In Korean author/director Park Syeyoung’s 2022 debut function, “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra,” mildew on an deserted mattress births a parasitic creature that feasts on the vertebrae of any people it touches. The movie enters extra unpredictable, oddly shifting territory than its B-movie-like premise might initially recommend, however that primary logline wouldn’t really feel misplaced amongst the demonizing authorities propaganda that recurs all through Park’s compelling follow-up function, “The Fin,” wherein even the lightest bodily contact with a minority group is portrayed as being life-threatening. Don’t let sure elements of them contact you otherwise you’ll get contaminated. Don’t allow them to scream as a result of the sound will kill you.
Not like a mattress monster that truly feeds on folks, the othered beings in Park’s second ostensible creature function are recognizably human, even when the broader inhabitants is inspired to not understand them that method. Set in a speculative, post-unification Korea, “The Fin” tracks the connection between brainwashed residents and the underclass they’ve been educated to hate — and in addition to use.
On account of ecological devastation, a bit of the Korean inhabitants — we’re given little sense of how the remainder of the world is doing — has undergone mutations that carry them nearer to merfolk of legend. Often known as Omegas, these mutated people have fins and weird ft, however in any other case look the identical as the remainder of their countrymen. To go with out trouble in Korea’s numerous colonies, Omegas may lower off elements of their ft or fins, or conceal these appendages with prosthetics made by the uncommon “regular” individual sympathetic to their plight. Any Omega found inside a colony’s borders is arrested to be exiled past the wall, or terminated on sight in instances the place a trigger-happy authorities employee thinks their life is threatened by an Omega merely shouting.
The non-mutated inhabitants is fed the suggestion that Omegas’ screams are deadly exterior of water, that their fins are full of poisons, and that after they die, they launch radiation. The accuracy of all that continues to be pretty ambiguous throughout Park’s movie, however the perception drives the construction of society. Within the case of East Colony 114, nonetheless, some Omegas are permitted to dwell across the seashores and cliffs simply past The Nice Wall, so long as they function the workforce to scrub the polluted oceans.
Throughout the colony, clear water is a treasured commodity. Residents are inspired to scale back bathing for the higher good. Among the many dirty-faced inhabitants, nostalgia for the ocean and fishing turns into one thing that enterprising enterprise house owners can exploit. The movie’s opening narration attracts on reminiscences of water, infusing exposition concerning the dystopia with a private contact. “They mentioned the ocean was once blue,” the voice of a younger girl tells us. “They mentioned many individuals died. My first reminiscence is of a blood-red sky. Black raindrops fell onto my lips. Drop. Drop. Drop. They tasted bitter, and I used to be sick all evening. Father spent the evening coughing as effectively. After which Father disappeared.”
Accompanying these phrases is a montage of pictures of individuals standing with fishing hauls of varied sizes, with all the human faces curiously blurred out. Finally, we get to a photograph that disrupts that components: one the place most faces stay blurred, aside from that of just a little lady. As this last photograph within the montage begins to dissolve from view, a close-up of a younger grownup girl’s face regularly seems within the middle of the body. This can grow to be the grown model of each the narrator and the little lady who caught out within the {photograph}. Named Mia (Yeji Yeon, “Pachinko”), she might be sought out by each an unnamed Omega (Goh-Woo), infiltrating East Colony 114 with a mission to seek out her and ship a severed fin, and Sujin (Pureum Kim), a novice authorities recruit within the taskforce that each checks up on Omega staff accumulating waste over the wall and hunts down anybody suspected of abnormalities.
By means of Sujin, Park explores the mindset of somebody following orders however starting to doubt the state’s ideology, and the following contagion of concern that has contaminated so many in such disagreeable methods — a notion that may show all too well timed in a great variety of the nations the place the movie could also be launched. Sujin’s ailing mom barely speaks, however when she does, it’s primarily to spit venom on the mere point out of Omegas, suggesting that they need to all be killed. Mia, in the meantime, represents the interior conflicts of the assimilated “different.” She passes by conserving components of her identification a secret, buys into a minimum of elements of the propaganda focusing on the minority group she’s secretly from, and is overtly hostile when coming face-to-face with somebody from that group reaching out to her.
Affected person in its pacing, “The Fin” is an engrossing temper piece fairly than a dystopian story primarily based round fixed clashes, though the specter of violence is all the time looming. Like in “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra,” Park, as soon as once more serving as his personal cinematographer, will get a whole lot of mileage out of a wierd type of intimacy achieved by characters unwittingly being noticed from a distance, be it by barely open doorways or excessive up from above. The broader aesthetic favors hazy saturation, the colours of metropolis streets and the skin wilderness — every lifeless zones in their very own method — at occasions recalling a post-apocalyptic touchstone like Konstantin Lopushansky’s “Customer to a Museum,” and elsewhere, Man Maddin and Evan Johnson’s latest collaborations like “The Forbidden Room.”
As an impartial manufacturing, “The Fin” is essentially efficient in its expressionistic options to budgetary limitations, with a delightful tactility to the sensible results on show. That mentioned, there may be one doubtful shortcut that leaves a bitter style within the mouth: Early within the film, we’re proven a authorities propaganda video about The Nice Wall and the unified Korea. It’s a propaganda advert in an explicitly dystopian story, so it’s clearly purported to make you’re feeling disagreeable, however there’s one thing just a little off concerning the imagery and movement in these temporary clips; an uncanny high quality inherent to poor simulacra of actual artwork route.
Then we attain one of many longest clips within the propaganda video and the miserable clarification turns into obvious. A shot of the backs of a number of yellow-jacketed figures taking a look at a faraway statue solely lasts a number of seconds, however inside that point, most of the nonetheless figures warp form. Some “folks” blur collectively, whereas others see the decrease halves of their legs instantly separate from the remainder of their our bodies. In the event you’ve been unfortunate sufficient to have working eyes previously few years, you’ll acknowledge this as unmistakably an instance of generative AI getting used as a substitute of actual footage being shot. With all due respect to the pressures of creating an unconventional sci-fi movie on a decent finances, utilizing ecologically damaging expertise for a narrative of ecological devastation, wherein clear water is an more and more uncommon useful resource, provides an unintentionally grim layer of irony to the story.
Grade: B-
“The Fin” premiered on the 2025 Locarno Movie Competition. It’s at present in search of U.S. distribution.
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