bong joon-ho

The Host (2006)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

When we discussed our conflicting feelings about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Brandon likened it to how Spanish critics have had to explain to English-speaking audiences that Pedro Almodóvar’s work in his native language has always been purposefully arch & overly theatrical. Specifically, the discourse revolved around allegations that English speakers perceive Almodóvar’s Spanish language works through a kind of veil of European exoticism while accurately identifying the more over-the-top and camp sensibilities in his recent films for audiences in the Western Hemisphere, which may also be the case with del Toro’s filmography. I’ve occasionally wondered about this in relation to last year’s Mickey 17, which was an overall disappointment to me as a Bong Joon-Ho fan, and which I dismissed as an example of his tendency to talk down to Western audiences that didn’t work for me this time, as it had in Snowpiercer. Was it possible that I was viewing Bong’s works in his native tongue through some kind of reverential veil and that Memories of Murder and Parasite were also over the top (outside of the moments of levity that were obvious across cultures) and I wasn’t picking up on it because I don’t speak Korean? Luckily, a viewing of Bong’s 2006 film The Host assuaged these doubts; when he’s going over the top, there’s no way to miss it. 

Half a decade after an American pathologist orders his Korean assistant to circumvent safety regulations about the disposal of toxic chemicals by directing him to pour (hundreds of bottles of) formaldehyde into a drain that eventually empties into the Han River, a mutant river beast emerges, killing dozens of people and abducting others. One of the abducted (and presumed deceased) is Park Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), the daughter of single father Gang-du (frequent Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho), a lazy manchild with bleached hair. Gang-du assists his father Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong) in the operation of a riverside snack bar that they occupy as well, but his “assistance” is hampered by his apparent laziness and frequent napping, and his overall flaws are further communicated by his ill-advised choice to give his daughter a beer. The two of them are excited to watch Nam-joo (Bae Doona), Gang-du’s sister and Hyun-seo’s aunt, in the Olympic archery competition, but her primary character traits of being extremely proficient but hesitant and timid are telegraphed by her receipt of “only” the bronze medal as she allowed her time clock to run out. Hee-bong’s third child, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is the only one to have gone to college, but his academic achievement has not netted him a job offer, and he’s taken refuge in the bottle. 

When the monster first emerges from the river, Gang-du manages to put up a pretty good effort, assisting a nearby American soldier who charges into the fray. He grabs Hyun-seo by the hand to flee and makes it some distance before falling, grabbing her again, and continuing to run, only to look down and see that he’s grabbed the wrong child in the fracas and is forced to watch helplessly as the monster brings her to the other side of the river and disappears. The Park family comes together in the wake of this tragedy, but during a mass memorial for the victims, a disease control team arrives in hazmat suits and advises that American scientists have theorized that some of the wounds left behind on survivors may indicate that the animal is a carrier for an unknown virus, and all present are shuttled off to a hospital for quarantine. Gang-du gets a call from Hyun-seo that indicates she’s still alive, and the Parks have to escape quarantine and work together to try and find the beast’s lair in the sewers before it’s too late. 

This is an unusual turn for Song Kang-ho as this is the first time I found it difficult to like him (at least in Bong’s filmography; he’s had a few effective villainous turns when working with Park Chan-Wook). It’s not his fault that his entire generation of the Park clan seems to be afflicted with narcolepsy, but his frequent sleepiness aside, he still does a lot of things that make him seem like a goofy old stoner in an American film about a guy who’s refused to grow up, even after having a child. That did not endear him to me as a character, especially when he later tries to explain to the authorities that he received a phone call from his presumed dead daughter and can’t hold it together long enough to explain this clearly. Instead he simply insists that “She’s deceased, but she’s not dead,” which doesn’t do him any favors, and not even the presence of his famous Olympian sister is enough to get anyone to listen to him. It’s in all of this that Bong is going very broad with the comedy, if it wasn’t already clear from the awkwardly long sequence in which Gang-du causes such a scene at the memorial that the rest of the Park family get involved in the bawl/brawl and security has to step in. It’s as campy as his movies for a Western audience, which comes through at the end when a forced lobotomy seems to suddenly make him hypercompetent. It’s not subtle, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief and rest assured I’m not simply elevating his Korean language films out of ignorance. 

