We love Park Chan-Wook around here. We recently discussed Oldboy on the Lagniappe Podcast (and Stoker years before), there was strong support for No Other Choice around here last year (it ended up in the number eight spot for our collective top ten of 2025), and I was personally very fond of both Decision to Leave and Lady Vengeance. It seemed to me that his thrillers generally have more cultural penetration in the west than his comedies, and I was finally able to track down a copy of I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, his 2006 romcom via my library. Alas, it is with a heavy heart that I report that I didn’t care for it. 

Young-goon (Im Soo-Jung) is a young woman working in a factory building transistor radios, when one day the instructions on the overhead loudspeaker tell her to slash open her wrist and insert connecting cords under her skin. Following what is presumed to be a suicide attempt, Young-goon’s mother admits to the psychiatric facility’s doctors that her own mother (Young-goon’s grandmother) had been admitted to a sanatorium in later years, after decades of her own delusions, including that she was actually a mouse. Before leaving Young-goon at the hospital, her mother advises her not to admit to anyone that she believes that she is a cyborg. On her first day, the seemingly catatonic Young-goon is observed by Il-soon (Rain, credited here as Jung Ji-hoon rather than under his stage name), a boy who is serving time after being diagnosed as an anti-social kleptomaniac, as Young-goon climbs out of bed after everyone else is asleep and puts in her grandmother’s dentures, seemingly in order to commune with the various machines around the facility. 

Il-soon’s supposed thievery around the hospital seems to revolve around other patients’ delusions that he is stealing some part of their essence, and he goes along with these ideas by pretending to “transfer” various neuroses between them. These stolen possessions are as ephemeral as one patient’s ability to play ping-pong or another’s neurotic “courtly behavior” of only walking backward. Within her own psychologically unwell self-storytelling, Young-goon believes that she must overcome the seven deadly sins for cyborgs, which include expressing gratitude, daydreaming, and having sympathy. She asks Il-soon to steal this from her, and he’s romantically fascinated enough with her that he attempts to work within the schema of her madness to try and nurse her back to health. Namely, Young-goon has been allowing another patient to eat all of her food because she believes that she gets all the energy that she needs from holding batteries, but knows that if she’s noticed not taking food during meal times, she’ll be forcefed, and if she stops eating altogether, she’s in for shock treatment. 

This movie comes at an important inflection point in Park’s filmography, coming right on the heels of his “Vengeance Trilogy” and before he experimented with more standard horror forms (2009’s vampire horror Thirst) and working in English (directing the aforementioned Stoker and producing Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, both in 2013). Bracketing Cyborg on both sides are films that Park wrote but did not direct: Boy Goes to Heaven, a fantasy romcom, in 2005, and 2008’s Cush and Blush, which is a more straightforward comedy but with clear romance elements. The Vengeance Trilogy is a set of dark, miserable films, and if I spent years of my life making them I would want to lighten up a little bit with my creative output for a while too, if for no other reason than to get the taste out of my mouth. Unfortunately, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK doesn’t work much as a romance (the tagline “She’s crazy; he’s crazy about her” is as accurate as it is awful) and the comedic elements mostly fail to land as well, since so much of it is dependent upon the viewer laughing at people with sufficiently severe mental illnesses to warrant medical intervention. 

One of the patients is a consummate liar, a pathological “mythomaniac,” whose constructed narratives are there to replace the memories that she’s lost as a result of application of ECT “therapy.” Another patient lives an entire life within a compact mirror in which she imagines herself as one of the von Trapp children, while the same overweight patient who eats all of Young-goon’s food believes that she is capable of flight by rubbing together two socks of her own creation that repel her from the ground via static electricity (the script is much meaner about her weight than it is about her madness). All of this becomes important because Il-soon is able to weave together all of their counter-factual beliefs into a series of stories that, theoretically, will draw Young-goon out of her own delirium. This doesn’t work, although it does reach a decent ending when Il-soon refashions his sole beloved possession into a “device” that will allow Young-goon’s cyborg form to allow her to convert food into energy instead, including a cute scene in which he pretends to put the mechanism into her back. Despite feeling like the natural conclusion to the story, the film goes on for another fifteen minutes of nonsense that doesn’t make the whole any more complete or enjoyable. 

As a fan of this director, I reached what felt like the halfway point of the film’s total runtime and was ready for it to deliver a big midpoint twist that would make everything prior to this point fall into place, but this was not to be the case. The two of them don’t escape from the psych hospital and find that their reality is as malleable as they believe it to be, nor is it revealed that all of these seemingly goofy hijinx surrounding our characters is reflective of a darker objective reality outside of either of their perceptions. There is a moment where it seems like the movie is going to really break out of the box and go in an interesting direction, as Young-goon’s “battery” reaches its full charge and she starts laying down automatic weapons fire out of every fingertip, massacring the staff of the place (whom she associates with the sanatorium employees to whom her grandmother was remanded). This proves to be another fantasy sequence, however, as Young-goon then faints from starvation and the forced feeding begins in earnest. 

It’s only in these fantasy fugues that Park really shows off his distinct style. So much of the film is shot in the sterile confines of the asylum that the breaks from reality feel like a breath of fresh air. The girl with the Sound of Music obsession who is only ever seen with her back to the camera and observing the world through her reflection allows for some impressive transitional trickery as it zooms in and out of her mirror, which is fun. Overall, however, this misses the mark for me, and it isn’t one that I would recommend. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond