Sleep aka Jam (South Korea 2023: Dir Jason Yu)

In Yu's clever and impeccably acted debut feature, successful actor Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) and his heavily pregnant estate agent wife Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) live happily in their small apartment, eagerly awaiting their new bundle of joy.

Their life becomes disrupted when Hyun-su begins showing signs of sleep disturbance, deeply scratching his face during the night, the wounds resulting in him losing the acting role to which he aspired. Added to this their downstairs neighbour, somewhat bafflingly, complains about excess noise from the couple's flat.

Hyun-Su's symptoms get worse; Soo-jin wakes up one night to find her somnambulous husband eating raw meat, eggs and fish straight from the fridge, narrowly stopping him throwing himself out of the window. Even more horrifyingly, one morning she finds their cute little Pomeranian dog in the freezer.

While her husband seeks a medical solution for his condition, which is diagnosed as REM sleep behaviour disorder - and medicated accordingly - things don't seem to be improving. On the advice of her mother, and concerned about the potential safety of their now just born baby, Soo-jin consults a shaman, and from there a supernatural element creeps into proceedings; the battle for Hyun-Su's recovery - and indeed soul - has begun.

The genius of Sleep is its transformation from light comedy to domestic drama to, well, something a lot darker, achieved effortlessly and, for the most part, in the confines of the couple's modest apartment. Much of the credit for this is due to the perfect casting of Sun-kyun and Yu-mi; this is, essentially, a two hander requiring, by the end, a massive suspension of disbelief, which the pair effortlessly manage.

This is also a film which, in quite an extreme way, details the way in which cracks can appear in otherwise sound relationships. In other dramas the tensions here would arise from, perhaps, the change wrought by the arrival of a new baby. Sleep turns this on its head by those changes coming from an existing member of the household. Words contained on a plaque on the couple's wall remind them that, as a married couple, they are able to face problems together; but when the problem is outside of their control, watching their attempts to adhere to the message are both tragic and, on occasion, darkly humorous.

Yu's previous experience includes AD work on Bong Joon Ho's excellent 2017 movie Okja, and there's something of that director's humanity amid the fantastic - and of finding comedy in situations rather than dialogue - at work here. I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

Sleep is in UK cinemas from 12 July.

London Korean Film Festival 2019: The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale (South Korea 2019: Dir Lee Min-jae)

It’s been a good year for the zom com. The movie we didn't think we needed - the excellent Zombieland follow up Double Tap - was a huge success, and now here's Korean director Lee Min-jae's debut feature, a fun and seriously sarcastic take on both the zombie movie and the perils of commodification.

The Park family are scam artists. Owners of a run down garage, in the movie's first scene we get the measure of them: a passing motorist is duped out of a load of money, forced into having his car repaired at ridiculously high prices, only to find that the family were the cause of the original vehicle failure by laying caltrops across the road. The family comprise station owner Joon-Gul (Jeong Jae-yeong), his wife, the pregnant Nam-Joon (Uhm Ji-won), failed in business brother Min-Gul (Kim Nam-gil), reluctant daughter Hye-gul (Lee Soo-kyung) and Hawaii obsessed widowed dad Man-Deok (Park In-Hwan).

At the nearby pharma company in the town of Poognsan, human experiments have been carried out to test a trial drug, and have clearly gone wrong. One of the 'experiments,' a young guy turned zombie (Jung Ga-ram) escapes the facility and wanders into the life of the Park family. Of course they remain unaware that he is a zombie - and daughter Hye-gul even takes a bit of a shine to him despite his rather ravaged appearance - until he takes a bite out of Man-Deok, which is unusual behaviour as our zombie is seemingly vegetarian, preferring cabbages to brains.

The bite triggers something rather unexpected: Man-Deok wakes up a younger, more virile version of himself. The zombie’s bite seems to have rejuvenation powers: the bitten man wastes no time in clearing out the contents of the family safe and pissing off to his beloved Hawaii.

Seizing on the potential for a bit of money making, Ming-gul rents out the walking corpse - now domesticated, named 'Jong-bie' and housed in Man-Deok's vacated mobile home - to bite locals (for a price of course), persuading the vegetarian zombie to chow down on the arms of strangers only by applying ketchup to the limb first. Before long the money's flowing in, the garage has been re- purposed, and the town's menfolk are all sprightly again. But it becomes obvious that youth is simply the first phase of infection for the bitten, and it's only a matter of time before the Park family have some new situations to deal with, and not just the fact that Nam-Joon's waters have broken.

The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale is that rare thing, a horror comedy that is actually laugh out loud funny. Sure, in true Korean style some of the comedy is quite broad, but a lot of the fun is found in the interactions of the Park family, whether coping with the undead or each other. They’re a reprehensible bunch (they reminded me of a more comic version of the family in Koreeda's 2018 film Shoplifters), but as with all such cinematic families, the more time you spend with them the more you get to like them.

