The most worthwhile film festivals deliver bold swings on the full array of the seventh art’s offerings. From small-scale contained indie flicks to strange genre experimentations and mega-international auteurist blockbusters, great festival programming — in my opinion — offers up something that the suburban North American multiplex can’t: meaningful artistic variety. The risk comes at a cost. The worst films one can ever dread seeing can be found at international film festivals. Even some of the films written about in this report are deeply flawed. But they generate strong reactions. That’s what excellent film festivals, like the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, are capable of.

The 28th BIFAN took place from July 4th through July 14 and featured 253 films from 49 countries. The breakdown includes 112 features (this critic’s focus), 97 Shorts, 15 AI Films, and 29 XR works — the latter two being a sign of both the festival’s populist leanings and willingness to poke the cinematic establishment. According to the festival’s website, “The 28th BIFAN rebrands itself by expanding the scope of the festival. 'BIFAN+' is a new brand that integrates the newly launched AI section, the current industry program B.I.G, the XR content project Beyond Reality, and the IP development project Goedam Campus.” The changes included a “hackathon-style AI workshop,” a conference on AI film production, and Korea’s first international competitive AI film section. The AI selection didn’t inspire this viewer and felt more gimmicky than formally innovative, hence my aversion to reviewing titles from the category. The opening and closing films — Love Lies Bleeding and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In —  show another of the festival’s strengths as being in the in-between space of Hollywood hegemony and the powerful East Asian production centers.

BIFAN’s embrace of sexuality is one example of its willingness to reach for something extra. They even had a retrospective category named Celluloid Erotica: Anatomy of Sexploitation Cinema. “The eight films offer an interesting insight into the various dialogues and negotiations that different eras and societies have had with sex on film, from conservative sex education and political modernism to the sexual revolution and hardcore pornography,” according to the website. Outside of the category, films like the stress-galvanizing American serial killer flick Strange Darling and the Norwegian animated film Spermageddon also don’t shy away from topics between the sheets. I’d be hesitant to not call sex and desire among the festival’s major themes even if they do not take center focus in most of the films in this report.

To no one’s surprise, the best films at this South Korean film festival were largely Korean. I was underwhelmed by Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, one of the most recognizable titles in the premiere Bucheon Choice category that recognizes “new worldviews beyond common sense, original styles and advances in experimentation and genre grammar.” Starring the hot new name of the moment, Hunter Schafer, Cuckoo may eventually find an audience because of its full conformity to the latest thriller conventions though I won’t be part of the audience for the same reasons. The best film I saw in the category was undoubtedly Strange Darling, a film that I rave about below. It’s likely one of the best-written horror films of the 2020s. Korea Fantastic was the stand-out category with interesting genre forays like the bizarre episodic Doombug: The Puddle, the puzzling apartment parable The Tenants, and the immersive and cultic The Unrighteous. Some of these films are great; some are awful; what they have in common is that they, for various reasons, attempt to refresh the boring and dry waters of modern cinephilia. I personally find that a lot more intriguing than just throwing the same old gunk into the water and hoping it eventually clears itself out.

Strange Darling

A cat-and-mouse style thriller set in the boonies of the American West, Strange Darling weaponizes socially and media-trained sensibilities for horrifying gain. The narrated opening scroll tells us we are watching the final months of a notorious serial killer, mysteriously leaving out the name of the killer. The credits introduce the muscled and stashed-out Kyle Gallner as “The Demon” and a humbling Willa Fitzgerald as “The Lady” right before title cards for Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 tick away, letting things commence with Chapter 3: a car chase, wreck, and an on-land pursuit of a grizzled man with a shotgun and a distressed, wounded young woman. With each passing chapter, writer-director JT Mollner and editor Christopher Robin Bell play coy with information reveals. Each chapter questions the lessons learned in the previous one; judgments pass from one character to the next like candy in a schoolyard. The chronological edit would be the generic thriller; this achronological edition is a stressful marvel. Part of the genius is the way in which the filmmakers get viewers to consistently doubt their own judgments.

Mollner shows his artistic ambition from start to finish and not just in the structure of the final cut. In one of my favorite scenes, a freaky sex scene with as many plot redirections as a basketball game has lead changes, he uses a split diopter brilliantly to divide attention between two subjects. That’s not why all the pieces to the puzzle fit together though. The thematic sleight of hand — where neoliberal social expectations of who might be a serial killer, of what their murders might look like — makes Strange Darling one hell of a film.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

The Kowloon Walled City was one of the most unique accidental urban formations in civilizational history. The densest city on earth, Hong Kong developed every inch of the city. The walled city no longer exists and nobody would believe it ever did if it weren’t for the media remnants of the urban legend. Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In isn’t the first film to be set in the city, nor will it be the last, but it’s one of the films that takes its setting most seriously and that alone makes it a valuable addition to global cinema.

