about Korean cinema. But now I have less of an ability to do that.

Thankfully, South Korean cinema doesn't seem to need me any more. (I recognize that is an arrogant, Columbus-ing statement. South Korean cinema never needed me. It did fine on its own terms.) Microhabitat is part of a new South Korean weave of women-directed films that I've been hearing about, films like the houses of us and hummingbirds, the Chan-sil's and Kim Ji-young's, all films expertly chronicled by other writers, such as on our website here by Rachel Min Park or in a wonderful film essay on South Korean women directors by Hieu Chau and Natalie Ng on the Australian film website Film In Ether. I just wish I could do more than just hear about them, than just watch them pass me by. I do hope I can see them, read them in a language I know, feel the bright pulse of the light from the screen of a darkened movie theater, a haptic tactic I've found affords greater empathy and brings me towards a more profound understanding than the emotional distance I feel with my TV.

The irony digs deeper knowing I am very much at a place in my life when these #DirectedByWomen Korean films are a sustenance I greatly need, yet I am less able to access these films that nourish me more than films by men that hammer and pummel and bruise. Don't worry, I still have other mediums that provide that sustenance. I still have access in Japan to books and so many delightful coffee houses in which I can read those books like Mi-so savors her whiskey and cigarettes at bars. It's just that I no longer have the rituals of my church of cinema where I prefer to practice my praxis. I miss cinema. But I will move on to other smaller spaces that provide similar solace, knowing solace is savored in sips, not given in gulps.      (Adam Hartzell)

    Seven Years of Night

Hydraulic technician Choi Hyun-soo (Ryu Seung-ryong, The Piper), saddled with a gambling habit and estranged from his hard-working wife Eun-joo (Moon Jeong-hee, Cart), drives to a remote village called Seryeong. Having been appointed as the chief of the reservoir control station overlooking the village, he reluctantly takes up an offer to look into a new apartment in the middle of the night, but thick mist blowing out from the eerie lake hinders his view. Adding insult to injury, he is confronted by a road hog, an expensive SUV driven by the local landlord and dentist Oh Young-je (Jang Dong-gun, No Tears for the Dead). Young-je turns out to be a psychopathic sadist, routinely torturing his wife and young daughter Se-ryeong (Lee Re, How to Steal a Dog). On that night, he happened to be looking for the latter, who daringly escaped from her father's clutches during a whipping session. Tragically, Hyun-soo runs over Se-ryeong with his car. Distraught and frightened, he then makes the worst decision of his life, dumping her body into the lake and pretending nothing had happened. Seven years later, Hyun-soo is a death-row inmate, and his son Seo-won, now a young adult (Go Kyung-pyo, Horror Stories 2), is a professional diver, taken under the wing of a family friend and an ace underwater salvage man Seung-hwan (Song Sae-byuk, A Girl at My Door). Finally visiting his father soon to be executed, Seo-won gradually puts together the horrifying story of denial, vengeance and cruelty involving his father and Young-je.

Seven Years of Night is based on a best-selling mystery novel (2011) by Jeong Yoo-jeong, a former hospital nurse-turned-genre scribe, well-known for a series of hard-boiled thrillers vividly portraying psychopathic villains (most notably Origins of Species [2016], also soon to be adapted into a motion picture). The film adaptation, completed in 2016 but unable to secure a release date until 2018, is written and directed by Choo Chang-min, who had previously scored a critical and commercial hit with the Lee Byung-heon vehicle Masquerade (2012). He is clearly a competent director, expertly thrashing into shape the film's complicated flashback structure, and consistently sustaining the tone of moist dread and coiled anger. Some of his mises-en-scenes are very impressive, abetted by suitably creepy underwater photography of a submerged human habitat and fog-enshrouded green lighting of DP Ha Kyung-ho and LD Shin Tae-seob.

As was the case with Masquerade, Choo works well with the actors, too, keeping Song Sae-byuk, an actor prone to scene-stealing show-off moments, subdued and in control, and letting the reliable Ryu Seung-ryong run the gamut of extreme emotions, from impotent rage to utter despair, but never allowing him to wade into the territory of self-indulgence or camp. One of the themes of Jeong's original novel is inheritance of (male) violence through intergenerational relationships (also dealt with in a much drier, more ironic manner in the short story "Anagura [An Eel-catcher]" by Suzuki Koji of the Ring fame), and as far as Choo remains focused on Hyun-soo's guilt-ridden consciousness, the film manages to convey this with reasonable clarity.

Unfortunately, Jang Dong-gun in the role of Young-je seriously undercuts this thematic thread. I feel bad about having to say this, since I am pretty sure Jang had only good intentions in landing this role, and objectively speaking, not much of what he does here is technically wrong or ruinously excessive. The problem is that once Jang is cast as the main villain, the screenplay begins to add all kinds of completely unnecessary excuses for his behavior. Jeong in her novel coolly examined the gears and pulleys of its villain's behavioral machinery, outwardly gentlemanly yet hideously manipulative. Jang conveys none of these truly evil qualities. Good-looking as ever in mid-forties (born in 1972), he seems stubbornly incapable of discarding his star persona, that of un bel homme who in the end must be coddled and understood by the (female) viewers. I think if he really took the idea of playing a sadistic bad guy seriously, Jang should have volunteered to get rid of all those scenes patently calculated to draw sympathy (including his big, slo-mo wailing upon the discovery of his daughter's body, one of the unintentionally embarrassing moments in otherwise an admirably taut thriller), or at least played them in such a way to highlight Young-je's socially manipulative, devious features. Again, I am sorry to have to make this unkind comparison, but Jeong Woo-sung's performance in Cold Eyes (2013), or even the crackpot Asura: City of Madness (2016), demonstrates what Jang is failing to do in this and his other recent films.

In fact, the overpowering presence of Jang Dong-gun as Young-je veers the entire movie away from critique of the patriarchy's poison (explored in the original novel) toward an acknowledgement, if not celebration, of patriarchal values. In the course of this turn-around, Seo-won loses his quasi-protagonist status, and Young-je's battered wife simply disappears from the movie version. In the end, Young-je degenerates into the kind of self-pitying macho bastard so familiar from countless Korean movies, the director's attempt to give him some kind of self-reflective interior life, perhaps a capacity for regret, entirely backfiring.

Seven Years of Night has all the right ingredients of a handsome-looking, effective Gothic melodrama, but it never gels into something genuinely moving or provocative. Although Jeong Yoo-jeong allegedly expressed approval over the way the movie had changed her characterizations, Choo's misguided attempt to bring a form of ethical "balance" to the relationship between Hyun-soo and Young-je has undermined some of the source novel's obvious strengths and muddled its emotional power.

Domestic box office records echoed the lukewarm reviews the film received, stalling at approximately 440 thousand tickets sold through the months of March and April 2018, not enough to earn back its rather high production cost. It will probably play somewhat better for the non-Korean viewers unfamiliar with the source novel, and, of course, for loyal international fans of Jang Dong-gun.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum

A crude smartphone video shows two giggling high school students trespassing into what appears to be a rundown hospital corridor. They try to open the door numbered 402, and then the video abruptly terminates. The scene shifts, and Ha-joon (Wi Ha-joon, Coin Locker Girl), a YouTuber running a popular program entitled Horror Times who has just played smartphone video, vows to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Korea's most famous haunted mental asylum, Namyang Mental Hospital at Gonjiam. A team of eager volunteers is assembled: the Brave Girl Ji-hyun (Park Ji-hyun, The Chase), the camera expert Seong-hoon (Park Seong-hoon, A Frozen Flower), Seung-wook (Lee Seung-wook) the outwardly calm commentator for Horror Times, the Nice Girl Ah-yeon (Oh Ah-yeon), the scaredy-cat Je-yoon (Yoo Je-yoon), and the Glamour Girl Charlotte (Moon Ye-won). Equipped with state-of-the-art video gadgets that allow them to simultaneously film their own faces and the objects in front of them, they set up the camp near the decrepit, long-deserted Namyang Hospital building and wait until the clock hits midnight. Everything goes fine, as the members divvy themselves up to explore different floors, each with creepy facilities such as a shower room and a storage room inexplicably lined with coffin-like wooden boxes. The team, following the script written by Ha-joon with an ulterior motive to boost YouTube clicks and therefore his ad-based income, performs a séance calling for the ghosts, and it seems to work. However, some members begin to sense that something genuinely weird is going on, that has little to do with Ha-joon's script.