Lee Min-Jae is clearly aware of the movie's genre - a clip of the 2016 Korean flick Train to Busan is used for instructional purposes, although this movie is much lighter on gore.There's also nods to Cocoon (1985) in the rejuvenative power of the zombie's bite, and Warm Bodies (2013) in the budding rom zom story between the 'Jong bie' and Hye-gul. The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale may be a knockabout movie, but it has some serious things to say about the family, the role of kinship and the perils of the pursuit of money. Apparently the director (who also co-wrote the script) didn't start out with the intention to make a comedy. Well however it happened, I've very pleased that he did.

London Korean Film Festival 2019: Ieoh Island aka Io Island aka Iodo (South Korea 1977: Dir Kim Ki-Young)

Hailed as 'the most bizarre Korean film of all time' it's kind of difficult to know where to start narratively with Kim Ki-Young's film, a comment you could indeed level at a lot of his output from the 1970s, and summed up by one of his own quotes: "I just make films by following my heart, so the analysis I leave to all of you."

Kim Ki-Young is best known for his 1960 movie The Housemaid, often cited as the finest Korean film ever made, and one which has been remade several times. Outside of Korea the director is known, if at all, as someone from the realist school of film making. Ieoh Island dates from a decade when the director's movies were increasingly surreal and surprising (a year later he made the strange and wonderful Woman Chasing the Butterfly of Death) and focused on one of Kim Ki-Young's chief obsessions, namely pre-modern Korean culture and belief systems, and their relationship to contemporary existence.

Sun Wu-hyun (Kim Jeong-cheol) is an advertising executive, publicising a new hotel which has been named Iodo, after a mythical island which is known to capture the souls of dead fishermen. Sun assembles a group of journalists on a boat to celebrate the hotel, announces its name and the fact that boat has been chartered for a trip to find the mythical island. One of the assembled journalists, Cheon Nam-Seok (Choi Yun-seok) takes exception to the violation of his people's legends for commercial reasons, and after a late night drinking session between the two men to settle the argument, Cheon goes missing.

Everyone seems to assume that Sun has killed him by pushing him overboard, although the ad man protests his innocence. After losing his job, he is determined to clear his name. Finding out that Cheon came from a remote island now populated only by women (after their men had been claimed by a sea monster and their souls taken to nearby Iodo), he sets off, accompanied by Cheon’s editor, to find out the truth about Cheon.

Once he arrives at the strange, sparsely populated island Sun learns, from interviewing various women, that Cheon wasn't a very nice person at all, seducing lovers out of their savings, investing in schemes to stave off famine and pimping himself out on an island where he was often the only male. Meanwhile the island's shaman, also a woman, is using her magic to solve the island's fertility problem by attempting to summon back the dead from Iodo and using their sperm to impregnate the female islanders. And her sights are set on recovering Cheon's body, his sperm to be hotly fought over by a number of his women admirers.

Ieoh Island is a film with a notoriously graphic climax, even by today's standards (initially cut out of prints but subsequently - and no pun here - re-inserted) but for most of its running time the director handles the rather bizarre content very matter of factly and without exploitation: the flashback within flashback narrative approach may take a little time to get used to, but it makes for satisfying story telling. It's the clash of old beliefs versus modern thinking that is at the heart of the film and the key to its fascination. Kim Ki-Young includes themes of environmental destruction, fertility, superstition, and the spread of capitalism (1970s Korea experienced rapid economic growth, although governed by a right wing military dictatorship at the time). Oh and teeth pulling: Kim Ki-Young's wife, the producer of his films, was also a dentist, so one assumes the dental work close ups are the real thing.

The film that Ieoh Island is closest to thematically is probably The Wicker Man. The island backdrop, a remote location, a search among the villagers, and indeed the shamanic dances all conjure up comparisons with Robin Hardy's 1973 movie. Its stormy coastal location, shamanism and medical obsessions also brought to mind Teruo Ishii's 1969 movie Horrors of Malformed Men. But Kim Ki-Young's film is entirely its own beast. It's audacious, fascinating and more than occasionally a little troubling. It's definitely worth seeking out if you can find a copy.

London Korean Film Festival 2019: Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels (South Korea 2018: Dir Kim Tae-yong)

Kim Tae-yong's fourth feature couldn't be more different to his previous directorial output, beginning in 1999 with the elegiac and spooky Memento Mori, followed up by dramas Family Ties (2006) and Late Autumn (2010).

Described by the director as tapping into the "warmth and nostalgia" of his own childhood, a 'kokdu' is a carved figure attached to a Korean funeral bier that guards the body on its passage from one world to the next.

Two children, brother and sister Dong-min (Go Choi) and Sun-min (Su-an Kim), come across a street trader who they refer to as 'Mr Junkman' selling a box of puppies. Having little money, the puppy vendor is prepared to barter, asking the children to bring items from the family home for trade. Dong-min and Sun-min collect various items, behind the back of their distracted mother, including a pair of floral patterned shoes from their grandmother (Jeong-suk Park), who is very ill.