The walled city is unromanticizeable and Soi doesn’t try, even if he’s looking for virtues (namely brotherhood, social unity, and integrity) that appear under threat in his films set in the modern world. The city, we are told, is so smelly that only someone crazy would willingly settle there; the Triads have such a firm grasp on the city that cops wouldn’t dare interfere with pesky routine operations like murder investigations or peacekeeping. Chan Lok-kwun (Raymond Lam), a lost mainland soul, stumbles into the city down on his luck and ends up working his way up the ranks of the Triad headed by Cyclone (the always special Louis Koo) and finds, hidden in the rickety and stinky city, a people worth fighting for. Together with new comrades Shin (Terrance Lau) and Twelfth Master (Tony Wu), Lok vows to protect the walled city turf of Cyclone from Mr. Big, in a pleasant cameo from one of Hong Kong cinema’s greats, Sammo Hung, whose greedy eyes see an opportunity to profit off the real estate when Britain hands over Hong Kong to China. That the gang aligns themselves against the big capitalists comes as no surprise with the mainland’s increasing oversight of the Hong Kong industry.

The digital establishing shots of the city’s exterior, hardly any better than AI-generated concept art, give a bad first impression, though the actual chaotic and cluttered set pieces provide redemption. Despite its box office success, including a US release, the studios enabled a relatively confined budget for the visual effects team. The messy geography of the city is tough to follow in individual fight scenes but that’s the point: there is no easier place in the world to get lost than the walled city. It's nothing but an artistic oversight that the actual fight choreography doesn’t make better use of the imaginative, veracious production design. The film earns its mettle with the chase scenes, moving in and out of alleys and buildings like a snake weaving through grass. The nimble camera needs flawless execution to work and that’s exactly what’s on screen: a swift camera that swims through the walled city and forces the characters running through the crowded city to become parkour gods.

It's not the best film at Bucheon this year but because of the industry it comes from and the names attached to it Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is one of the most significant films at the festival. Fans of actioners will be gratified with the grounded Hong Kong-style fights in the first half and will likely grow impatient with the superhero-wuxia physics that take over closer to the film’s end credits. And make no mistake: while the film may not live up to its epic title, Twilight of the Warriors hits like a drug. Soi, who made 2014’s The Monkey King and last year’s Cyber Heist, has long been a friend of digital cinema but with his latest film he appears to have made the same shift that filmmakers like Tsui Hark and Chen Kaige made at least a decade ago.

You Will Die In Six Hours

As a horror film about the inevitable death on a woman’s 30th birthday (Park Ju-hyun), You Will Die in Six Hours shares a similar atmosphere with the Happy Death Day films, only without the Groundhog Day novelty. Instead of a pure horror flick, the mystery here isn’t simply how to prevent Lee Jung-yoon’s murder but also whether the man who soothsays her future in the first place, Jun-wo0 (Jaehyun from the K-Pop group NCT), can be trusted or should be considered a murder suspect. BIFAN specializes in genre flicks and You Will Die in Six Hours leans full-heartedly into that almost to fault by refusing to circumvent genre convention in the slightest and instead riffing variants off of dictionary-defined genre expectations.

One thing director Lee Yun-seok’s film has going in its favor is its corrupt cops. In a local cinema industry where The Roundup pro-police brutality films hold the mantle for the most profitable franchise, more You Will Die in Six Hours will always be welcome. The predictable twisting and turning to arrive at the law-dodging law enforcement agents requires goodwill on behalf of the viewer but the payoff exceeds the investment. The cops aren’t just in on it: they are the roots the tree of crime grows off and that’s philosophically connected to the beliefs of the corrupt police. They see themselves as arms of state justice there to flex on incorrigible reprobates. Unlike corrupt cops in Hollywood, they believe they are doing the right thing (rather than the selfish thing) and it is precisely that belief that sources their unjust actions. Something about that feels closer to real-life police corruption than the more capitalist “bad-egg” trope that refuses to admit the system itself requires some degree of reform.

Two aesthetical choices limit the effectiveness of Lee’s film. The first is the use of a full-screen aspect ratio. The decision felt more like one made out of convenience or familiarity rather than creative intent and that affects how the scenes are framed and choreographed to a detriment. To be blunt: it looks like cheap network television. The second choice is the faint and undramatic score. The music plays so quietly that it took me some time to realize there was nothing wrong with the sound mixing. Even when it's audibly noticeable, the score remains emotionally invisible. A stronger score would have lifted the film.

Doombung: The Puddle

No major film festival would be complete without an episodic (or anthology) horror film. Most are insignificant. Every now and then, one generates a little buzz. Doombung: The Puddle, a three-part Korean anthology set around a tiny cursed lake, hopes to be one of those rare conversation drivers and it does its part by maintaining originality. Lee Dong-ju’s film doesn’t always work and that’s okay because even when it doesn’t work, Doombung still shows originality.