Gonjiam (I know, the title sounds as dorky in Korean as it does in English) is a modestly-budgeted found footage horror film. The primary PR hook for it has been that its setting, Namyang Mental Hospital, is a real place in Gonjiam County, Gwangju City, Gyeonggi Province, previously profiled by CNN as one of the seven creepiest deserted places in the world, along with Japan's Hashima the Battleship Island, Russia's Chernobyl and Mexico's Isla de las Muñecas. The ensuing publicity has clearly helped the film's box office performance (and reportedly stoked irritation of the owners of the estate, long suffering from thrill-seeking hooligans: the hospital site in real life is apparently ensconced right in the middle of a peaceful residential area and disappointingly mundane), as it sold robust 1.73 million tickets since its theatrical release in the second week of March, 2018, one of the best domestic performances for an out-and-out horror film in recent years.

For a jaundiced fan of horror cinema like myself, it is difficult not to suppress a yawn as soon as "found footage" is mentioned, especially considering that Gonjiam's premise seems to be directly working off on The Blair Witch Project, the movie that started all the FF craze way back when. Yes, it is a low-budget horror film neither with anything profound to say about the universal human condition, nor particularly interested in developing nuanced characterizations or an involving narrative, but once you take this built-in limitation into account, the film declares itself a surprisingly decent nail-biter. It helps enormously that the writer and director behind the project is Jeong Beom-sik, who has proven his mojo with the now-classic Epitaph and the "The Escape" segment of Horror Stories 2, still one of the wackiest and weirdest pieces of Korean genre cinema I have seen in a long time. Jeong certainly knows how to juggle and keep afloat disparate and potentially confusing visual elements of the film, to keep the flow of sequences logical and legible and his young cast believable and sympathetic. Admittedly some ideas, such as an old graffiti spontaneously switching meaning from "Let's live" (salja) to "Suicide" (Jasal), likely a reference to the "Redrum" scene in The Shining, are borderline silly, but many of the scare effects, especially those focused on the spatial displacement suffered by the cast members, a la Mario Bava's Kill... Baby, Kill!, are genuinely effective. The sound design and almost imperceptible ambient music are also first-rate.

Intriguingly, Gonjiam, despite its streamlined structure and youth-oriented premise, shares a few thematic concerns with the more historically-minded Epitaph. There is a nod, in the form of an actual government newsreel footage, to the anti-Communist paranoia under the Park Chung Hee regime as one of the underlying causes of the hospital's "curse," and one of the movie's jolting set pieces duplicates the deservedly notorious, hideously scary "lullaby" scene from the 2007 film. The overarching theme of ghosts as the individuals temporally and spatially trapped in modern Korea's traumatic and unsavory past, trying to ensnare the innocent younger generation into their (zombie-fied) world-view, might be shared by the two films, and perhaps supplies an additional, subtle undercurrent of unease for the Korean viewers.

In the end not an earth-shaking work of art, Gonjiam nonetheless more than fulfills the modest expectations generated by its minimalist outlook, successfully showcasing Jeong's considerable prowess as a horror specialist. Based on the evidence displayed here, Netflix or Amazon should endow him with a five million-dollar-plus budget, so that his devious imagination could be fully indulged, without having to be constrained by the commercial calculations of the Korean theater-chain owners.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    True Fiction

Gyeong-seok (O Man-seok, Our Town) is an up-and-coming aid-de-camp to a big-shot politician Yeom Jeong-gil (the TV drama veteran Kim Hak-cheol), but his real job is a safe-keeper for the latter's illegal stash of funds. Married to Yeom's harpy-like daughter and mystery writer (Come again? This is only one of the many weird and murky set-ups in the film) Ji-eun (Cho Eun-ji, A Bizarre Love Triangle), Gyeong-seok hightails to his wife's villa, where the money is hidden, with his lover Ji-young (Lee Eun-woo, a.k.a. Lee Na-ra, Moebius) and a bag of cash in tow. On the way to the tryst, the adulterous couple runs over a dog. When the dead mutt's self-proclaimed owner, Sun-tae (the singer-DJ Ji Hyun-woo, popular for the TV drama Awl), shows up, they feel guilty, annoyed, and suspicious in turn. It soon becomes clear that the perpetually grinning Sun-tae, who claims to be house-sitting for a neighboring unit, might be not only privy to Gyeong-seok's secret job, but also planning to bring some serious harm to him and his lover.

For the long stretches of its runtime, True Fiction plays like a soporific, overlong version of Won Shin-yeon's A Bloody Aria (2006), with grimy, foul-mouthed local yokels under the "leadership" of Sun-tae ganging up on Gyeong-seok. Writer-director Kim Jin-muk falls headfirst into one of the common traps for a debutant feature director, putting all his eggs in the one basket of keeping the narrative as convoluted and full of "surprises" as he possibly could, at the expense of other considerations such as building sympathetic and credible characters, proper management of tonalities, and legibility of action and motives. The result is a stuttering mixture of crushingly boring, utterly un-suspenseful, yet supposedly "tense" exchanges among the characters, on the one hand, and a series of increasingly frantic but emotionally uninvolving confrontations and back-stabbings on the other. All characters are so abjectly unsympathetic and hateful, to the point that, somewhere along the way, I began to root for Gyeong-seok, obviously meant to be the soulless villain of the piece, to just take out a golf club and beat the brain-springs out of Sun-tae and his "helpers" (something like this eventually does happen, alas, too late in my opinion).

O Man-seok and Ji Hyun-woo are neither charismatic nor entertaining, but it is unlikely that they could have done much with their half-baked roles. Sun-tae is an especially confusing character: is he some kind of an avenging angel getting back at the Yeom family (What is his real connection to Ji-young anyway?), or just an unhinged psycho who cannot tell his imaginary "novel" apart from his real-life con game? This aspect is never clarified to the viewer's satisfaction, because Sun-tae is a total cipher: he might as well be a Smile icon plastered atop a bulky mountaineer's get-up.

Moreover, Kim seems to believe that he is bringing into the mix a genuine sense of irony (not a chance) as well as deeply felt political critique (his argument being that all politicians are evil and rotten to the core: right, what a jolting message for the South Koreans, so naïvely trusting of the pot-bellied hacks they regularly vote into power! Seriously, how could they live with something as corrupt as an electoral democracy?). It's all very macho-angry, predictable and dreary. The female characters in the film are divided into a cheesecake-flashing "love interest" subject to exploitation and dismissal, and a poodle-carrying hysterical b*tch. Neither Cho Eun-ji nor Lee Eun-woo deserves such clichéd (and frankly misogynistic) parts, after their rich and variegated careers.

Finally, to cap all this off, True Fiction features some of the most offensive dog-related vignettes I have seen in Korean cinema in recent years, one involving a sick joke about a pooch stew, and the other, even in worse taste, about a "man-bites-dog" situation (this assessment from me, a Korean guy who usually can't stand the Euro-American brouhaha about canine welfare in Asian societies). I venture to guess that these "jokes" will likely prevent the present motion picture from being added to the roster of Netflix New Releases anytime soon.

True Fiction is probably not the worst Korean film of 2018: for all I know, some local viewers might have found its hackneyed, twist-laden plot at least amusing, if not actually nail-biting (although its box office figures stand at the tepid 49 thousand tickets sold, outdistanced by even Pororo's Dinosaur Island Adventure). As for me, one or two more of these "politically relevant" pretzel-plot mystery thrillers from Korea, and I think I would need some type of vaccination.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Believer

Detective Jo Won-ho (Cho Jin-woong, Bluebeard) is an overworked narcotics detective obsessed with capturing the mysterious master criminal known only as Mr. Lee. The movie opens as Detective Jo's snitch, a teenage drug mule, is brutally murdered by Mr. Lee, and O Yeon-ok (Kim Sung-ryung, The Fatal Encounter), one of the latter's underlings, throws herself at the feet of Jo, when her colleagues are blown up sky high by a bomb. Miss O is convinced that Mr. Lee is getting rid of his management team to reboot his organization. Jo manages to find in the rubbles of the building a wounded young man, Seo Young-rak (Ryu Jun-yeol, Socialphobia), a low-ranking but important liaison officer for the syndicate. Persuading him that Mr. Lee needs to be punished for killing his surrogate mother, also an unintended victim of the blast, the detective enlists Young-rak's cooperation in interjecting himself into the deal between Jin Ha-rim (the late Kim Joo-hyuk, The Tooth and the Nail), the unstable Korean-Chinese supplier of raw materials for the merchandise, and Park Seon-chang (Park Hae-joon, Heart Blackened), the thuggish middle-rank boss. The Mission: Impossible-like ploy seems to work well, especially when an elusive faux-Christian minister Brian Lee (Cha Seung-won, Man on High Heels) comes out of the woodwork as the potential candidate for Mr. Lee's true identity. But Jo is yet not aware of the frightening extent to which the master criminal's spider-web of schemes has ensnared everyone around him.