There are other hallmarks of Bong’s work here, of course. It wouldn’t be a Bong Joon-Ho feature without some political commentary; it’s no surprise that American interference is the initial cause of the problem. On the cover of the DVD for the film is a pull-quote that says The Host “is on par with Jaws!” and while that’s a decent point of comparison, the film is much more like the original Godzilla in that it’s about an amphibious kaiju awakened (or in this case mutated) by American negligence, with tragic consequences for the respective coastal/island Asian nation states. Here, American interventionism continues throughout as a narrative thread, from the appearance of U.S. soldier Donald White at the first emergence of the beast from the river, to the American C.D.C. getting involved in quarantine and containment, eventually taking over the assault on the creature with a chemical weapon called Agent Yellow. That this deployment does virtually no long term damage to the creature (it’s up to Nam-il dousing it in gasoline, Nam-joo setting it ablaze with a burning arrow, and Gang-du stabbing it with a broken traffic post to bring it down) while harming if not killing the dozens of protestors who are opposed to the release of dangerous chemicals is, as always, a fun insight into Bong’s politics. Even when he’s doing a silly one, he’s still unmistakably at the helm. It’s worth noting as well that Gang-du’s aforementioned lobotomy was performed when he understood enough English to overhear a conversation in which an American scientist admits that there’s been no additional evidence of a virus and that they’re all in over their heads. 

In 2006 when the film was released, it was undoubtedly a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of his other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mickey 17 (2025)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

When we recently did our podcast episode about The Big Sleep, Brandon mentioned that he had already seen Mickey 17 and briefly shared his thoughts about it. One of the things that he noted was that when Bong Joon Ho makes a movie that is primarily for a Western audience, he foregoes a lot of the subtlety that is maintained in the films that he makes with his homeland in mind. Which is to say that I think he thinks we’re all a little stupid over here (and he’s not wrong). Memories of Murder and Parasite are films with lots of subtext and subtlety (although the latter doesn’t hold back with its themes), while Snowpiercer and Okja are—and I mean this in the most affectionate and respectful way possible—a little obvious. When I think about Bong’s body of work, the scene that comes to my mind most often and the one that stands out most clearly is the sequence from Snowpiercer in which Tilda Swinton’s androgynous Minister Mason delivers a speech to disruptive back-of-train passengers. “A hat belongs on the head,” they say, “And the shoe belongs on the foot. I am a hat; you are a shoe.” Mason’s voice drips with disdain and hatred. Theirs is a demonstration of not just their slavish, religious devotion to class distinction, but just how furiously angry power can be when it reinforces itself, how the veil of civility (barely) conceals a snarling dog. 

So when you hear mixed things about Mickey 17, and people talking about how the film is obvious, well, they’re not lying to you. Mickey 17 is an obvious movie. It lacks subtlety, and I can see how people may feel that they’re being talked down to, or how the film’s lack of nuance in its themes could make it feel like a Disney Channel Original version of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, if you’re feeling extremely uncharitable. I would never go that far, but I will say that my expectations were not exceeded. 

Three decades from now, dimwitted Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has run into some trouble with a mafia-connected loan shark, alongside his friend Timo (Steven Yeun). The two decide the best solution to their problem would be to escape the dying planet aboard a corporate ship bound for worlds that humans seek to colonize. Timo is able to talk himself into a pilot position immediately, while Mickey signs up to be an “expendable,” a person whose primary role is to take on dangerous jobs during the long spaceflight. Sometime between the present and the not-too-distant future, scientists figured out how to 3-D print cloned human bodies and how to transfer memories between them, allowing for people to essentially create backup versions of themselves in case of death. When the technology was virtually immediately used for criminal (and homicidal) purposes, its use was banned on earth, but due to the dangerous nature of starfaring, one “expendable” is allowed per starship. Aboard, Mickey meets and falls into immediately reciprocated love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer. The ship on which they are travelling is commanded not by a seasoned space veteran but by manchild former (read: failed) politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a character who exists to be an amalgamation of celebrities cum “leaders” but whose details make him a very (read: not at all) thinly veiled parody of the current U.S. president. Along for the ride is his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose rather thin characterization—she’s obsessed with sauce—goes largely unnoticed as Collette gives another fantastically over the top performance. 

