Screening at DOK Leipzig in the International Competition Documentary Film after its world premiere out of competition at the Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Impact Golden Globes Prize for Documentary, the film offers deep insight into the intense psychological pressure of an opposition under siege in a country in which independent reporting is actively blocked from reaching the outside world.

Kutsila, who previously made a documentary on the 2020 protest wave, When Flowers are Not Silent (2021),  is now living in exile from his native Belarus in Poland, and draws on close personal knowledge of the dangers of speaking out. Letters, which focuses mainly on the aftermath of the mass demonstrations, gathers testimony, letters, drawings, photographs, video footage and animated sequences that present different scenarios faced by those opposing the regime, through the personal stories of individuals who have been imprisoned, killed, or have fled. Their experiences echo those of activists grappling with a resurgence of political repression by totalitarian governments elsewhere in a destabilised Europe, giving the film wide, of-the-minute resonance.

Dark, evocative drawings of a huddled, isolated figure, peepholes, and ever-watching eyes that were made in prison by Kasia Budzko, who was sentenced to two and a half years in a penal colony for protesting when she was just nineteen, are incorporated into the film, forming the basis of animation sequences. These are effective in creating a sense of the troubled interior worlds of political prisoners, who are made to wear yellow tags on their uniforms to single them out from other inmates for particularly harsh treatment. There is scant colour in these animations, or in the cityscapes of Belarus that appear in photographs, in which grey tower blocks dwarf humans, and the statue of Lenin in a square draws an unmistakable parallel to the repressions of a Soviet era threatening to return.

While this dramatic animation provides the soul of the film, the most shocking and nerve-shredding moments come from video-camera, which brings us unsettlingly close to outrageous violence at the hands of the system and its thug-like enforcers. In one, CCTV penal colony cell footage shows prisoner Vitold Ashurak, who would die just after in suspicious circumstances, falling twice, mysteriously unable to stand. Letters home reassure family of his comfort; witness accounts of inmates tell differently, of a campaign of persecution against him. In other footage, recorded by Belarusian KGB, a resident with a hunting rifle faces off against the band of armed officers sawing through his door. Beyond these gut-churning snatches of moments at death’s door, the horror that seeps across most memorably is the unremitting fear before being caught for citizens of conscience in a country in which facial recognition cameras operate as public surveillance against protesters, and arrests, of which there are several a day, happen even in the dead of night. One anonymous man has rejected exile to stay close to his daughter, and he goes about his routine with guarded vigilance.

Extended testimony comes from Andrei Ostapovich, a former police investigator of violent crime sentenced in absentia  to eleven years, who resigned due to shock at the sadism of colleagues beating protesters, and is living in exile in Poland after fleeing Belarus. He details his disillusionment, his vulnerable subconscious world of dreams, time on the run, and his subsequent activism breaking into official databases to collect evidence of regime crimes — activity he has now halted due to the frustrating lack of an avenue to act on the findings.

Kutsila achieves access to regime targets whose profiles are varied, and their trust in him is considerable. The voices he amplifies defy the regime’s efforts to dehumanise its victims into faceless, expendable ciphers, as its politically motivated arrests (more than 765,000 have been recorded since 2000 in Belarus) continue. This is not a film that registers great optimism for imminent change, but its humanity, and the dignity of considered attention that it affords its subjects, is undeniable and bracing.

Director, writer: Andrei Kutsila
Editor: Piotr Oginski
Producers: Miroslaw Dembinski, Giedre Zickyte, Gregor Streiber, Friedemann Hottenbacher
Cinematographer: Wojciech Weglarz, Anonymous
Music: Vygintas Kisevi?ius, Paulius Kilbauskas
Sound: Saulius Urbanavi?ius
Animation: Natalia Spychala
Production companies: DocEdu Foundation (Poland), Moonmakers (Lithuania), Inselfilm Produktion (Germany)
Sales: Filmotor
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Documentary Film)
In Belarusian, Russian, Polish
75 minutes

Screening in the international documentary competition at DOK Leipzig on the heels of its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix of the Semaine de la Critique, it is a delicate, slender portrait of indomitable seeds of resilience. Serwicka does not make a spectacle of combustible violence, but rather captures subtle shifts of energy in the cramped space of a household in which several generations of women have lived with abusive partners, and anxious tension still resides in their bodies long after the men have departed. Its restrained and poetic obliqueness promises niche but appreciative festival audiences.