Lee Hae-young, a high-profile screenwriter with many distinctive film projects under the belt, including Conduct Zero, Like a Virgin (which he also directed, one of Korea's first commercial films to feature a transgender protagonist) and 26 Years, had just helmed The Silenced, an interesting but not entirely convincing genre hybrid thriller set in the colonial period. He seemed like an odd choice for adapting Johnny To's lacerating Drug War (2013) into the Korean context. Indeed, given the latter's jaw-droppingly withering view of the Chinese law enforcement and social order, Asian masculinity, and the very notion of justice (all no doubt immaculately designed to stay legitimate within the boundaries set by the Chinese censorship), as well as its cuttingly precise filmmaking style that little resembles the contemporary Asian cinema and instead recalls a '70s William Friedkin or Paul Schrader, one might question if there was really any reason to remake it. It must have been obvious to everyone concerned, from the very beginning, that a literal, faithful replication would not have worked. As it turns out, Believer, while neither as powerful nor as ruthless as Drug War, has its own gaudy, genre-driven strengths. Sure, it is not an EBS documentary exposé of drug trade in South Korea, but, hey, it's no fault of your charcoal grill if you melt your rubber tire on it.

Believer retains the tense and morally ambivalent relationship between the main investigating officer and the criminal-turned-reluctant-partner from Drug War, but its plot and characterization in the end significantly deviate from the Hong Kong actioner. Lee unfurls his plot almost languidly, spending little effort to mount suspense in the trendy, attention-deficit way, and instead heavily relies on the great cast to carry forward the aria-like set pieces toward the film's character-oriented resolution. For starters, Kim Joo-hyuk does a compelling job with what appears at the outset the most thankless and cliché-ridden role in the film, a drug lord hopelessly addicted to his own wares, making Jin at once contemptibly hilarious and rather unsettling, a thug whose speed-addled brain might at any moment snap to attention and see through Detective Jo's masquerade. Cha Seung-won rolls out his dialogue in the speech pattern of a TV evangelist crossed with a self-help guru, a Bill Murray doing impersonation of Deepak Chopra: he beautifully conveys narcissistic rottenness of Brian Lee, a snake-oil salesman who believes in his own con, with a serpentine tongue that spits venom. Among the colorful villains that populate the film, Cha's characterization comes closest to an outright political satire, but Director Lee thankfully does not push the point, like Kim Sung-soo did with a sledgehammer in Asura: City of Madness.

At the other end of the spectrum, Cho Jin-woong firmly anchors the film, whose Detective Jo goes through some unexpected, not exactly welcome realizations about himself: the character arc that I thought was handled quite well. If I were to push the American cinema analogy further, Cho at this point of his career reminds me a bit of Jeff Bridges, in the way that he makes the viewer note his robust physical presence in every role, yet does not necessarily rely on large "acting" to make his point. However, the movie ultimately belongs to Ryu Jun-yeol, who has perhaps the most difficult job in the whole shebang, keeping Young-rak's motivations and internal conflicts carefully under the wraps but not totally opaque to the viewers. Some have registered complaints that the young hoodlum makes little sense as a character, but I think Young-rak as portrayed in a clear-eyed, frosty manner by Ryu is a good foil for the film's more operatic villains. Playing greatly off one another, Cho and Ryu more or less make the film's risky climactic sequence work, which surely would have ruined the movie if tilted ever so slightly more toward a self-consciously melodramatic-confessional direction.

The film also deserves mention for containing some interesting supporting characters, one of the Lee Hae-young specialties, such as the deaf-mute brother-and-sister team of drug processors (Kim Dong-young and Lee Joo-young) who clearly treat Young-rak as more of a family member than a co-criminal, and Jo's female cop team member So-yeon (played by the very tall model Kang Seung-hyun), who is refreshingly not used as a comic relief and has the film's bloodiest fist- (and foot-) fight showdown with a gangster.

Believer is not really a slam-bang action film, although some of the set pieces, a few involving classic shoot-'em-ups between cops and gangsters, are pretty exciting and suitably violent. DP Kim Tae-gyung and Lighting Supervisor Hong Seung-cheol (Broken) as well as Production Designer Lee Ha-joon (Okja) and the art team do excellent work, the former keeping the palette just a touch excessive, without sliding into full-blown psychedelia, yet resolutely distinct from the blue-tinted art-gallery look of the usual, post-Michael Mann crime thrillers, and the latter pulling off some borderline-kitschy assignments such as setting up a state-of-the-art drug laboratory inside the Yongsan Station, of all places.

No doubt buoyed by its star power-- with most of its impressive cast in their full-throttle mode-- Believer scored 2018's first big domestic box office success, collecting 5.06 million tickets in approximately six weeks since its theatrical release in May 22, 2018. As I stated above, fans of Johnny To in his patented economical, precision-sniper mode might not see much to like here, but for me, the Korean not-quite-a-remake worked as a sort of cinematic graphic novel (this is not a put-down, just in case you are wondering), off-kilter and perhaps even borderline daft, but with some unexpected resonant character conflicts that pay off at the end. I am happy to check score one for Lee Hae-young, a talented screenwriter whose directorial effort had trouble escaping the alleged "minor" or "quirky" sensibility, whether such designation was fair or not, until now.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Illang: The Wolf Brigade

The Korean Peninsula, 2029 C.E.: The North and South Korean governments have set up a five-year plan for reunification, against objections of surrounding nations, plunging the South Korean society into an economic and political chaos. Im Joong-kyung (Kang Dong-won, Vanishing Time), a member of the elite Special Weapons Unit created within the police force, mired in controversy due to their accidental massacre of female high school students. Traumatized by the experience, Im hesitates before dispatching a teenage courier working for the armed rebel group known as the Sect. The girl commits suicide by triggering a bomb, but Im is given a memento of the dead girl by his Metropolitan Police Security Division friend Han Sang-woo (Kim Mu-yeol, Forgotten), to be delivered to the girl's sister Lee Yoon-hee (Han Hyo-joo, Cold Eyes). However, this was a ploy to set Im up as a fall guy. He and Lee become embroiled in a political struggle among the Special Weapons Unit, spearheaded by the battle-scarred Jang Jin-tae (Jung Woo-sung, Asura: The City of Madness), the Security Police and the Sect, all of whom are ready to resort to back-stabbing deceptions and cold-blooded murders to get what they want.

Financed by Warner Brothers Korea with a large budget (around twenty million dollars), Illang: The Wolf Brigade, adapted from the Japanese animation auteur Oshii Mamoru's multimedia "Kerberos Panzer Cop" series, especially the animated prequel Jin-roh: The Wolf Brigade (2009, directed by Okiura Hiroyuki based on Oshii's screenplay), has been one of the most highly anticipated Korean films of the year. The designated helmer, Kim Jee-woon (The Age of Shadows), is well known for his deep love for Japanese animation, and his eye for visual splendor and propensity for elaborate set pieces were considered strong assets in transporting the unique texture of the high-end Japanese animation into live-action cinema, the task at which Japanese filmmakers have not excelled over the years, to say the least. For every serviceable adaptation like Miike Takashi's Yatterman or Anno Hideaki's Cutey Honey, there are half a dozen unmitigated disasters like Gatchman, Devilman and Iron Giant No. 28, so it is not surprising that Oshii and his production company were willing to place a bet on an internationally recognized Korean cineaste.

On the other hand, there were legitimate concerns about whether Oshii's highly idiosyncratic, intellectually sophisticated, some might call pretentious, approach to the medium of anime could be turned into the kind of crowd-pleasing summer blockbuster that Warners Korea was obviously hoping for. Jin-roh is well known for its deep-dish critique of the complacency of postwar Japanese democracy (Oshii set his manga/animation/live-action film series in an alternative universe in which Japan had been a part of Allied Powers and became occupied by the victorious Nazi Germany instead of the U.S. after 1945) as well as its notoriously downbeat resolution, its message being dehumanization of a decent person in a militarized society constantly beset by baroque political struggles. To make things worse, the Hollywood remake of Oshii's magnum opus, Ghost in the Shell (2017), did not exactly inspire confidence in the Illang project. The U.S. version jettisons the entire philosophical contents of the original animation film and replaces it with a turgid, "humanistic" storyline that could be read as a bizarre quasi-apologia for corporate whitewashing of the Japanese animation in the form of casting Scarlett Johansson in the lead.

Personally, the needle in my "uh-oh" meter swerved into the red area when I found out that Illang would be set in Korea of the near future, sure to bring in the entirely unwelcome nationalistic-jingoistic mindset, a cliché for a post-Cold War Korean action thriller but utterly inappropriate for the cerebrally sullen Weltanschauung of an Oshii Mamoru signature piece. I was beginning to dread the possibility of Illang ending up as pointless as a Jerry Bruckheimer action blockbuster "based on" Joseph Heller's Catch 22.

