When it comes to hypnosis, you usually belong in one of the two camps: Those that believe and wish to try, and those that don’t but would also like to try. Suffice to say, The Hypnosis is eager to tap into this fascination for this fledgling science, though practitioners might not appreciate the dramatic slant…
Tag: korean
METAMORPHOSIS (FILM REVIEW)
South Korea is really gunning for their own Exorcist hit. From TV titles like The Guest (2018) to movies like The Priests (2015), The Wailing (2016), House of the Disappeared (2017), and most recently, The Divine Fury (2019) and Netflix’s, Svaha: The Sixth Finger (2019), it seems that the priest protagonist remains as enigmatic as…
PARASITE (FILM REVIEW)
There’s a “landscape rock” gift that gets featured early in the Parasite that sits very nicely as a metaphor for the film. It’s a harbinger of prosperity as much as a burdensome weight; physically, an elegant decoration that can also turn deadly. It never changes its state and doesn’t presume to be anything but a…
INTIMATE STRANGERS (FILM REVIEW)
The smartphone changed our lives forever. And as a character remarks in Intimate Strangers, it’s like a black box of its owner, full of messages, emails and media they’ve collected. So is it any surprise that the content within might shock some of our closest friends or loved ones? An adaptation from the 2016 Italian…
BURNING (FILM REVIEW)
In this world, there is Little Hunger and Great Hunger. Little Hunger is when someone is physically hungry. And Great Hunger is when a person yearns for the bigger answers, like the meaning of life, shares Haemi (Jun Jong-Seo), the female protagonist of Burning. Director Lee Chang-dong is renowned for tackling the Great Hunger in…
A TAXI DRIVER (FILM REVIEW)
Other than in South Korea, and for people in that region during May 1980, not many may have known about the Gwangju Uprising, where hundreds, and some witnesses suggest thousands, of civilians were massacred during demonstrations against a military coup. This state secret back then would have gone undocumented, if not for Jürgen Hinzpeter, a…
Fabricated City (Film Review)
“If it wasn’t something new, I had no reason to come back,” proclaims Director Park Kwang-hyung on his latest film, Fabricated City. And admittedly, the classic story of a scapegoat turning tables on his offenders is getting a little predictable. After a decade-long break, Park injects enough ingenuity into his latest work to keep the…
Master (Film Review)
The latest cat-and-mouse Master by director Cho Ui-seok is a formulaic crowd-pleaser. We enter the chess game between dogged detective and colourful villain in the middle of the set, but still get rewarded with the diet of car chases, double-crossing maneuvers, some gunfight, and an exotic locale – in this case, Manila, Philippines. The standard…
Age of Shadows (Film Review)
With super slick productions increasingly coming out from South Korea, one might say that the tides are turning towards the rise of Hallyu-wood. With sharp visualisations and even sharper jawlines, the attractive aesthetics of their resources are winning audiences over, especially when it comes with finesse for refreshing classic plots. Director Kim Jee-woon is one…
HIDE AND NEVER SEEK (FILM REVIEW)
Money and fame is to be had on the online world. And in the world of afreecaTV, a fictional channel specialising in horror named “Glow World” is chalking up some interest. The host of the channel, VJ Glow (Ryu Deok-hwan) is a douchebag skeptic, who bulldozes any possible spirits with his bravado and rapid-fire mouth….
MORGAN AWYONG 