Over the course of their journey, Mickey isn’t just given dangerous jobs to do, he becomes the subject of outright inhumane laboratory tests. His brain gets backed up onto a hard drive every week and then he gets printed out again when he dies. He’s put outside in a spacesuit in order to be exposed to cosmic radiation; he’s used to collect spores from the new planet’s atmosphere so that a vaccination to the diseases present on the planet can be created; he’s exposed to an ongoing series of nerve gas exposures in order to develop new biological weapons. One would also have to assume that, as his rations keep being halved over and over again, one of the Mickeys must have starved to death. It’s not a charmed life, but Mickey is so in love with Nasha that he doesn’t mind dying over and over again as long as they are together. Things go sideways, however, when he’s left to die after falling into a crevasse. He’s rescued by the tardigrade-like aliens that are native to the planet and brought back to the surface, and when he manages to get back aboard the ship, he learns that his replacement, Mickey 18, has already been printed. If anyone learns that there are two of them, they’ll both be killed and the brain backup deleted in accordance with law, and Sen. and Mrs. Marshal are all too happy to kill both Mickey and the tardigrade aliens (whom they dub “Creepers”) despite the indigenous life form’s apparent sentience. 

It’s a small detail, but one of the things that I liked at the beginning was that we see Mickey and Timo wearing the shirts for their failed macaron business, which features the slogan “macarons are not a sin.” It’s an unusual slogan but one that makes some modicum of sense since desserts and sweets are often considered an indulgence. However, we later learn in the film that “multiples are not a sin” was a rallying cry for a certain perspective on the question of the legality of the human backup-and-restore program. This all leads us to see how short-sighted Mickey is, as he clearly would have to know enough about the cloning process to see this as a reasonable macaron peddling tagline, but he also isn’t paying enough attention to know what he’s signing up for when he first enlists as an Expendable. Further, his taking inspiration (or willingness to go along with Timo’s inspiration) from a complicated legal and social issue for a myopic macaron business is more insight into Mickey’s doofiness. There is a charm in that, though, and the way that Nasha is instantly smitten with this dumb, lost puppy is endearing, as is her ongoing devotion to him despite the personality changes—some almost imperceptible, some quite obvious—that come with each rebirth. 

Shortly after Mickey 17 returns to the ship and discovers that Mickey 18 is already up and about, Mickey 18 takes it upon himself to assassinate Marshall. 17 is able to stop him in time, but this action reveals their existence as multiples and also ends in the death of one of two baby Creepers who came aboard the ship inside of a rock sample. There’s some slapstick, Ruffalo bellows as Marshall, the little cat-sized alien beings run around, then one of them is gunned to pieces. My viewing companion leaned over to me and said “I hated that,” the moment that the sequence ended. I didn’t agree, but I also understand that Mickey 17 isn’t going to win over as many people as Bong’s previous works have; it’s a familiar theme of his in a new environment and with different sci-fi trappings, but for some, it just doesn’t have that same “wow” factor. Unfortunately, I find myself completely sympathizing with the underwhelmed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Memories of Murder (2003)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 feature 살인의 추억 (Memories of Murder) is an example of a familiar genre made unfamiliar in its trappings, at least at first. Initially, this is because it is set in the yesteryear of 1986—and, as L.P. Hartley noted in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “the past is a foreign country” where things are done differently—but also because it takes place in the South Korean city of Hwaseong. It follows two police officers on opposite ends of the scale of corruption who, because of the depravity and darkness of the crimes that they are investigating, eventually exchange places on this spectrum. Detective Park (Song Kang-ho) is local to Hwaseong and is the lead on the investigation into a nascent series of serial assaults and murders on women in the community, and Detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) has been sent from Seoul to assist after the discovery of a second body. There’s some jurisdictional friction between the two, including a vigorous discussion about the lack of a national investigative agency like the U.S. has with the FBI. (A useful note here: S. Korea’s National Police Agency wasn’t founded until 1991, and during the time in which this film is set, this would theoretically have fallen under the auspices of the National Security Headquarters, but with Chun Doo-hwan and his junta in power, it’s a wonder that Seo was even sent.) Their biggest difference, however, lies in their approaches. Park may not be as violent or hot-tempered as his partner, another local detective named Cho (Kim Roi-ha), but his apathy about justice is in many ways worse; it’s clear that Cho is driven by his temper and his aggression, while Park’s casual treatment of, for instance, the elicitation of a false confession in order to close the case, demonstrates that performing that kind of quotidian evil is driven by nothing more than the banality of doing one’s job. Seo, in contrast, is more evidence and psychology driven, and sees through Park and Cho’s arrest of an innocent man with developmental disabilities and the rehearsed admission of guilt that he recites in Seo’s presence. 

As I was thinking about how I would open my review while watching the film, a phrase came to mind about how the world that these characters inhabit is so unlike our own, where police brutality is so naked and unafraid, where violence and torture are commonplace means of maintaining the status quo. Then I remembered that we do live in that world. A girls’ school is visited in the film by one of the investigators, and the students there are practicing drills on how to escape from deadly attack and provide each other with first aid in the event of violence on the school grounds. Cho, the very same detective who has a special boot cover for when he is kicking prisoners to avoid leaving obvious marks, grows enraged when a local eatery’s television displays a report about a Seoul officer being indicted for similar actions, and he both destroys the television and physically attacks the students there who cheer on justice being served, protesting too much. Even the “good cop” Seo sits by idly while Park and Cho hang a suspect upside down, only becoming involved when the man says something that provides an epiphanic deduction. Park, an unapologetically bad cop, thinks he has some kind of preternatural sense that allows him to discern when someone is guilty or not, a frightening look into how someone can get the idea that they can sense other people’s spirits and then mete out punishment on them based on their own preconceptions. What Bong was saying in 2003 about both the contemporary present of the film’s production and about the 1986 on which it focused is the same thing that he’s still saying about the distant past, the near past, and today: “Essentially,” he said in 2019, “we all live in the same country called capitalism.” The S. Korea of 2003 is the present United States is S. Korea in 1986, and it’s jackboots all the way down. 

For those who haven’t seen the film, a brief synopsis: Detectives Park and Cho, under orders from Sergeant Shin (Song Jae-ho), partner with Seoul city detective Seo when the body of a woman is found in a roadside culvert, the second victim of a potential serial killer. The two local detectives physically torture Kwang-ho (Park No-shik), their first prime suspect, the mentally handicapped and physically scarred son of a local restaurateur. They take him out to the woods to force him to dig a hole under the pretense that he is digging his own grave if he does not confess, and he does so, into a tape recorder. Seo is not convinced by any of this and, much to Shin’s chagrin, finds evidence that exonerates the man, embarrassing Park and Cho. Seo connects the dots on the fact that both women were murdered in the rain to a missing person case for a woman who also disappeared on a rainy night, and he is able to turn the search to a specific area and a search team finds her body relatively quickly, further driving a wedge between Park and Seo, the former of whom thinks the latter looks down on him as a comparative bumpkin. A trap is laid for the killer the next evening that it rains, but it fails; although Officer Kwon (Go Seo-hee), who was used as bait, fails to draw out the killer, she does discover a link between the nights of the murders, the rain, and a series of postcards to a local radio station that requests the song “Sad Letter” be played when it’s a rainy day. An accidental sting operation at the location where the fourth body was found leads to the arrest of the next prime suspect, Jo (Ryu Tae-Ho), while a follow up on the song requests leads to another, Park Hyeon-gyu (Park Hae-il). Jo is Park’s collar, and he grows infuriated when Seo finds proof of the man’s innocence, once again enraged that his case closure has been torn out of his hands, and Hyeon-gyu is Park’s man, but there’s no solid proof and even some physical evidence that seems to exonerate him. I wouldn’t consider any of this a spoiler, though, because although this is a crime thriller, it’s not a mystery, even though it occasionally wears one’s clothes. 