While the end product is not quite a nightmare on such a scale, it nonetheless appears to me-- perhaps an extended director's cut might change my opinion later--, Kim and his co-screenwriter Jeon Cheol-hong never truly understood the point, political or otherwise, of Jin-roh. Nor did they seem to have had the conviction to take the necessary leaps of imagination in transplanting the original's premise in the Korean soil. Instead, we have yet another tiresome glut of "victim nationalist" (the noted historian Im Jie-hyun's term) narration that blames all social ills of a future Korea on foreign powers, and half-baked references to "unification," as if Im and Lee were tragic lovers representing the North and South under the Cold War regimes (They are not. In fact Northerners and other foreigners do not figure at all in the film, even as cardboard bad guys).

What Illang needed was a genuinely challenging set of (SF) visions, such as, for instance, setting its story in an alternative timeline in which Korea had been colonized by a white supremacist United States or a czarist Russia instead of the imperialist Japan. As it stands, fidelity to the original's predominantly German literary reference-- the disturbing "folktale" ending of The Little Red Riding Hood serves as an allegory of the completion of the dehumanization process for the Kerberos Panzer Cops-- makes little sense except as calling cards toward the Japanese original, rendering Han Hyo-ju's tearful rendering of the Riding Hood story in the climax faintly ridiculous.<[> This is too bad, since, as a live-action reconstruction of Jin-roh, Illang actually does a superb job. The Kerberos forces (never referred to as such in the Korean version, despite fleeting glimpses of the three-headed hound emblem) are robustly materialized here as futuristic, cybernetic beings with the just right hint of Orwellian decadence. An early sequence in which a phalanx of these armored warriors annihilating the ragtag guerrillas of the Sect in a sewer corridor exudes a powerful sense of fascist foreboding and menace, the cops spitting out lethal bullets like spurts of white flame from their dark, conjoined metal bodies that seem to melt into the underground darkness. A few scenes, such as a direct-overhead shot in which the SWU agents zero in on Lee while winds percolate around them into a small tornado, or the jolting drone attack inside the Namsan Tower's viewing room, are striking in their eruptions of lyricism and beauty amidst suspense and kinetic excitement.

Production values are mostly excellent, with the multiple-award winning veterans Production Designer Cho Hwa-sung (The Age of Shadows, Vanishing Time) and DP Lee Mo-gae (The Battleship Island) leading the fray in meticulously realizing a credible dystopian near-future Korea. Even Mowg (Burning)'s music is uncommonly effective for a big-budget Korean film, making a great use out of the industrial noise-like electronic music to add a layer of anxiety and suspense to the proceedings.

The talented cast, on the other hand, is by and large underused, stuck with inadequately developed or misconceived characters. Kim Mu-yeol's Han starts out okay but quickly degenerates into a typical Korean thriller villain whose only responses to the unfolding events are exasperation, anger and some more exasperation, accompanied by threats and acts of physical harm toward his victims, and when they are in short supply, his underlings. Han Hyo-ju's character uncomfortably oscillates between the original's Little Red Riding Hood stand-in and the Hollywoodized archetype of a female protagonist, and is given cringe-worthy romantic outbursts that remind viewers of one of Kim Jee-woon's weakest traits, namely, not knowing when to turn off the faucet. Jung Woo-sung manages to maintain his dignity, but Jang has been "softened" from his equivalent in Jin-roh for no discernible reason: maybe Kim wanted to play up a bromance angle between Jung and Kang Dong-won.

As for Kang's performance as Im, this stoic soldier who internalizes most of his psychological conflicts is not the kind of role the super-handsome star could really sink his teeth in. Moreover, there is little chemistry between him and Han Hyo-ju, one of the film's most glaring defects. Frankly, if Im had been written as gay, and in a romantic relationship with Jang, the moral dilemma he faces at the end might have come off as compelling, as he would have to choose his humanity over his "love," instead of what we actually have in the film, wherein he is forced to choose between his "love" and¡¦ what? His loyalty to the nation? His identity as an elite cop? It is no wonder that Kang's performance in these scenes is less than gripping.

Illang pulled in 895,500 tickets in approximately two weeks, a disappointing record for such a big-budgeted film, beset by a wave of negative words-of-mouth that prompted one cast member to publicly accuse some viewers of engaging in malicious internet campaign to kill the film's box office prospects. The audiences outside South Korea will have a chance to judge its merits for themselves as a Netflix presentation. Frankly, those non-Korean viewers indifferent to Korean/Japanese histories and/or their convoluted postwar politics might be able to enjoy the film more, as a sheer sensual experience (The hard-core fans of Jin-roh, on the other hand, should come with their expectations lowered, although I reiterate that Illang comes off as a superior production compared to most Japanese-language live-action adaptations of the classic manga/anime available out there).

Mannered, superficial, over-emotive, derivative of other great classic films, or whatnot, Kim Jee-woon, when riding high in the wind, has always offered something intensely pleasurable for the connoisseurs of contemporary cinema. Some viewers have criticized the framing device for his A Bittersweet Life (2005) as arch and self-indulgent, but I have always felt that the character arc of Lee Byung-heon's Sun-woo in that film makes good sense, even comes across as genuinely touching. I surmise that he wanted to try something similar with Kang Dong-won's Im Joong-kyung here, but it simply falls flat this time, partly because Jin-roh/Illang was just too top-heavy as a material to start with, and partly because he (and his producers, most likely) has not thought through how bold or prudent he should have been in adapting the Japanese source.

It is not a happy situation that Kim, one of New Korean Cinema's premier stylists, is still struggling to find a project that allows his creative juices to flow and yet also ensures his survival in the Social Darwinist blockbuster-as-apex-predator industrial environment of today. Granted, I have some serious problems with his attitudes toward Korean "history" and "politics," but this is not an issue confined to just him. I can only wish that he could find a new venture sooner than later, that plays to his strengths instead of putting him in a box, as Illang regrettably ended up doing in the end.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Spy Gone North

The year is 1993, right before South Korea is to embark on a fateful transition to a civilian democratic government under President Kim Young-sam. A crack military intelligence officer, Park Seok-young (Hwang Jeong-min, The Wailing), is recruited by a KCIA honcho Choe Hak-seong (Jo Jin-woong, Believer), who has learned from the Americans that North Korea is secretly developing a nuclear power program. Park, code-namded Black Venus, becomes a deep cover agent tasked with finding out the truth about the regime's nuclear development, assuming the identity of an amoral international businessman willing to conduct business with Northerners via his contacts in Beijing. With practiced displays of both capitalist callousness and companionable sincerity (not entirely fake on his part), he becomes close to Ri Myong-un (Lee Seong-min, Sori: Voice from the Heart), a Northern government official in charge of foreign economic outreach, in other words, laundering, raking and scooping stacks of dollar bills into North Korea with whatever means at his disposal from beyond the country's barbed-wire curtain. Park is harassed by a suspicious Northern security officer (Joo Ji-hoon, Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds) and goes through a few harrowing crunches, but eventually manages to win the trust of the higher-ups in North Korea, including the Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il himself (amusingly played by the virtually unrecognizable Ki Joo-bong). However, to his consternation, Park uncovers a clandestine deal being worked out by the Northern and Southern security forces, that seeks to undermine democratic process in the upcoming 1997 election in the South.

The Spy Gone North is the fifth feature film directed by Yoon Jong-bin, whose early works, The Unforgiven, Beastie Boys and Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time, are united in their unflinching exposition and sharp critique of the masculine pathologies and hypocrisies of South Korean society. Watching his films, it is impossible for most Korean men to evade those moments that generate bitter smiles or uncomfortable coughs of recognition. Only his latest work, Kundo: The Age of Rampant (2014), a kind of South-of-the-border bandidos Western transplanted to an early modern Korean setting, felt somewhat anonymous and politically timid, muting down his own individualistic perspective in favor of the (unimaginative) conventions of a period action piece. Thankfully, his latest effort, a robust commercial hit with 4.9 million tickets sold as of October 2018, has him on top form again, confidently wrangling an unusually complex plot and extracting great, non-show-off-y performances out of his talented cast (his perennial collaborator Ha Jung-woo is notably missing this time).