Exchanging various items, including the shoes, for the puppy, they are clearly immediately besotted. But when they arrive home, grandma has fallen gravely ill and has been taken to hospital. Her only request is that her favourite shoes - the same ones traded for the puppy - are taken to her, so the now regretful children visit the junkyard of the dog vendor to retrieve the items. While searching Sun-min finds a battered kotku discarded among the rubbish: seeing the shoes deep in a tall cylindrical pile of abandoned items, the children reach in but fall into the garbage. And when they emerge on the other side, they find themselves in another world.

Tae-yong's single trick here, and one which requires some patience to adjust to, is to shoot everything we've seen up to now in the real world, and locate the kids' journey to the underworld as a performance in an actual stage play, featuring four adult kokdu - functioning as caregiver, entertainer, guard and guide - who mistakenly believe that Dong-min and Sun-min are dead. The quartet do their best to persuade and cajole the brother and sister to travel from the land of the living, across the mythical Samdocheon river and into the underworld. Most of the film is spent in this theatre bound environment with the kokdu using their various strengths to erroneously escort the siblings. Tae-yong never lets us forget that this is a theatrical production: stage hands are glimpsed, and indeed it is the production's director that initially finds the kids sleeping back stage, after falling through the garbage, and introduces them to the action, which they enter confusedly.

Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels takes its stage cues from a successful production of the story performed at the National Gugak Centre in Seoul, and the film is rich in traditional gugak music and dancing: a performance of the ancient Korean 'ganggangsullae' dance is a visual highlight. The magic realist touches extend to footage of grandma, back from the dead and wandering the country roads, flanked by impossibly vivid green fields of grass as she searches for her shoes. She sings of dreams, and of fame being useless, and eventually her character becomes enmeshed in the stage play as she prepares herself to cross over to her final resting place

Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels may not always satisfy dramatically, although Su-an Kim should be singled out for a very moving performance as Sun-min and Jeong-suk Park is graceful as the grandmother - and the stage elements, outside of the big set pieces, feel decidedly like community theatre. But what it does successfully achieve is, as Tae-yong intended, a lavish, playful but bitter-sweet attempt to plug into both the director's own cultural upbringing and the visual history of the country: it's also no coincidence that the film in format directly references Korea's oldest (and now lost) film, 1919's Righteous Revenge, in its mixed use of film and stagework. Slighter than I would have liked in some places maybe, but also quietly powerful in others.

The Witch - Part1 - The Subversion (2018 South Korea: Dir Hoon-jung Park)

In action director and screenwriter (he wrote the script for I Saw the Devil) Hoon-jung Park's latest movie, a girl escapes from a medical facility and is taken in by a middle aged couple. The girl has no memory and cannot remember her name; the couple call her Koo Ja-yoon. Ten years later Ja-yoon is a bright young woman who excels in her school studies and has a chirpy best friend, Myung-hee, who encourages her to participate in a TV talent show called 'Birth of a Star.' Ja-yoon is so good she automatically goes through to the quarter finals, but she inches ahead of the competition by supposedly performing some magic tricks, which the viewer does not see.

But things aren't all good in her world; her adopted parents are getting older, and her 'mother' has early onset Alzheimers. More worryingly, a threatening young man accosts Ja-yoon on a train, appearing to know her from the past. She's also suffering from increasingly frequent searing headaches, giving her brief glimpses of her supposed lost memories. For it appears that the people in charge of the facility from which Ja-yoon escaped are keen for her to return, but she has one or two tricks up her sleeve which they weren't expecting.

Part 1 of The Witch, which previewed at Glasgow FrightFest earlier this year, may be advertised as mining John Wick and The X Men films for its thrills, but it also has a jolly good plunder of The Matrix, Scanners, The Fury, Hanna and The Girl With All the Gifts. But like his Korean stablemate Chan-wook Park, director Park is known for dark subject matter, so while this film could have been a fairly straightforward superhero(ine) movie, he instead delivers an intense story of revenge which sits at the opposite end of the dramatic spectrum to most of the caped crusader 'universe' movies.

True it has its fair share of cartoonish bad'uns, not least programme director Dr Baek (Min-soo Jo), a woman so relentlessly mean that she should have been provided with her own moustache to twiddle, but the film's overall tightness and economy of storytelling (even at just over two hours) keeps things focused and resists a descent into cliche.

Da-mi Kim delivers an outstanding performance as Ja-yoon, whether playing the shy schoolgirl of the first half or the full on warrior required in the movie's spectacular final sequences, but without ever sacrificing an essential vulnerability rendered by her odd upbringing (the scene when she first turns the tables on her aggressors is truly shocking). The action scenes are superbly choreographed and, in true Asian cinema style, brutal and graphic, but for once the story is kept fairly uncluttered plot wise. The film's title suggests a franchise in the offing, although my understanding is that no sequels are currently planned. That's a shame because I'd be really keen on seeing this story developed further. Pretty good then.