Mystery Archives - London Korean Film Festival

Somebody

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:36:49 +0000

This starts off like We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011), as divorced mother Young-eun (Kwak Sun-young) struggles with her kindergarten-age daughter So-hyun (Gi So-you), who is a budding sadistic psychopath desperate for a maternal love that Yeong-eun cannot bring herself to give. Two decades later, as bereft mother Hyeon-gyeong (Shin Dong-mi), who has already adopted adult orphan Kim Min (Kwon Yu-ri), takes in another orphan Hae-young (Lee Sul) in need of love, the tensions, jealousies and secrets in this domestic set-up will have the viewer suspecting that somebody here is the dangerous So-hyun, but not sure who exactly.

The thematic preoccupation of Kim Yeo-jung and Lee Jung-chan’s thriller is the mother-daughter bond, whether over, ersatz or impending. For here maternity itself comes battered and scarred, in an intense portrayal of desperate neediness and affectless determination, with an ending that is breathtakingly uncompromising in its refusal to pander to sentiment.

Anton Bitel

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Commission

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:45:51 +0000

Though structured as a serial killer thriller, Shin Jea-min’s film is a psychodrama about an intense rivalry between two sibling webtooners. Their conflict exposes all the tension, jealousy and ambition that often drive art, and dramatises the creative process itself in all its pain and plagiarism, its nerdiness and narcissism, its cutthroat competitiveness and dark fantasy.

Anton Bitel

Film contains disturbing scenes.

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Mother’s Kingdom

admin — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 16:02:54 +0000

Thirty-something Ji-wook (Han Ki-jang), author of a faith-based motivational book (The Power of the Truth), still lives with his mother Kyung-hee (Nam Kee-ae), who is drifting into dementia. As her brother-in-law Joong-myung (You Seong-joo), a pastor, tries to discover what happened decades ago to his brother before the facts are forgotten, Ji-wook too starts asking questions about his past and remembering things from his childhood perhaps better left buried.

Writer/director Lee Sang-hak’s darkly Freudian tale is concerned with belief, memory, oblivion, and the fictions we keep telling ourselves and each other to maintain the illusion of happiness. Here, past and present increasingly overlap in a domestic world askew with dysfunction. In exploring an intense, unhinged mother-son bond, this evokes Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009), although it is focused more on the son’s difficult path to truth.

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Light it up at 2 AM

admin — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 07:18:13 +0000

Seori recalls the story of her friend Yurim. They and other girls find themselves at the mercy of the Headmistress of a Technical Institute. It claims to teach the girls a trade, but in reality, they are all but imprisoned, the Headmistress doling out punishment at whim and withholding their mail. At their wit’s end, the girls decide to take drastic measures, but even those are not enough for Yurim, whose final, desperate act is a painful cry for help.

Shelagh Rowan-Legg

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Guimoon: The Lightless Door

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 16:52:58 +0000

Pitched somewhere between Jung Bum-shik’s Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018) and Jo Ba-reun’s The Grotesque Mansion (2021), Sim Deok-geun’s haunted building horror has shaman’s son Seo Do-jin (in 2002) and a trio of college students (in 1996) both entering an abandoned and cursed community centre where many murders and suicides have occurred, and both repeatedly crossing each other’s paths despite being there eight years apart.

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

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Contorted

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 16:46:16 +0000

When Myung-hye (Seo Yeong-hee) moves into a remote, suspiciously cheap rental home with husband Hyun-min (Kim Min-jae) and children, her nightmares intensify and she repeatedly hears a strange noise coming from the locked shed. This is also heard by her adopted daughter Hee-woo (Kim Bomin), who has a special sensitivity to the other side.

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

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Seire

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 16:38:15 +0000

Seire (aka samchil-il) is the 21-day period of postpartum confinement for a newborn and its mother, during which special dietary measures are observed, saekki ropes are hung over the threshold, visits are restricted, and family members are supposed to avoid anything ill-omened. Recent father Jin Woo-jin (Seo Hyun-woo) ignores the superstitions of his wife Hae-mi (Sim Eun-woo) and breaks a taboo by attending the funeral of his ex-girlfriend Se-young (Ryu Abel), presided over by her identical twin Ye-young.

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

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The Anchor

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 19:23:54 +0000

Leading TV news anchor Jung Se-ra (Chun Woo-hee) is under immense pressure, her career driven by her suffocating mother (Lee Hye-yeoung) and jeopardised by younger female rival reporters, even as she conceals a broken marriage to keep up appearances. One evening, Se-ra gets a call at the station from a young woman who, with her daughter, is the victim of a home invasion. What ought to be a scoop, will in fact cast Se-ra adrift, while the viewer, along with the caller’s psychiatrist Cho In-ho (Shin Ha-kyun), will struggle to work out what connects these women.

Jeong Ji-yeon’s mesmerising psychological thriller plays out its genre tropes to dizzying perfection, while also addressing the inequalities and traumas which women both face and hand down in Korean society.

Anton Bitel

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Recalled

admin — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 13:00:23 +0000

After a fall, Soo-jin (Seo Yea-ji) wakes up in hospital with a serious head injury that has left her with no memory of who she is or how she came to be there. As she goes back home with her solicitous husband Ji-hoon (Kim Kang-woo) – whom she also does not remember – to their high-rise apartment, her inability to recall the past is irrationally offset by apparent clairvoyant powers that enable her to see what is about to happen. All of which will lead her gradually to look at her present situation and relations with different, suspicious eyes.

Like a smarter riff on Rowan Joffe’s Before I Go To Sleep (2014), Seo You-min’s amnesia thriller uses deftly handled, superbly unpredictable twists to paint a portrait of a woman lost, traumatised and gas-lit, but on the wild, rocky road to recovery.

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