Yoon, working from a screenplay he co-authored with Kwon Seong-hwi (Ghost Sweepers) adapting the real-life Black Venus Park Chae-seo's jaw-dropping memoirs, maintains a deliberate pace in unspooling the increasingly amazing story of Park's double life, refraining from the common mistake of radically compressing narrative details for fear of inducing boredom on the part of viewers. The movie is pretty long at 2 hours and 17 minutes, and, to be fair, it should not be mistaken for a rousing Tom Cruise vehicle-type action extravaganza. There is a strong '70s Sidney Lumet- Alan J. Pakula vibe to the proceedings, but Yoon refuses to herd his viewers toward easy emotional identification with the beleaguered protagonist Park and his Northern partner-in-cloak-and-dagger, Ri, allowing these characters to gradually earn the viewer's admiration and sympathy. Yoon's patient approach brings the best out of both Hwang and Lee as performers. Hwang is completely believable as an idealistic, intelligent agent with the outward shell of a greedy, craven loudmouth, but the movie's moral compass really belongs to Lee. The latter gives a restrained yet powerful performance, one of the best in his distinguished supporting-actor career, subtly conveying the seasoned Northern official's essential decency, nonetheless callused by years of living under an oppressive condition into an almost instinctual form of hardboiled skepticism.

The Spy Gone North is also noteworthy for its thoughtful, historically astute approach to North-South relations, all the more evident when compared to other fancier and slicker espionage thrillers such as The Berlin File and Steel Rain. Whereas these films end up using North-South relations as basically a local setting or elements of a plot to foreground or thread together established genre conventions, Yoon does the opposite. He starts with all the ingredients of an ordinary spy thriller and gradually chips away at them, until, by the climax, The Spy ends up persuasively showing just how strange and unfamiliar North-South relations in fact are. For sure, he shows little hesitation in presenting North Korea as a racketeer-capitalist regime (Rolex watches, both real and fake, serve as totems of financial voodoo) that it has become, with ludicrously irrelevant vestiges of Communist ideals bandied about by the powers-that-be, while the population is reduced into living skeletons by the massive famines of the '90s. Instead of culminating in a "progressive" position speech reiterating that Southerners should be nicer and kinder to the North, The Spy mounts a totally persuasive portrayal of a partnership, that grows into a genuine friendship, between Park and Ri, based in no small part on their healthy distrust of the powers they ostensibly serve, as well as their respect for each other's professionalism and commitment to making things just plain work. The hollering and screeching "we are brothers" (macho) ethnic nationalism has little place in this picture: it is a delicious, and if you think about it, provocative, irony that this spy film ends with a press junket about a phone commercial with the superstar Lee Hyo-ri replicating her real-life 2005 appearance for the film.

The Spy's technical accomplishments and production quality do not loudly declare themselves but are nonetheless top-notch. DP Choe Chan-min's (Private Eye, Kundo) cinematography and Yoo Seok-mun's lighting cannily recreate the lugubrious shadows of '90s Chinese hotel corridors and drab Korean office rooms. Park Il-hyun's (A Violent Prosecutor) production design is particularly remarkable, recreating '90s South Korean ambience with overwhelmingly convincing detail. There are several set pieces that stand out, showcasing Yoon's stunning orchestration of the overachieving contributions of the staff, including Park's "audience" with Kim Jong-il, presented as an absurd mixture of Caligula, Napoleon Bonaparte and Cruella De Ville, and scored to the sepulchral tunes of Dies Irae by composer Jo Young-wook.

The Spy Gone North perhaps does not break new cinematic ground, but is, in its limber but persistent way, determined to avoid action-movie or thriller clichés about North-South relations and to make sense of the genuine human toll that the surreal ideological-political chess games the powerholders play with one another has taken throughout the postwar history of the peninsula (and thereby demonstrating a sophisticated level of historical consciousness, miles removed from the Warner Brothers cartoon perspectives of Korean history displayed by such domestic hits as Steel Rain). Quietly witty, well aware of the banal absurdity of the peninsula's politics, but neither self-satisfied nor condescending, the film is a satisfying return to form for Yoon Jong-bin.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Last Child

As Last Child opens, married couple Sung-chul and Mi-sook are lost in grief. Six months earlier, their only son died while jumping into a river trying to save a friend. The boy has been posthumously recognized as a hero, and his parents have decided to establish a scholarship in his name. But the emptiness left in his wake overwhelms them.

One day Sung-chul starts to ask after Gil-hyun, the boy who was saved by his son. (The Korean title of this film can be translated as, "The boy who was left alive".) Gil-hyun has apparently dropped out of high school and vanished. But Sung-chul manages to track him down at a restaurant where he works making deliveries. Their conversation is almost unbearably awkward. Gil-hyun can hardly even look into the eyes of the father whose son died on his behalf. But we also see that Gil-hyun is desperate and completely alone in the world, living without his parents, with only a minimum-wage job to support himself. Sung-chul gives him his phone number and tells him to call if he ever needs help, though the boy just looks anxious to get away.

Some days later, however, Sung-chul's phone rings in the middle of the night. Gil-hyun is at the police station, accused by his boss of stealing the restaurant's motorbike. He insists he is innocent. Sung-chul pays for the bike and buys the boy some dinner, then on impulse - or perhaps this was already running through his mind? - he offers Gil-hyun a job at his small interior decorating company. The next day, without telling his wife, he starts teaching Gil-hyun how to apply wallpaper.

Last Child is a film you watch with your heart in your mouth, pretty much all the way through. The three protagonists are all fragile and hurting in different ways, each of them driven forward by an unbearable pain and emptiness inside them. The question is, will being in each other's presence help them to heal, or will it only intensify the pain?

Director Shin Dong-seok has rightly received a lot of attention for this, his debut feature, which premiered at the 2017 Busan International Film Festival. His directorial style is never flashy, and never distracts from the narrative, but he knows how to propel the story forward and maintain tension between the characters. The final scene seems to divide viewers, with some calling it the perfect ending, and others considering it the movie's biggest weak point (I am, I have to say, in the latter category). But even those who dislike the ending have voiced praise for the work overall.

Choi Moo-seong, who plays the father Sung-chul, has appeared in close to 30 films since making his debut in 2005, but this is a rare case where he is given the opportunity to take a leading role. He can be a somewhat intimidating screen presence, but he is also just as effective at showing compassion, and we see both sides of him in this role. Kim Yeo-jin, who plays the mother Mi-sook, first established herself with roles in Girls' Night Out (1998) and Peppermint Candy (1999), and her years of experience translate into an unusually raw and touching performance. But the youngest among the leading actors is no less impressive. Seong Yu-bin, having started his career as a child actor, has a fair amount of acting experience himself, and it's the combination of his vulnerability and our inability to read his thoughts, that most effectively pulls the audience into the film.

In the end, Last Child is not so much about the process of recovering from trauma or family tragedy, as it is a portrayal of how complicated and intense human relationships can be under extreme circumstances. You feel that the director is making a real effort to tell this story in an honest way, and that's what gives the film its considerable impact.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Monstrum

Early 16th century, Joseon dynasty Korea: following the coup that unseated the notorious tyrant Yeonsangun, the new king Jungjong (a real-life Joseon king, reign years from 1506 to 1544, played here by Park Hee-soon, The Age of Shadows) has trouble holding onto his power, beset by social unrest and a plague, which he suspects is a part of a treasonous senior minister's (Lee Gyeung-young, The Battleship Island) scheme to usurp the throne. In addition, he now has to contend with the reports of a vicious monster, leaving gruesome, gory aftermaths of torn and half-eaten bodies for the perplexed officials. The king, still unsure that the monster really exists, enlists the help of Yun-gyeom (Kim Myung-min, Pandora), the former Captain of the elite Royal Guard, now exiled and leading an anonymous life as a game hunter, to investigate the matter. The latter is joined by his partner Seong-han (Kim In-kwon, The Himalayas), his adopted daughter Yun-myeong (Lee Hye-ri of K-Pop group Girl's Day) and the young Royal Guard member Heo (Choi Woo-sik, Set Me Free) sent by the king as a liaison officer. Yun-gyeom's initial conclusion is that the monster is likely a fabrication in order to stir up discontent among the masses against the reigning monarch. However, he and his brave company soon learn in a hard way that not only does the monster exist for real, it is also very much a product of the past sins of Joseon's ruling classes.

Monstrum, based on a discontinued webtoon series by the screenwriter Heo Dam, was originally attached to Director Shin Jeong-won (Chaw, The Ghost Sweepers) with Jung Woo-sung in the role of Yun-gyeom, but eventually handed down to Huh Jong-ho (Countdown, The Advocate: A Missing Body) and Kim Myung-min slipping into the star seat. The film's premise is derived from an actual line in court chronicles of the Jungjong era, wherein a "strange beast that looks like a hairy dog about the size of a pony" was seen as running around roaring loudly, supposedly witnessed by a multitude of subjects, including soldiers. Costing upward of 11 million dollars to produce, this Taewon Entertainment (Operation Chromite) production had the strong backing of Lotte but managed to collect approximately 720 thousand tickets, not enough to break even.