Like the crime on which it was based (at least at the time of release), the killer is not found in this film. He’s present in the movie, in peripheral glances and blurred visions of final moments, but we never see his face and the police never apprehend him. The final scenes of the film, which take place in 2003, find Park returning to the road where the opening scene took place and staring into the culvert in which the second victim’s body was found, seventeen years older and now a small kitchen appliance salesman. A little girl asks him what he’s doing and tells him that another man was there a few weeks prior, also looking into the same space and, upon being asked, said he was remembering something that he did there a long time before, implying that the killer is still loose, but history ended up proving this one wrong. As it turns out, the Hwaseong serial killer had actually been in prison since 1994, for killing his sister-in-law, and he was prompted to confess to the Hwaseong killings upon the discovery of further DNA evidence to confess in 2019. This doesn’t hurt the film in any way, but I don’t want to leave pedant bait out there in the open like that. 

This movie is beautifully shot, and the action is often kinetic and fun. Clocking in at 2 hours and 10 minutes, I can see how some of the scenes in the middle could feel like the film is going in circles if you don’t have the attention span for a film of that length, but I never felt like the film was spinning its wheels. There are countless independent pieces at play here that add up into a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Some of the police violence can be hard to stomach, and without some knowledge of S. Korean politics of the 1980s there are probably some details in the film’s metaphorical filigree that are lost. Even if you don’t, the violence of the police against protestors and students speaks for itself, as does the way that different members of the institution behave, with Cho being more violent than before and Shin growing increasingly furious that his subordinates are disobeying his direct orders to show restraint while they are under the microscope. It’s familiar even if the time and place are foreign to you, because we do all live in one national police state. If you can stomach that, this is a masterpiece you should see as soon as you can. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I was a late joiner to the Bong Joon-ho fan club. I didn’t see any of his films prior to the US release of Snowpiercer (which ended up being Swampflix’s very first pick for Movie of the Year), and I shamefully still—all these years later—have not doubled back to catch up with his early catalog.  Now that the runaway success of Parasite has made him an Oscar-certified sweetheart of the industry, Bong’s early films are easier to access than ever, so I have few remaining excuses to cover those blind spots.  It took nine long years for his debut feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, to land proper American distribution, but now it’s just sitting right there on Hulu waiting to make you laugh & squirm along with the director’s other darkly funny genre pranks.  It obviously doesn’t match the budgetary scale of the eye-popping spectacles Bong would later deliver in films like Okja, Snowpiercer, and The Host, but it’s just as worthy of a post-Oscars re-evaluation of his decades-long career.  If nothing else, it’s good to be reminded that the adorable man who became a meme by making his Oscars statues kiss also has a deeply fucked up, vicious sense of humor.

Barking Dogs Never Bite feels like Bong Joon-ho’s version of the post-Clerks slacker comedy, complete with a couple of listless corner store clerks among its cast of downtrodden losers.  Gen-X apathy & ennui weighs heavy on its central players, a loose collection of near-destitute tenants of a multi-tiered apartment complex, barely earning enough through their entry-level jobs to feed themselves.  The title refers to the violent hijinks of an out-of-work academic whose peaceful days lounging around the apartment (which his pregnant wife pays for) are interrupted by a neighbor’s small, yipping dog.  The absolute worm of a man takes his frustrations over his stalled career out on various small dogs throughout the building, murdering them in an effort to quiet his own mind.  These outbursts of animal cruelty catch the eye of an anonymous notary who lives nearby, daydreaming about earning celebrity through heroic acts of vigilantism.  As the would-be vigilante tracks down the pathetic dog killer, the small minds & embarrassments of their daily routines pile up in an increasingly absurd tangling of their lives, somehow amounting to a pitch-black hangout comedy instead of a low-budget crime thriller.  It’s the exact kind of ironic slice-of-life slacker tale you’d expect to see at a film festival in the 1990s, except with a much sharper eye for visual gags & splendor than what you’d typically expect from movies on its budget level.

