The post The Silenced appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

While set in the future, this Kafkaesque dystopia cohabits with the features of today’s urban existence: alienating routine, online-only companionship and shrinking prospects, where the only escape lies in surrender to delusion and despair. At first witty, whimsical and weird, this eventually accommodates a bleak heart of darkness.

The post The Tenants appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Screening together with Cashbag (2019, 25 min)

With Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), Possession (1981) and A Ghost Story (2017) as its nearest analogues, Park Syeyoung’s experimental fungal slasher tracks a mattress, and the spores growing on it, as they pass through the hands of different owners and users, including lovers at different stages of their relationships and a terminally ill woman. As the fungus rapidly evolves and subtly apes the manners of its human hosts, it vampirically absorbs a vertebra from each to build itself into anthropomorphic form.

A melancholic, monstrous romantic horror with a very unusual take on time, this sets human dramas and dreams against a much broader, more irrational canvas of nature. Episodic and abstract, its utterly gonzo premise drifts to an ending of unexpected sadness and awe. Meanwhile Park’s (non-horror) short Cashbag, which follows a man in a series of nocturnal transactions, ends in a similar waterside location.

Anton Bitel

The post The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Merging different spatiotemporal realities over a single, recurring night, and featuring a grudge-holding ghost whose dissociative identity disorder confounds the usual rules of possession and exorcism, this is a disorienting, increasingly frantic affair, as these disparate characters all race to survive their respective nights. Full of oppressively nightmarish atmosphere and irrational incident, this is a wild, bewildering ghost train, transgressing a door that should never be opened.

Anton Bitel

The post Guimoon: The Lightless Door appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Adapted from Jeon Gun-woo’s novel The Contorted House, but also drawing liberally (if dynamically) on both Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003), this horror feature from writer/director Kang Dong-hun (Pray, 2020) concerns a haunted house and a haunted family, where mental illness and domestic history merge into one. This hits the ground running, placing a child in harrowing peril, and its twisted narrative is sufficiently deft in recombining its borrowed tropes to wrong-foot even the most genre savvy.

Anton Bitel

The post Contorted appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Has the baby I-su come under a curse from the breath-hungry dead, or is Woo-jin working through his own conflicted feelings and deep-seated guilt about having become a father? Eschewing sensationalism or special effects, Park Kang’s intense, ambiguous feature is a subtle, serious, slow-burn exposé of one man’s inner psyche, both waking and dreaming.

Anton Bitel

The post Seire appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

The post The Cursed appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

The post The Perfect Fishplate appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.