The film received mostly terrible reviews, but, while ultimately disappointed, I did not find it such an abject failure. Director Huh does a workman's job of keeping the kettle boiling, not revealing the monster in full until more than halfway point of the film, aided by the DP Kim Dong-young (Helpless) and LD Kim Hyeong-yong (Minority Opinion)'s darkly moody cinematography that favors natural lighting and Mowg's jittery, nerve-wracking score. The visual scheme emphasizes precariously sloping terrains and deep pools of darkness in the ravines and underground caverns, painting in broad brushstrokes a society consumed from inside by unspoken anxieties and secret hostilities. The monster itself, resembling a souped-up, zombified version of haetae (a supernatural lion-like beast that guards the Kyongbok Palace), realized by a host of special effects team led by Hong Jang-pyo (Steel Rain), Mofac Studio (Memories of the Sword) and CELL (Okja), is actually not bad, imbued with appropriate levels of ferocity and menace, and by the end of movie, a certain degree of pathos. Unlike a sizable number of Korean viewers, I thought its origin story and behavioral traits were fairly well realized. It ain't Godzilla, for sure, but let's face it: the majority of monsters in the dedicated creature features churned out in North America (or the world) are pretty awful. I certainly prefer this overgrown lion-puppy over the woman-eating oversized gorilla in Rampage, for instance.

The real problems with Monstrum lie, again, in its screenplay. For one, it is too reminiscent of the South Korea's top monster pic, The Host (2006), all the way up to a pretty heroine who fights both human enemies and the eponymous beastie with bows and arrows. An even bigger issue is the film's unimaginative engagement with the conventions of the Korean period pieces set in the Joseon dynasty. The red herrings about the reality of the monster are less than intriguing, and the palace conspiracy angle has been done to death. The cast could have been enlivened, too, if the screenplay had given them less archetypal characters. Neither Kim Myung-min nor Lee Gyeong-young manages to leave a strong impression, their roles such clichés that these veterans could have played them half asleep. However, director Huh deserves some credit for reigning in ludicrous "comic reliefs" (allowing Kim In-kwon to act like a normal human being rather than a cartoon figure, for one).

With apologies to Director Huh, I cannot help but speculate what Monstrum could have been had Shin Jeong-won, one of the rare Korean directors with the wacky-crazy sensibility tailor-made for a genre hybrid like this project, been allowed to run with it. Technically, it might still not have been much superior to what we have, but the stultifying period piece clichés that end up sapping the movie's strengths might have also been jettisoned. As it stands, Monstrum does meet the baseline expectations of a good ol' creature feature, but unfortunately that is pretty much all it is good for.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Great Battle

By this point, Korean filmmakers (and the scriptwriters for TV dramas) have left very few stones unturned in their search through modern and classical Korean history for movie ideas. Like the Hollywood studios with comic book characters, the Korean film industry has combed through every available historical source for people and events that might be turned into the next blockbuster hit.

In the case of The Great Battle, it was a mere three lines of text in the historical annals that formed the basis for this $20 million film. In the year 645, the legendary Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty personally led an attack on the Goguryeo kingdom (37 BCE-668), which was centered in the northern regions of the Korean peninsula. After a series of victories, the Tang army attempted to seize the fortress in Ansi City (which is actually part of modern-day China, but it was controlled by Goguryeo then). Despite having a much bigger army, the fortress defenses proved to be much more than the Emperor bargained for.

Essentially, The Great Battle is a classic underdog story, with the leader of the forces in Ansi Fortress, played by Zo In-sung, using clever planning, quick thinking and ingenuity to fight against a much stronger enemy. Not only that, Goguryeo's main forces based in Pyongyang view the fighters in Ansi City with deep suspicion, so there's not much help available from them, either. In one sense, the plot of this film is extremely simple: once it gets warmed up, it's just an extended series of battle scenes. But director Kim Kwang-sik, in his first attempt at a big-budget blockbuster (his previous two films were My Dear Desperado and Tabloid Truth), creates enough interesting characters and subplots to keep the audience engaged.

Although the cast list for this movie seems to stretch on forever, with famous character actors, former models, K-pop stars and grizzled veterans all vying for attention, it is Zo In-sung (The King, A Dirty Carnival) who takes center stage. As the fortress commander Yang Man-chun, he projects leadership, resourcefulness and physicality in a convincing and entertaining performance. By contrast, the film's second lead played by the hugely popular TV star Nam Joo-hyuk (Cheese in the Trap) ends up looking a bit overshadowed by the end.

There is a certain kind of aesthetic to the ideal summer blockbuster. Even though The Great Battle was pushed out of the peak summer season by the likes of Illang: The Wolf Brigade, Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days, and The Spy Gone North, and forced to open in September, it fits the template of a spectacle-driven summer blockbuster better than any of its competitors. Sure enough, it enjoyed decent word of mouth and ended up as the second-highest grossing Korean film of the year with 5.4 million admissions.

It would be a stretch to say that The Great Battle is exceptionally well made. But it is big, exciting, and filled with genuinely impressive spectacle. Director Kim manages to ratchet up the action in an engaging way throughout its 135-minute running time. The climax is properly epic. One shouldn't expect to gain any insights into Asian or Korean history through this film, but one can safely expect to have fun.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Intimate Strangers

A group of friends meet up one night for a dinner party. The hosts -- a psychiatrist played by Kim Ji-soo (This Charming Girl) and her plastic surgeon husband (Cho Jin-woong, Believer) -- have recently moved into a lavish apartment. When the other guests arrive at their home, a familiar sort of mood is established: relaxed and friendly, since many of them have known each other from childhood, and yet with tension beneath the surface, as their lives have diverged in uncomfortable ways in middle age. In one sense, they know each other intimately. But -- as with all friendships, or even marriages -- there are sides of themselves that they would never think of showing each other.

What might have been just another ordinary evening is given a jolt when the psychiatrist proposes a sort of game. Each of them are to put their mobile phones up onto the table, and whenever a message or call arrives, they are to share it with the rest of the group. Messages are to be read aloud, and calls put on speaker phone. It's more of a dare than a game, really, but each guest finds it hard to object too strongly without looking like a person who harbors guilty secrets. So they all agree to it out loud, while at the same time privately hoping that nothing too embarrassing comes out at dinner.

A remake of the very popular Italian film Perfect Strangers (2016), Intimate Strangers has been described jokingly by many Korean viewers as a kind of horror movie. After all, few things are more frightening than having your inner secrets exposed. A well-structured script (that sticks close to the original), sharp execution by director Lee Jae-kyoo (Fatal Encounter, TV drama Beethoven Virus) and a knockout cast make for a film that is bursting with tension and consistently intriguing. Released at the end of October, the modestly-budgeted movie benefitted from strong word of mouth and sold more than 5 million tickets.

There's no question that this ensemble work benefits from strong acting across the board, with an experienced cast that includes Yeom Jeong-ah (A Tale of Two Sisters), Lee Seo-jin (Damo), Song Ha-yoon (Dangerously Excited), and Yoon Gyeong-ho (Okja). But somehow it is Yoo Hae-jin (A Taxi Driver) in the role of an uptight husband in a tension-filled marriage who has made the biggest impression on viewers. This is not because his acting outshines the others -- he knows better than to attempt that sort of thing. But it's true that when thinking back on this film, it's his natural, heartfelt performance that jumps most immediately to mind.

Probably the average Korean viewer would tell you that the situations portrayed in this story feel very specific to Korea, given its reputation as one of the most wired nations on earth. But in truth, this is probably more a testament to the story's universality. In just two years, remakes of Perfect Strangers have been released or announced in Spain (by Alex de la Iglesia!), France, Turkey, Mexico, India, Germany, Sweden and Qatar. (English-language remake rights, purchased by the now-defunct Weinstein Company, are currently in limbo.)

Clearly the central concept of this film hits a nerve for contemporary audiences. It illustrates how technology, and mobile phones in particular, have nestled into our lives to the point that they hold our most intimate secrets. (The fact that large corporations have access to these secrets is something that the plot leaves unexplored). On the other hand, the filmmakers' observation that any person is composed of three separate selves - public, private and secret - has been true to the human condition for millennia. So Intimate/Perfect Strangers has found success with an effective blend of the timely and the universal. Certainly it's been exciting to see such an idea-driven, modestly produced film connect so strongly with audiences, and together with Bohemian Rhapsody it ranks as the event film of the season.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Unstoppable

Kang Dong-cheol is a former gang member who was once legendary for his powerful fists. But in recent years, he has renounced his lawless past and found a new life with his smart and outspoken wife Ji-soo. They are a close and affectionate couple, though they struggle with debt, and Dong-cheol's greatest weakness is his susceptibility to questionable get-rich-quick schemes. At the start of the film, another "business opportunity" is offered to Dong-cheol, who is having trouble saying no.