Bong’s debut is hilarious but vicious, which feels consistent with everything he’s done since.  Even so, violence against dogs is one of the few remaining taboos that make audiences squeamish, so it still cuts deep. It’s the kind of movie that’s almost pointless to log on the content-warning database Does the Dog Die?, as its entire purpose is to mash that exact taboo button.  The dogs that are killed are cute & pathetic.  Their murderer waits maybe a scene & a half before deciding to violently shut them up, not even suffering the expected montage where they annoy him for days on end until he snaps.  Even as someone with a high tolerance for shocking art, I was thankful that the film opened with an obligatory “No animals were harmed” title card instead of saving it for the end credits.  Still, I don’t know that I ever fully believed it, as whatever puppetry, camera trickery, or hidden harness support they used to depict the pups in peril was impressively convincing.  I was in love with Bong’s playful camera set-ups, non sequitur ghost stories, sped-up Benny Hill chase sequences, and onslaughts of discordant jazz, but I can’t claim that the puppy violence didn’t upset me.  It’s supposed to be upsetting, because Bong Joon-ho is a sick fuck, which is easy to forget as he’s become something of a Film Twitter mascot.

I remember there being a lot of memes at the expense of Chris Evans delivering the teary line “Babies taste best” in Snowpiercer, as if it were funny by accident.  I always found that mockery to be odd, as that moment didn’t feel especially over-the-top to me, at least not relative to every other batshit crazy thing that happens in that movie.  Having now seen Bong Joon-ho’s debut feature—a feel-bad hangout comedy about a series of dog murders—I’m even more convinced that the Snowpiercer memesters (likely just hungry to dunk on the limitations of Captain America’s acting talents) got it wrong.  Given Bong’s larger body of work, I believe that line was both intentionally funny and sincere.  It’s both a discomforting moment where a man deals with the guilt of surviving on the nourishment of baby-meat and a darkly humorous punchline that underlines just how depraved the film’s trainbound universe has gotten.  I’ve now seen Bong apply that exact discomforting humor to the onscreen death of puppies, so why not the off-screen death of babies? Lots to think about there, lots to consider.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Snowpiercer (2013)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss Bong Joon-ho’s English-language debut Snowpiercer, which was selected as Swampflix’s Movie of the Year in our very first week as a website.

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Brandon Ledet & Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Episode #97 of The Swampflix Podcast: Parasite (2019) & Vertical Class Warfare

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

Welcome to Episode #97 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our ninety-seventh episode, James & Brandon discuss one of 2019’s great crowd-pleasers and one of its most divisive oddities: Parasite & Us. And because both films deal in vertical class warfare, they then descend below ground to wrangle with C.H.U.D. (1985). Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-Brandon Ledet & James Cohn

Parasite (2019)

/ swampflix

“Money is an iron.”

This is the thesis statement of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a beautiful film about the lengths that one family living in poverty will go to in order to climb the ladder of social success. As stated by a member of this quartet, money is an iron, as it irons out all the wrinkles in life, both metaphorical and literal, leaving behind flawless skin and a life virtually devoid of the anxieties of the common man.

A couple of years ago, a friend was taken on a date by a man of great wealth (she never mentioned his name, either to maintain the air of mystery or possibly due to an NDA). She described the evening, in which they were seated at a table in a clearing that was essentially devoid of people, servers appearing seemingly out of thin air when more wine was needed or to deliver unidentifiable gourmet foods and then disappearing back into the bushes. At the end of the night, when her host was driving her home in a wine-buzzed state, he tapped the rear bumper of another car. My friend watched as the wealthy man got out and talked to the other driver, the scene playing out in the Lynchian halo of headlights: no arguments, just a civil conversation, until finally her host took out his wallet, handed the younger man an amount of cash, and at the end of their discussion, the victim hugged the man whose car had struck his own. “In that moment,” my friend said, “I realized my whole life was a lie. Nothing matters. Money can do anything.” Money is an iron.

Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik, of Train to Busan) lives in a half-basement apartment with his parents and sister, all of them working odd jobs, like folding pizza boxes, to scrape by. One day Ki-woo’s friend Min-hyuk (Park Seo-joon) visits the family to deliver a suseok shaped like a mountain—and meant to act as a charm to bring the family wealth—and ask Ki-woo to take over his position as English tutor to the teenaged daughter of a wealthy family whose patriarch Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) is the CEO of an IT company. Ki-woo, who is naturally bright but was unable to afford college following his required military service, is initially reluctant, but agrees to interview for the position with school documents forged by his sister Ki-jeong (Park So-dam), and is accepted for the role by the relatively simple-minded family matriarch, Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong). Noticing that the couple’s younger, undisciplined child, son Da-song (Jung Hyun-joon), likes to paint, Ki-woo secures a job for Ki-jeong as the boy’s art teacher, under the guise of a friends cousin from art school in the U.S. With a little more finagling, he gets his mother Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) and father Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho, of Snowpiercer) positions working for the Park family as well. And that’s when things get . . . weird.

To say more would be to spoil the film’s various twists and turns, although all of them are foreshadowed beautifully: Ki-taek’s tendency to leave the windows of the family’s hovel open results in disaster, Ki-woo’s obsession with and allegiance to the rock that is meant as a talisman for the family’s upward mobility brings him nothing but misfortune, even Ki-jeong’s fortuitously lucky guess that something “traumatic” happened to Da-song when he was younger turns out to be true, after a fashion. For the Park family, money is an iron, as it not only frees them from difficulties others experience, but protects them from even having to be aware of them, as they live in an ornate, sun-kissed mansion surrounded by a perfectly manicured and maintained lawn—the only vegetation that we see in the entire film. Approaching the Park home from the street, there is only a set of stairs and a garage door visible, but once inside, the walls at the edge of the property make the house and its inhabitants seem completely isolated, the shrubbery creating an optical illusion as if there is no world beyond the edge, no starving people living in easily-flooded basements just subway stops away.

The Parks are not malicious people, just naive and separated from the rest of the world. The Kims are not evil either; they are merely trapped within a social structure that offers no legitimate or straightforwardly moral methods to escape from their social tier. The rules are different for the rich, and it shows in the way that they treat their domestic employees: Ki-taek may be treated like a trusted advisor and even a friend most of the time, but Dong-ik doesn’t hesitate to remind him that he is being paid when the former is hesitant to participate in a roleplay for Da-song’s birthday. The Parks also remark upon Ki-taek’s smell, noting that it is musty and “like the subway,” not that any member of their family has set foot in a subway in years, and Dong-ik’s involuntary reaction to being confronted by the scent unexpectedly plays a major role in the film’s resolution. Further, the Park family even fetishizes poverty at one point, as husband and wife lie together and he whispers to her about the eroticism of the “cheap” panties (actually Ki-jeong’s) that were found in the backseat of his car earlier in the film.

Money is an iron. For the Parks, it is the metaphorical iron that makes life smooth and effortless, and the iron strength of the walls that separate them from the riffraff below. For the Kims, it is the iron of prison bars that keep them in a metaphorical prison of society and, perhaps, a literal one; it is the weight that drags them down, a millstone to prevent them from ever escaping the trap of stratified social classes.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Okja (2017)

/ swampflix / 23 Comments

In one of our very first posts as a website we declared Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi epic Snowpiercer the Best Films of 2014. My assumption is that it rose to the top of our list that year mostly because it was so much movie. As with a lot of Asian cinema, Snowpiercer never ties itself down to a single genre or tone. It constantly shifts gears from humor to terror to action spectacle to political satire to whatever whim it feels at the moment as its story progresses from one dystopian end of its train setting to the other. It was near-impossible to know what to expect from the director’s follow-up, then, except that it might similarly spread out its eccentricities over a bizarrely wide range of cinematic modes. Okja is just as deliciously over the top, difficult to pin down, and tonally restless as Snowpiercer, although it does not resemble that film in the slightest. If a movie’s main virtues rest in its ability to surprise & delight, Okja is an undeniable success. It’s not something that can be readily understood or absorbed on even a scene to scene basis, but its overall effect is deliriously overwhelming and expectation-subverting enough that it feels nothing short of magnificent as a whole.

