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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Anton Bitel

Film contains disturbing scenes.

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Cleverly blending and thoroughly updating elements from other hotel horrors – chiefly Psycho (1960), a distant mother, showers, voyeurism) and The Shining (1980), an axe-wielding madman) – writer/director Yeon Je-gwang’s tense, taut thriller and of horror viewership, in a cynical, metacinematic peek at unspeakable exploitation.

This is lean, mean genre filmmaking, with a difficult contemporary subtext.

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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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Yet Kim Se-hwi’s directorial debut is no romance, but a twisted thriller that radically shifts perspectives while exploring every variety of narcissist, creep, parasite and psycho – and viewers are never let off the hook for their own role at this game of image-making, self-concealment and vicarious, fickle judgement. 

This is Rear Window (1954) for the social media generation.

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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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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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The clash between city and country, urban middle classes and hard-edged rural folk, may have roots in mythical archetypes, although John Boorman’s 1972 Deliverance made sure that the myth was relevant to contemporary cinema. In this ensemble, Sul Kyung-gu appears in his first main role as husband to Jeong-hwa (Kang Soo-yeon), while Lee Eun-ju – fated to have a tragically brief career – debuts as Se-hwa.

Mark Morris

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In picking Kim Ki-young’s 1960 classic The Housemaid for a remake, Im Sang-soo faced a huge challenge. He wisely gave one of Kim’s favourite actors, Youn Yuh-jung, the key role of Byeong-sik while casting star Jeon Do-youn as Eun-yi. There is some irony in the fact that in his critical attack on the ultra-rich, Im was able to deploy a luxury of cinematic tools Kim Ki-young could never have imagined.

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