Lee Sun-kyun

Psychic Damage at The Overlook Film Festival

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The term “horror” can apply to such a wide range of narrative, thematic, and aesthetic traditions that it’s almost too wide of an umbrella to be considered a single genre.  I’m always especially impressed with The Overlook Film Festival’s interpretation of what qualifies as horror in its programming, which makes room for films as disparate in tone & intent as a when-spiders-attack creature feature set in a French housing block and an internal identity crisis triggered by obsessive television watching in the American suburbs.  This breadth of curation was especially on my mind while attending a trio of films about psychic mediums at this year’s Overlook – three films that had little, if anything, in common beyond the shared subject of their premises.  Not all horror films are interested in scaring their audience; some are interested in making us laugh, some in making us ponder the incompressible phenomena of daily life.  It’s incredible that I saw all of that territory covered in three Overlook selections that all happened to feature spiritual mediums’ attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead.  Horror is everything; everything is horror.

Look into My Eyes

Documentarian Lana Wilson sounded surprised by Overlook’s flexible definition of horror as well, introducing her film Look into My Eyes by saying she was “tickled” by its selection for this year’s festival.  It totally makes sense in the context of the overall program, though, given its open-minded curiosity about spiritual mediums who claim to communicate with the dead.  Look into My Eyes is an intimate documentary about the therapeutic powers and performative artistry of New York City psychics & mediums.  It would be easy for a doc with that subject to find ironic amusement in the eccentric characters interviewed, but Wilson cares way more about the interpersonal communication & emotional healing of spiritual sessions than the legitimacy of the supposedly supernatural practice.  Neither skeptical nor defensive, she focuses on what the psychics themselves get out of the sessions (beyond the obvious monetary compensation) instead of what they do for their clients.  They’re real people seeking connection to realms of the unreal, which makes for a fascinating dissonance if you care to listen long enough to get to know them.

Within the context of a horror movie festival, it’s impossible not to notice the genre movie cinephilia of the psychics profiled here, something Wilson acknowledged in the post-screening Q&A.  One interviewee hangs a poster of Jack Torrance on their bathroom wall, as if he were about to break into the room with an axe; another is a John Waters obsessive who’s transformed her apartment into a shrine honoring Divine (a woman after my own filthy heart).  All seven of the psychics profiled are artistically creative, most of them having started as actors in the performing arts before settling into parapsychology as a side hustle.  Wilson does not use this revelation as a gotcha to expose them as frauds, because it’s not something that her subjects see as shameful or disqualifying.  They’re channeling the spirits of the dead the same way they’d channel a fictional character, and (most of the time) it feels real to them.  They’re often just as haunted by grief & loss as their clients and both sides of the transactional divide find the practice therapeutic (an intimacy that’s heightened by the movie being filmed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic).  It’s possible that out of the 150 or so NYC psychics Wilson contacted as potential subjects for this project, she subconsciously chose these particular 7 because they share her own interests in the creative act of filmmaking, so that it says less about the practice at large than it says about the director’s bias.  Even if so, the reason the movie works is because she is genuinely curious about their professional & private lives; any curiosity about the spiritual world beyond our own is secondary.

Sleep

Like with Look into My Eyes, it’s also ambiguous as to whether the Korean horror Sleep is actually a ghost story, or just a story about people who believe in ghosts.  Curiously, the answer to that open-ended question also hinges on whether a struggling actor is telling the truth when they appear to be communicating with the dead, or whether they’re performing for personal survival.  The actor in question is played by Lee Sun-kyun, the Parasite performer who unexpectedly died shortly after this film’s international premiere last year.  Lee’s real-life death is made even more acutely painful by how lovably charming he is in Sleep as a doting husband who feels immense guilt about his nightly sleepwalking episodes that torment his equally adorable but increasingly frazzled wife (Train to Busan’s Jung Yu-mi).  Scared that the out-of-character violence of her husband’s sleepwalking episodes will threaten the health of their newborn baby, the normally skeptical wife allows her mother to bring a psychic medium into the house to help exorcise the evil spirit that’s supposedly taken root in his body.  Whether the husband believes in the ghost himself is ultimately up for debate, since he may very well be play-acting with the superstition just long enough to be cured by modern medical science, hoping his wife doesn’t attempt to violently extract the “ghost” from inside him in the meantime.

Speaking of Parasite, Sleep is the debut feature of director Jason Yu, a young protegee of Bong Joon-ho (who recommended Lee take the lead role as the possibly-possessed husband).   That professional connection is worth noting because it informs Sleep’s oddly prankish tone.  Whether or not this is a legitimate ghost story, it certainly is an adorable romcom.  Lee & Jung are super cute together, which makes it all the more tragic when the sleepwalking-ghost turns them against each other.  It’s a romcom, sure, but it’s a romcom about how psychotically violent you can become if your partner disrupts your sleep for long enough, with the wife taking over most of the horror duties in the back half once she fully commits to believing in the presence of a ghost.  Thinking back to the ice-cold humor of Bong’s own debut Barking Dogs Never Bite, Sleep is also notable for its willingness to go there in its onscreen violence against innocents.  No one is safe here; pregnant women, newborn babies, and Pomeranians are all in genuine mortal danger.  Whether they will be saved by prescribed medication or old-world prayer relics is a fight between husband & wife – a fight with surprisingly, viciously funny results.

Oddity

Of course, not everybody goes into horror movies looking to have a laugh or to feel empathy.  Sometimes, audiences actually want to be scared.  The scariest movie about a spiritual medium I saw at this year’s Overlook was the Irish ghost story Oddity, in which violent spirits are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. The only movie I saw on the program that had me more on edge was the one that featured spiders crawling all over people’s faces & bodies, which by comparison feels like cheating.  Oddity has to take its time to build the reasoning & mythology behind its supernatural scares, which start when a blind psychic arrives uninvited to the home where her twin sister was allegedly murdered by an escaped mental patient.  Armed with a psychic ability to read hidden personal truths in physical possessions, she seeks answers about her sister’s death in the widower’s home, then sets about righting past wrongs with the help of present ghosts.  She also weaponizes the physical body of a gnarled wooden puppet she drags into that home, a consistently creepy prop that recalls the puppet reaction cutaways from the 80s horror oddity Pin.

Oddity is a consistent series of routine fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting super quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time.  After the credits rolled, I was startled again by the physical presence of the wooden puppet, which the festival programmers had quietly propped up at the exit door mid-screening.  Personally, I don’t always need horror films to be scary to be worthwhile.  I mostly cherish the genre for the freedom it gives filmmakers to ignore the limitations of real-world logic, and I’m usually onboard for whatever they choose to do with that permission to imagine.  I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to this year’s festival than Oddity, though, since it reminded me that the primary value most audiences seek in horror is its ability to scare, which is just as valid & rewarding as anything else the genre can achieve.  After seeing a documentary about real-world psychics’ emotional lives and a domestic comedy about psychics’ superstitious opposition to modern science, being genuinely scared by a movie on the same subject was a necessary, grounding experience.  That unlimited range in tone & purpose is exactly what makes the horror genre so rewarding, and it’s what makes Overlook Film Festival an unmissable yearly ritual on the New Orleans culture calendar.

-Brandon Ledet

Parasite (2019)

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“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