After watching The Shape of Water, I thought it might be amusing to follow it up with another fantasy film, this one from South Korea. As far as I can tell this is director Um Tae-hwa’s first real feature film and the young actress who plays the female lead is a newcomer as well. This is a piece of mass market entertainment and not an art film, so with my expectations calibrated accordingly, I found it to be perfectly cromulent fantasy film.
Su-rin is a young girl who is raised by her stepfather after her mother’s death. They move to an island where she has no friends and she is further ostracized when the other kids discover her interest in the paranormal. She eventually befriends a boy, Sung-min, who shares the same interests and lives in an orphanage. One day she learns that Sung-min is going with two other boys to watch explosions being done in conjunction with construction work that her father is involved in. She tags along and they discover a small cave in the base of a tree. Inside they find a glowing egg in a pool of water and one of the boy talks about an old story about a goblin hidden in a cave with the power to steal time. After bringing the egg out of the cave, Su-rin goes back inside to pick up her hairpin that she had dropped. But when she goes outside again, she finds the boys missing and sees that the egg has been smashed.
It shouldn’t be difficult to guess based on the promotional poster that features an adult man and the film’s title that time shenanigans are involved in the disappearances of the boys. Those who really care about spoilers should bow out now as I’m going to go ahead and say that this is basically a time-stop scenario put on film. I’ve read such stories before but I can’t recall seeing one actually made into a film before. While there are no great surprises here, this makes for a competent depiction of the concept with an emphasis on the isolation and loneliness of the boys trapped within frozen time after a period of jubilation. I also like it manages to keep tension levels high as Su-rin desperately tries to no avail to convince everyone that the adult is really a grown-up Sung-min. The special effects are great as they show how they can affect physics within a short range of their bodies but everything beyond that is frozen, so that plain water feels like molasses to them. It would have been cool however if they had also shown how people had noticed that the world changed from one moment to another as the boys steal plenty of food and leave behind lots of rubbish.
One interesting bit about this film is that Su-rin and Sung-min are originally attracted to each other in the romantic sense but after he ages up the relationship takes on a somewhat awkward tone. The other adults for example very reasonably assume that he is a pedophilic creep. The aging up is also interesting in that while Sung-min’s emotional development is stunted by having to grow up almost entirely alone in an empty world with no supervision, it wasn’t as if he suddenly grew up overnight. He actually did have to live out every day of those years and he has certainly been changed as a result. This being a lightweight fantasy film doesn’t explore this angle further but it’s rather good material for a more serious film.
Overall I liked this well enough for what it is and at least it’s relatively honest in that it isn’t trying to be overly ambitious in the way that The Shape of Water is going for. I even liked how the early parts give off a bit of a Stranger Things vibe though that’s probably a coincidence given the release date. One thing I will say in favor of South Korean films: they’re not afraid of killing off child characters to advance the plot. It’s pretty hard to imagine a mass market American film aimed at general audiences being willing to do that.