Beyond the geography, all three stories share a subject material of the generational divide in South Korea. The latter two center on younger protagonists whereas the first features a middle-aged man (Lee Jong-yoon) beating a younger and disrespectful fisher to death as he laments that “kids these days have no respect for their elders.” By the time the second story flips the dynamics a bit by having a younger man (Yoon Kyung-ho) struggling to earn money to pay for his dying mother’s hospital bills, director Lee declares a subjective axis for his first feature. The cryptocurrency mining and sci-fi flashes stand out for their tenuous connection to the body of water (vis-à-vis a mysterious power cord that goes to the “puddle” instead of an energy provider). The third story — about a young academic researching the wetland with burn marks on her face (Choi Ye-eun) who finds healing in the water — has the softest connection to the tension between the generations.

Doombung: The Puddle is that weird kind of horror movie that never tries to be scary. At least not in a flinch-and-scream sort of way. Anything with the power to scare comes not from cheap gags and ephemeral visuals but from the moments of real-world reflection that the subject material hopes to conjure. The instability of the shifting social order is bound to terrify some, and the moral judgment the film places on the abusive fisherman testifies to this. Lee is a young director, technically a millennial by most generational categorizations, and the thematic choices he’s working worth — and rebelling against — glimpse the next generation of films to come from South Korea. As younger Koreans continue to question historically neo-Confucian (and Christian) standards around domestic and family life, the films they make will continue to reflect that.

Base Station

The folks at BIFAN labeled Base Station, the newest film from The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra director Park Sye-young, as a “dark comedy” despite there being nothing funny about this strange, small-scale dystopian film. Clocking in just longer than an hour, Base Station revolves around a controlling older sister, Eden (Yeon Ye-ji), and her younger brother, Hyun-ho (Woo Yo-han), whom she convinced suffers from a conspiracy-sounding electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome. They tromp around a restricted forest like fairy tale characters. There is no magic in Base Station though.

The love between the siblings is strange and twisted, a false love if there ever was one. At least, that’s the case for Eden, who manipulates her brother like a child playing with their noodles at dinner. His “sickness” lacks any proof beyond her quack diagnosis and flimsy word. At her worst, and in a quite confusing scene, she even physically harms him. They’re too young for anything too strange to be going on, thankfully, but their insular social lives hint at something weirder, more Lannister, down the line. In the meantime, only Eden gets to really be a character in the sense that she actively does things and affects the world around her. Hyun-ho’s role amounts to something quite similar to a pylon: standing by, taking up space, and serving a purpose that impacts others without any effort.

Base Station limits its potential by sitting on the thematic thumbs of the screenplay. It’s not a thematically empty film. Loyalty and grief, regret and suffering, are just a few of the many themes that make an appearance in the short run-time. A few themes show up too late to leave any meaningful emotional impact on the viewer, including everything about the long-departed grandma and rabbit killing. Park and co-director Yeon bite more than they can chew and their film chokes as a result.

The Unrighteous

Of the many intelligent films I saw through BIFAN, director Kim Seon-kuk’s feature debut The Unrighteous comes close to the top. The film is about a fanatical Protestant cult that captivates a middle-class apartment building in Busan. Everything begins when Joo-hyun (Lee Hyun-woo) sticks the irksome evangelism brochure he received in a pesky neighbor's mailbox. Shin-hye (Moon Jeong-hee), the neighbor with a kid who is always a tad too loud, curiously attends the church service advertised on the paper, converts, and proselytizes the entire building — and Joo-hyun’s act of pettiness immediately bites him in the ass.

Unlike many cult films, Kim never allows the audience to fall for the same religious charisma as his characters. The film begins in an orgy of violence, a telegraph of where the clean aesthetics and trite religiosities will take us. The screenplay ironically sharpens and primes the moral compasses of its viewers by keeping them at a distance. Apartment residents climb the escalator of depravity (an escalator that arrives at child sacrifice) after the cult weaponizes their tight-knit community as a homeowner’s association and this is where The Unrighteous is at its most intelligent. Fellow Korean director Um Tae-hwa, the helmsman of last year’s apartment-dystopia Concrete Utopia, told me in an interview that “in Korean society, apartment living has almost become a religious value and an obsession to people.” Assuming Um’s opinion has at least some gravity of truth motivating it, Kim takes a similar approach. He may be even less generous than his more famous director peer. Here the homeowners association and their monthly meetings are inseparable from the function of the cult. This is related to class analysis. The cult also intrudes into Joo-hyun’s workplace—a realtor in training—when his boss and a business partner ask him if he wants to hear the “life-giving words” and fire him when he refuses. The inescapability of the cult for Joo-hyun replicates the all-consuming tendencies of real-life cults and it's an effect that’s achieved in the writing and editing rooms; he’s never allowed to breathe without a cult member in spitting distance. One diegetic YouTube video calls the Open Heaven’s Gate cult “the Gucci of the cult world” for their clean reputation. While the quote’s pronounced with the intention of drawing the attention to their reputation as something classy and professional, just like a more honest and virtuous charismatic Protestant church, the video also affirms the issue socio-economic heartbeat of both the film and, perhaps, puts forward a hypothesis regarding the religious cult issue in South Korea.

Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August 2024 Festival Reports   asian cinema   bucheon international fantastic film festival   horror   korean cinema