Tilda Swinton & Jake Gyllenhaal star as the public faces of an evil meat industry corporation that’s attempting to improve its image with a new, falsely fun & friendly attitude. As part of this evolution within the corporation, they promise to breed a new form of domesticated animal to help maintain the world’s demand for (supposedly) non-GMO meat supply, a “superpig.” The unveiling of this superpig breed is structured as a kind of reality show contest and the movie follows one of 26 worldwide contestants within that frame. Okja, a superpig who has been raised free-range in the forests of South Korea, is officially declared “the best pig” (recalling titles like Babe & Charlotte’s Web), winning the dubious prize of being torn away from the little girl who raised her as a close friend instead of an eventual source for food. Before their separation, we get to know Okja as a kind, selfless animal with human eyes & a hyper-intelligent aptitude for problem-solving (not unlike the intelligence of a real-life pig). After she’s unceremoniously removed from her home and sent to face her fate as meat, we get to know the little girl who raised her as our de facto protagonist. The movie gradually reveals itself to be a coming of age quest to free Okja from her corporate captors, protect her from the well-meaning but idiotic animal rights activists who want to use her as a political pawn, and return her to her home in Nature. The rest is a blissfully messy blur of action set pieces, wild shifts in comedic tone, and a brutally unforgiving satire of modern meat industry practices.

The cuteness of Okja herself and the film’s occasional dedication to a kids’ movie tone (despite its constant violence & f-bombs) make it tempting to look to Babe as an easy animals-deserve-empathy-too comparison point. The truth is, though, that Okja more closely resembles George Miller’s terrifying action movie nightmare Babe 2: Pig in the City, where the grand adventure staged to bring its very special superpig home is a nonstop assault of bizarre imagery & comedic terror. There’s a constant threat of danger in Okja, ranging from car chases to meat grinders to stampedes through an underground shopping mall. The CGI in service of this spectacle is shoddy, but in a flippant, Steve Chow kind of way that is so irreverently cartoonish it could not matter less. Oddly, the performances work in much the same way. Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, and Shirley Henderson all stand out as intensely bizarre sources of nervous energy that exist far beyond the bounds of human nature, but in such a casually absurd way that it somehow fits the film’s ever-shifting tone. Gyllenhaal likely wins the grand prize in that respect, often resembling more of a rabid duck than an adult man. In any other context he’d be too broad or, frankly, too annoying to function as anything other than a distraction, but it’s somehow just the jarringly over the top touch the movie needs.

Okja is too much of an ever-shifting set of complexly self-contradictory tones & moods for it to be wholly described to the uninitiated. It’s both a scathing satire of modern meat industry & a slapstick farce poking fun at the activists who attempt to dismantle it. It’ll stab you in the heart with onscreen displays of animal cruelty, but will just as often giggle at the production of farts & turds. I can try to describe the film as an action adventure version of Death to Smoochy or a more deliberately adult reimagining of Pig in the City, but neither comparison fully covers every weird impulse that distracts & delights Bong Joon-ho as he chases his narrative across multiple continents. Just like with the similarly divisive Snowpiercer, I can’t promise all audiences will be onboard for the entire ride (Gyllenhaal in particular is sure to be a frequent point of contention), but Okja does offer something that’s increasingly rare in modern action adventures of this blockbuster-sized scale: the wildly unpredictable. You may not appreciate every individual turn in its impossibly twisty road, but oh, the places you’ll go.

-Brandon Ledet