Despite his obvious physical strength, Dong-cheol has a soft heart: he is basically a large teddy bear. But a chance encounter with some very bad people leads to a change in mood. Eventually, the scheming head of a human trafficking operation decides to target Ji-soo. When Dong-cheol learns that his wife has been abducted, a powerful sense of rage that has lain dormant within him for years suddenly erupts.

The runaway success of Train to Busan (2016) and The Outlaws (2017) has turned the actor Ma Dong-seok (a.k.a. Don Lee) into practically his own industry. In 2018 alone he was the leading actor in five films: arm wrestling drama Champion, crime drama Wonderful Ghost, blockbuster Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days, thriller The Neighbors, and now Unstoppable. Among that group, the most entertaining and dramatically satisfying by far is this action film by debut director Kim Min-ho. Although comparisons to Liam Neeson's Taken series are inevitable, Unstoppable spends more time developing its characters, and features a different mix of action vs. emotion.

The Korean title of this movie is "Raging Bull," and that adequately describes the style of fighting we get here: powerful, compact blows that accomplish their objective in a single swing or two. It's a perfect vehicle for Ma Dong-seok: not quite as dark and vicious as the action in The Outlaws, but with something of the heart he shows in Train to Busan. Director Kim shows a good instinct for pacing, giving the story time to develop before kicking into motion. In this case, the contrast between the jokey humor and character building of the early scenes make the later action setpieces feel more dynamic.

The film also benefits greatly from the casting of its second lead. Song Ji-hyo has created a very distinctive screen and TV persona since her debut in the horror film Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs back in 2003. More than anything, her eyes project a fierce intelligence that gives an edge to any character she plays. This quality prevents her from coming across as a typical damsel in distress, and makes Unstoppable feel less like the story of a man trying to rescue his wife, and more like two members of a strong partnership struggling to get back together.

In the end, Unstoppable is exactly what it what it promises to be: entertaining, kinetic, with a bit of humor and large doses of sentiment. It doesn't break any new ground, or subvert any genre conventions, but the end result is no less satisfying. In a year when Ma Dong-seok seemed in danger of spreading himself too thin, and appearing in too many weakly-constructed dramas, he has redeemed himself in this fun showcase of his considerable talent.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Default

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, South Korea prided itself more than anything else on its economic growth. The export-led economic expansion, dubbed "the miracle on the Han River," had lifted the country from poverty to a place among the world's most developed economies. This had been accomplished through great personal sacrifice on the part of ordinary workers, but by the mid-1990s, citizens were finally able to enjoy some of the fruits of their labor.

This is why the financial crisis of 1997, which resulted in a $58 billion bailout by the International Monetary Fund, was such a humiliating and traumatic event. Its effect on the middle class was devastating, and it left the Korean economy forever altered. In particular, the economic "shock therapy" required by the IMF as a condition of the bailout had a lasting impact on many millions of lives.

Default (the original Korean title - "The Day the Nation Went Bankrupt" - is a bit more dramatic) revisits the crisis, from a historical and critical perspective. Director Choi Kook-hee (Split) wished not only to give younger generation viewers a vivid birds-eye understanding of this event, which they will have heard about from their parents, but also to look into the circumstances under which the bailout package was negotiated. In this sense, it shares some things in common with Hollywood film The Big Short, combining drama with a sort of journalistic expose.

The plot focuses on several (fictional) characters who provide multiple perspectives on the crisis. One of those heroes will seem familiar to anyone who has watched The Big Short. Yoo Ah-in plays a brilliant young financial trader who, intuiting that a meltdown is coming, pitches his expertise to investors who wish to bet against the economy. Yoo's acting is a bit more erratic and unhinged than what he displayed in Burning (2018), but his lectures to his clients are illuminating. Far more heartbreaking is the story of Gap-soo (veteran Huh Joon-ho), a small business owner who, after being pressured by a corporate client to take out a risky loan, has to shoulder the responsibility when things go wrong. This is the most moving section of Default, and really helps to illustrate the human cost of the crisis.

The third major character is a policy researcher at the Bank of Korea, played with focused intensity by the very talented Kim Hye-soo. She, more than anyone else, understands the depths of the crisis, and what needs to be done in order to limit the damage. But her common-sense proposals are rejected by senior figures in the government, who seem less concerned with protecting ordinary citizens than with shifting the blame elsewhere. When the economy starts to spiral towards disaster, she is present to witness first hand the negotiations that take place between Korea's finance ministry and the head of the IMF, played with a greasy arrogance by acclaimed French actor Vincent Cassel.

It's not an easy thing to depict such complicated economic and political developments in a two-hour film, but Default effectively conveys the panic, desperation and lack of leadership which characterized that moment. While it can't provide the level of detail and insight that a non-fiction book might offer, what it does give us are enduring portraits of the people forced to suffer the consequences of a government's cruel incompetence.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Door Lock

Kyung-min (Gong Hyo-jin, Missing) is an attractive, twenty-something bank teller living in a small studio apartment by herself. A temp worker up for a transfer to a full-time position, she suffers from overwork and chronic fatigue, guiltily snatching cat-naps during work hours. Shy and considerate, she is good friends with a more rambunctious co-worker Hyo-joo (musical actress Kim Ye-won) but is constantly subject to belittling treatment by her superiors as well as harassment by a super-creepy customer Ki-jung (Jo Bok-nae, Roaring Currents). She experiences vague feelings that she is being watched over, too, but brushes them off as just nerves. However, beginning with a panicky episode involving her section chief and a cup of coffee, the situation rapidly mutates into a murder case, with the police detective (Kim Seong-o, The Merciless) eyeing her as a possible suspect. Afraid for her life, Kyung-min enlists Hyo-joo's help to start her own investigation. The trail of clues seems to lead to a missing co-worker Seung-hye (Han Jee-eun, Rampant), who happens to be renting a room in the same apartment as Kyung-min's. However, she is not prepared for the devastating truth behind all this mayhem, including the real reasons behind her fatigue.

Door Lock, another South Korean adaptation of a contemporary Spanish-language thriller, this time Jaume Balaguero's Sleep Tight (2011), produced for approximately three million dollars by a newbie production company Pieona, was one of the more commercially successful genre films of the last quarter of 2018, raking in more than 1.5 million tickets (thus breaking even in the box office) and strongly supported by the target demographic of young to middle-aged female viewers. Gong Hyo-jin, following her acclaimed performance as a Korean-Chinese nanny with a dark past in Missing, proved again her ability to commercially carry a film. Not exactly coincidentally, this film happens to be directed by Lee Kwon (My Ordinary Love Story), the husband of Missing's director Lee Eon-hee (The Accidental Detective), who had reportedly suggested that the lead role be offered to Gong.

Apparently it required some effort to convince Gong to take on the character of Kyung-min, super sympathetic but moderate in terms of both outlook and social attitude, since the actress's previous choices for cinematic roles (as opposed to her TV drama roles) have leaned toward indie sensibilities and quirky, commercially risky characters (best represented by her lead role in Lee Kyoung-mee's Crush and Blush). However, Gong, despite her lanky frame and model-like poise, has little difficulty projecting vulnerability and anxiety to viewers. It is largely due to her sensitive performance that Kyung-min comes off neither as a passive damsel in distress nor a cartoonishly plucky working girl version of Nancy Drew. She is quite heartbreaking when tearfully apologizing to her friend for embroiling her in the nightmarish situation, and extremely believable in her expressions of bewilderment, frustration and ultimately resignation at the men-- bank superiors, customers, police detectives-- who continue to blame her for the very troubles caused and abetted by their aggression, prejudice and indifference.

Like Bedevilled (2010), Door Lock is almost surreptitiously feminist without deviating too much from its genre-bound qualities. Its considerable suspense is generated by situations tailor-made to remind many unmarried South Korean working women of the real-life dangers to which they are uniquely vulnerable: the anonymous stalking, the randy, supposedly "trivial" intrusion into one's private space by male co-workers and clientele, the sudden shaking of a studio apartment door in the middle of the night. Another admirable aspect of Lee's directorial approach is its restraint: even though the film eventually slips in horrific plot details involving acts of Grand Guignol-like corporeal mutilation, he refuses to salaciously dwell on these elements, instead focusing on Gong and the other actors' reactions to underscore their full-blown horror.

