The young South Korean writer-director Park Syeyoung marked himself as notable rising talent with his eye-catching debut feature The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra (2022), an inventive blend of body horror, surreal comedy and experimental indie drama. His follow-up project widens his horizons without diluting his strong authorial voice.
Set in a dystopian future Korea, The Fin is a post-apocalyptic thriller with timely socio-political elements, ambitious in its dramatic scope and resourceful in its production design, despite its modest budget. Targeted mainly at art-house audiences, this cult curio is unlikely to earn Park any major Hollywood offers just yet, but it should find a ready-made following among elevated sci-fi fans and at genre-friendly festivals. Fresh from its Locarno world premiere, it screens this week at Sarajevo Film Festival.
The Fin takes place in a blighted post-war Korea, an authoritarian police state cowering under blood-soaked skies, its vast contaminated wastelands separated from crumbling cityscapes by a vast protective wall. Park never clarifies the exact cataclysm has blighted the country, but it has clearly been ecologically devastating. Most citizens routinely leave their faces unwashed because water is scarce, performatively obeying state propaganda to save water for future generations: “show your patriotism, wear a dirty face.”
In this alt-future timeline, the two Koreans have been finally reunited into a single totalitarian state, but with a deep new division in place between regular citizens and a mutant underclass caste know as Omegas. Marked out by their deformed feet and fin-like prehensile tails, Omegas are demonised as monstrous untouchables among normal citizens, relegated to dangerous toxic waste removal work, and banned from entering the cities. Rebellious Omegas sometimes escape these slave-like conditions and live undercover among regular humans, but they are routinely hunted down and killed by brainwashed young zealots working for the Korean Freedom Youth Civil Service.
The Fin zooms in one one these escapees, Mia (Yeon Ye-ji), a self-exiled Omega who has rejected her family heritage and now lives incognito in the city, where she works at a bizarre bar with its own interior fish pond – a surreal venue based on real establishments in contemporary Korea. Mia’s story becomes fatefully entangled with Sujin (Kim Pur-eum), a recent recruit to the Civil Service, who is starting to question relentless government scare-mongering about Omegas being dangerous enemies of the state who can kill with a single scream. But although both these young women bravely fight against the state’s official racist narrative, the wider political pressures around them inevitably lead to violent confrontation.
On first impressions, especially viewed through European eyes, The Fin presents as a dark satire on entrenched hostilities between the two Koreas – indeed, the Orwellian society depicted here, with its grim living conditions and ironically cheery state propaganda, feels very close to the current regime in Pyongyang. But Park’s idiosyncratic fable widens into something more universal, ambiguous and original than that, inviting parallels to all states where outsiders are demonised and marginalised, from Trump’s America to Modi’s India, China to Israel and beyond. Park has cited the paranoid, divisive mood of the Covid-19 pandemic as a key influence on the plot. But it gains more dramatic force by avoiding too many direct real-world parallels, leaving room for its allegorical layers to breathe and expand.
Dramatically, The Fin is a bumpy ride at times. The scrappy plot and brisk runtime leave little room for narrative nuance or character development, while some scenes which aim for emotional depth simply lack bite. Even so, on a conceptual and aesthetic level, Park scores highly, with a pleasingly lyrical dimension shining through during wistful voice-over passages. Serving once again as his own cinematographer, the director smartly turns lo-fi limitations into assets, creating an alluringly grimy cyberpunk look by retaining much of the grungy texture and digital noise created during the film-making process. In contrast to the main exterior action scenes, with their harsh use of saturated monochrome, the fish-pond bar interludes are soothing and colourful, where sparkly rainbow lights hint at some magical dreamlike realm beyond this bleak totalitarian reality.
Director, screenwriter, cinematography: Park Syeyoung
Cast: Yeon Ye-ji, Kim Pur-eum, Goh-Woo, Jeong Young-doo Jeong, Meng Joo-won
Editing: Clémentine Decremps, Syeyoung Park, Jiyoon Han, Benjamin Mirguet
Production design: Yoonseo Lee
Music: Seokyoung Ham
Sound design: Youhoon Kim
Producers: Heejung Oh, Park Syeyoung, Philippe Bober
Production companies: Seesaw Pictures (South Korea), Essential Filmproduktion (Germany)
World sales: Coproduction Office (Paris/Berlin)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Kinoscope)
In Korean
85 minutes
