4 days ago
16
Kim Byung-woo’s chimeric but not unenjoyable sixth feature begins like a normal apocalypse movie, with a deluge inundating Seoul. Then it flirts with taking on social stratification baggage as a beleaguered mother tries to climb up her 30-storey apartment block to escape the rising flood waters. But once it is revealed that An-na (Kim Da-mi) is a second-ranking science officer for an indispensable research project, the film becomes a different beast entirely – possibly something quite insidious.
As the film gats under way, An-na’s swimming-obsessed six-year-old son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) sees his dreams come true when water begins flooding their apartment. Along with everyone else, they begin pounding the stairs – before corporate security officer Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) catches up with them and explains that an asteroid impact in Antarctica is causing catastrophic rains that will end civilisation. But a helicopter is en route to evacuate her and Ja-in, because she is one of the pioneering minds who have been at work in a secret UN lab that holds the key to humanity’s future.
Hitting the rooftop – and then continuing further upwards – changes our view on everything, as the exact schema of her work is revealed and the film goes down a virtual rabbithole. Making this sci-fi swerve, Kim has clearly heavily imbibed from Edge of Tomorrow, Charlie Kaufman’s mental mazes and perhaps also – with mega-tsunamis gathering on the horizon and the presiding maudlin-apocalyptic tone – Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
But Kim’s recursive narrative is not so much prepping us for the future of humanity as it is – as per its Netflix Original ident – the future of entertainment. As An-Na “corrects” her initially selfish reactions to the people she encounters – a girl trapped in a lift, a woman in labour – the suggestion is that emotional responses to this relooping drama can be somehow calibrated. It feels like an apologia, complete with cut-and-paste disaster imagery, for algorithmic entertainment. The often brittle storytelling, especially the failure to designate a helpful antagonist, does suggest human fallibility is alive and well, though. Or perhaps this reluctance to condemn our optimised future means Kim is already complicit to the nth degree.