As was the case with, say, Office (2015) or Bluebeard (2017), the film features a "cold," bluish color palette to generate a sense of isolation and urban anxiety, expertly realized by DP Park Jung-hoon (The Villainess) and DL Lee Je-woo (My Ordinary Love Story). Dalparan's effective score ranges from avant-garde percussion to variations on Erik Satie, again underscoring the fragmentation of the communal bonds and neuroses of the haunted characters. The film's main weakness is its somewhat rudimentary whodunit mystery (it is not difficult to figure out who the real culprit is, if you have seen your share of classic mystery movies), although its climax, that evokes both The Shining and The Silence of the Lambs without ladling the hommage gravy on too thick, works pretty well, again focusing on Kyung-min's struggle to overcome the clutches of the perpetrator rather than on the latter's superhuman villainy, as in a garden-variety slasher horror.

Door Lock is a welcome surprise, in that the project description leads one to expect a rather generic thriller in the mode of an '80s slasher pic with women as random victims of a creatively insane serial killer. Those elements are in fact dutifully present in the finished film, but they are subordinate to a cool, level-headed rumination on the key moment of social anxiety for female South Korean viewers, which goes a long way to explain why it was so well received by the latter. A genre thriller with a brain and a pair of keenly observant eyes, Door Lock in the end is an excellent showcase for Gong's versatility and prowess as a bankable female star, as well as a vindication of director Lee's faith in his own "coldly rational" proclivities.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Swing Kids

The movie opens with a mock newsreel describing the Geoje [Koje] POW camp circa 1951, where approximately 150,000 North Korean prisoners of the Korean War (along with 20,000 PRC soldiers) were incarcerated. The prison camp became notoriously dangerous when the pro-South Korean "converted" among the DPRK prisoners, egged on by the fiercely anti-Communist Syngman Rhee regime, and those still loyal to the Northern regime started fighting among themselves, leading to horrid bloodshed. At one point the UN Forces camp commander General Francis Dodd was held hostage by a band of insurrectionary prisoners, one of the more embarrassing propaganda blunders for the South during the grueling peninsula war.

Following these (real-life) agitations, the (fictional) new camp commander Roberts (Ross Kettle) decides to try a soft sell, discovering a former Broadway tap dancer Jackson (Jared Grimes) among the guards and twisting his arm to organize a dance team consisting of Northern prisoners. Not a bad idea for counter-propaganda, showing the Korean Commies succumbing to the fun and joy of American capitalist entertainment: except, how could Jackson realistically find anyone among North Korean POWs who could tap to '50s American tunes? After a series of shenanigans, he manages to enlist Byung-sam (Oh Jung-se, Fabricated City), an expert in traditional Korean festive dance; the Chinese soldier Xiao Fang (the comedian Kim Min-ho); and Yang Pan-rae (Park Hye-su, Will You Be There?), a novice "Yankee Princess" who also lands the job as an interpreter. However, the biggest prize for Jackson may be Ro Ki-soo (Do Kyung-soo, best known as D.O. of the K-pop group EXO), a young North Korean soldier whose brother Ki-jin is worshipped by the camp prisoners as a war hero.

I had perhaps unrealistically high expectations for Swing Kids going in, because I have long championed the musical as a genre that New Korean Cinema could do something great with. Even before the global mega-success of K-pop, it has been obvious that singing and dancing have always been something South Koreans love to death: but for some reason, they have never been adequately represented in motion pictures. This is additionally frustrating considering that musical theater has in fact become a flourishing platform for song-and-dance-based entertainment since the late '90s, with musical theater stars such as KAI and Kang Ha-neul crossing over into the TV and cinema industries. For some reason, Korean filmmakers never seem to be able to just let go, have fun and let the sheer joy of singing and dancing take over. They seem obligated to shackle the genre to the fat steel balls of tear-jerking melodrama or lugubrious nationalism that solemnly decrees that the Korean (male) protagonists remain martyrs of the "tragedy of the nation." I so fervently hoped that Swing Kids would finally be that movie that demolishes these shackles. Regrettably, it is not: in the end, the impresario behind the project, Kang Hyung-chul (Tazza: The Hidden Card), despite all his savviness and adroit judgement, succumbs to the burden of ideological correctness, notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary in the body of the film.

There is a lot to like or even love in Swing Kids. The film never loses the sight of its rhythm and beat as a musical-comedy, undulating and flowing from one setpiece to another. Even when something ugly-- an act of violence against woman, say-- threatens to take place, Kang keeps the film vibrating with infectious energy. The music by Kim Joon-seok (Scandal Makers) and the choreography by the musical theater veteran Lee Ran-young are good, if not startlingly memorable, with a few anachronistic pop hits (such as David Bowie's "Modern Love") and dance styles thrown in, which probably would not bother anyone other than period-music purists.

Kang's impeccable command of visual language, and his impressive ability to squeeze earthy but humane humor out of conventional setups, showcased in his popular comedies Sunny and Scandal Makers, are very much in evidence here as well. With the expertise of a seasoned conductor, he orchestrates comic sequences like the one in which Ro, utterly infatuated with Jackson's dance moves, keeps hearing tap beats everywhere he goes, even in the snores of his bunker-mates. At his best, he successfully invokes the kind of laid-back, sophisticated wit displayed by the great comedian Koo Bong-seo in Lee Man-hee's classic The Marines Who Never Returned (1962).

It helps, too, that Kang, unlike some other male Korean filmmakers, respects and listens to his female characters. Park Hye-su's Yang (with a surname that defiantly acknowledges her "Yankee Princess" status) is, along with Jackson, the film's most interesting figure, a young survivor who knows how and when to evade or confront life's adversities. The scene in which Yang and Jackson compare notes about whether Korean females or American blacks have it harder, has, not surprisingly, been cited by many critics and viewers as one of the most affecting in the film. Now that we are at it, it is worth pointing out that the American characters in Swing Kids, while still very much genre-based archetypes, are more fleshed out than those in usual South Korean films. Jared Grimes has obviously been chosen for his tap skills, but the understated, pre-Civil Rights tonality of his performance works well as a stable anchor for the more high-pitched deliveries of the Korean actors.

As for Do Kyung-soo, he does a fine job (although his stand-in seems to be doing the more strenuously complex tap moves) with what was given to him, but I wish his character was either more fully three-dimensional than he is in the film, or conversely, "lighter," purely enamored with dancing and music without the symbolic burden. It is in Kang's treatment of the young male protagonist and his ultimate fate that the film deviates from the musical version, entitled Ro Ki-soo. I do not wish to spoil the ending of the film, but apparently in the musical Ro gets to fulfill his dreams of becoming a dancer (whether such an ending is supposed to be "realistic" or an outright fantasy is beside the point). Swing Kids, however, ends in a familiar tragic-melodramatic way, in line with almost all works of New Korean Cinema dealing with the Korean War, with the "tragedy of Korean (ethnic) nation" dutifully inscribed in the bodies of the main characters. The ending, simply put, is a terrible cliché, rudely dropping a dark shroud of a curtain over what has overall been an energetic celebration of the arts as a force that can overcome politically-inculcated hatred.

This is doubly regrettable because Kang Hyung-chul deviates from standard cinematic conventions on the North-South relationship in some notable ways. For instance, in Swing Kids both Northerners and Southerner-Americans have their "moles" planted in the other camps, but when Ro angrily confronts one such character (Lee Kyu-seong), the latter reminds him that both of them have long stopped believing that Communism is worth sacrificing the lives of their loved ones (or even total strangers, for that matter), momentarily shutting down the former's righteous trap. Kang's refusal to treat these "moles" as expendable traitors morally justified to meet their violent comeuppance, coupled with clearly harsh portrayals of the "ideologically committed"-- i.e. fanatically murderous-- Northern prisoners, is echoed by Jackson's rejection of anti-Communist propaganda as the raison d'etre for the dance team. He even makes the latter christen the climactic dance number "F*ck Ideology."

Alas, Kang does not seem to realize that "ideology" could mean not just Communism or Capitalism, but also the very idea that cinema must serve up certain messages or agendas, prioritizing them over other equally valid qualities. His choice to modify the musical's ending to foreground the "tragedy of the Korean nation" narrative is itself a conventionally ideological one that effectively nullifies the anti-ideological stance he put in the film with Jackson as its mouthpiece.

Swing Kids is at the very least an interesting and worthy attempt that seeks to extend the perimeters of New Korean Cinema beyond those defined by its stubborn clichés and self-righteous agendas. The fact that it ultimately could not succeed in breaking free of these self-erected walls does not make it any less charming or fun. However, it is still not the great Korean musical film that I have been fervently waiting for over the last two decades, one that, to follow Kang Hyung-chul's own lead, is truly capable of saying "f*ck you" to all ideologies and means it.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

Koreanfilm.org, last updated January 25, 2023.