Park Chan-wook did a rom-com and it it as odd as you'd expect it to be.
Following Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, Park chose to take a hard left turn into this colorful, psych ward romance, and a woman who thinks she is powered by batteries, and to my surprise, it works.
It's a complete visual change. Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon replaces Park’s familiar dark, violent colour schemes with cotton candy pinks, mint greens and sterile whites. The hospital is a pastel-colored playground. The hallways are broad and bright. There are fantasy moments floating through glittering technology and soft focus romanticism. Every frame feels surreal, making you question what’s real, and that’s the goal.
The performances are wonderfully committed. Lim Soo-jung makes Young-goon so lovable, robotic and vulnerable, blank-faced yet intensely emotional. And Rain is quite endearing as Il-sun, a young man who lives by his own weird code of honor.
But to my eyes, it’s not perfect, it moves along, the middle act has a looseness that feels less like whimsy and more like aimless. Some jokes are repeated. Some of the side characters are a little off. And the pace sometimes lags in ways that Park's tighter films never do.
That said, the final act is truly wonderful, a quiet, odd, deeply sensitive conclusion that only this film could bring off. This is not Park’s best. But it was perhaps his sweetest.
A sweet, strange, and surprisingly touching detour from a master of darkness. Be open minded about this film as it is so different from Park Chan-wook other work.
Park Chan-wook did a rom-com and it it as odd as you'd expect it to be.
Following Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, Park chose to take a hard left turn into this colorful, psych ward romance, and a woman who thinks she is powered by batteries, and to my surprise, it works.
It's a complete visual change. Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon replaces Park’s familiar dark, violent colour schemes with cotton candy pinks, mint greens and sterile whites. The hospital is a pastel-colored playground. The hallways are broad and bright. There are fantasy moments floating through glittering technology and soft focus romanticism. Every frame feels surreal, making you question what’s real, and that’s the goal.
The performances are wonderfully committed. Lim Soo-jung makes Young-goon so lovable, robotic and vulnerable, blank-faced yet intensely emotional. And Rain is quite endearing as Il-sun, a young man who lives by his own weird code of honor.
But to my eyes, it’s not perfect, it moves along, the middle act has a looseness that feels less like whimsy and more like aimless. Some jokes are repeated. Some of the side characters are a little off. And the pace sometimes lags in ways that Park's tighter films never do.
That said, the final act is truly wonderful, a quiet, odd, deeply sensitive conclusion that only this film could bring off. This is not Park’s best. But it was perhaps his sweetest.
A sweet, strange, and surprisingly touching detour from a master of darkness. Be open minded about this film as it is so different from Park Chan-wook other work.