The surge in gender-based violence that accompanied the world’s COVID pandemic lockdowns, with their added stress and confinement, is not spelled out through facts and figures in Blossoming, which is as subtle and observational as it is quietly powerful. Rather, we feel the underlying unease as 23-year-old Kamila returns to the house in which she grew up after eight years, at the start of a lockdown in April of 2020, where six family members are squeezed in. Classes have gone online, and the Lord’s Prayer is recited around the dinner table, in scenes in which the women of the family — three sisters, a mother, and a grandmother — try to maintain a semblance of order and purpose, amid the ill-tempered demands and insults of the father. He asks one daughter go fill up his car, but she pushes back that he will just want to buy vodka, in one of many terse exchanges. Details are kept spare, but we learn that sporadic calls to the police are part of regular family dynamics; there has already been one court case, and several interventions.

Countering glimpses of the conflict, are scenes of the house interiors when empty, as a clock ticks, or wind chimes tinkle. The understated, finely tuned soundscape supports the reflective nature of a poetic film that knows how to use still moments to great effect, bringing audiences into an understanding that frazzled, exhausted nervous systems need calm spaces in which to heal. Scenes outside, as the women dig potatoes, or watch flocks of birds, reinforce the sense of bodily reconnection with nature, nourishment and safety. There is snowfall in many of these sequences, with the implication that winter is well underway, and a renewal is afoot.

“The same thing has been haunting this house for generations,” we hear, as an online therapy session gives more overt context and psychological insight. Kamila’s grandmother, who lives with them, also left an abusive marriage when younger, and raised four daughters on her own, pointing to a long family cycle that is tough to break. While Kamila steers the documentary through her camera, it is her mother, Agnieszka, that is positioned as the long-suffering backbone of the family. She withstands wider pressures from relatives (Kamila’s uncle pushes her to give her husband yet another chance), as she prepares to go through with a divorce and honour her daughter’s wish that they stop pretending that the abusive dynamics are normal.

Agnieszka can initially not think of any dreams of her own when asked, but she makes the challenging move to the Netherlands  to embrace a new life, an endeavour we follow with some suspense through her calls back home, to find out if she will make a go of things there. Kamila’s father continues to participate on the film’s edges, but Kamila keeps this primarily as the story of the family’s women, as they come together to mark their growth, ending in 2026 when they have all moved out of home, in the aftermath of a traumatic situation that is not permitted the final say in this ongoing, inter-generational history.

Director, cinematography: Kamila Serwicka
Editors: Julia Oleksy, Jakub Darewski
Producer: Adrianna Redzia
Music, sound design: Joanna Szczesnowicz
Production company: Lumisenta Film Foundation (Poland)
Sales: Film Mundi (Neda Lukic)
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Documentary Film)
In Polish
77 minutes

The slickly packaged, ESPN-produced documentary, which world-premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and now screens in the Audience Competition at DOK Leipzig, is essentially an effective crash-course for western audiences in understanding and appreciating a declining sport. (Shirai’s 2015 The Birth of Sake demystified another Japanese tradition, that of sake-brewing.) But while it is very reverent toward the sumo tradition as a way of life, emphasising its ritual elements and warrior ethos, it does not hold back on the heavy toll it takes on athletes’ bodies and the unrelenting psychological pressure to perform the rikishi (professional wrestlers) face as they give all they have to climb the ranks and stay at the top.

A potted summary of the origins of sumo is subtly woven into a documentary that switches between a warm sepia that nods to ancient heritage and more naturalistic colour. The film asks whether the tradition, which originated 1,500 years ago as a Shinto ritual to appease the gods for a good harvest, and was popularised by feudal lords who treated rishiki like samurai, can endure in a changed world in which fewer kids are signing up for training. While success still makes wrestlers popular celebrities with devoted fandoms, the gruelling nature of the sport is detailed through the strict regimens and ups and downs of several wrestlers, concluding with the retirement of the reigning yokozuna (highest-ranked champion), Terunofuji Haruo, due to ongoing health issues, and the rise of a nineteen-year-old rookie, Yonezawaryu Daiki.

The stable of wrestlers whose training we observe is run by Master Sakaigawa, a sixty-two-year-old who comes across as a strict but fair force in the rigidly hierarchical and rule-bound environment, demanding full commitment from his cohort, but never needling them when they are too down. As part of weight training, wrestlers are tasked with consuming a huge number of calories per day, and eating in the sumo school is considered a skill requiring the same level of commitment as practice sessions, sometimes prompting trepidation among new recruits. Yonezawaryu expresses initial reservations over the sport’s rigid demands, as he sees first-hand the physical risks, and bristles at the school’s curfew and his circumscribed freedoms. Through a series of tournament match-ups, losses and victories, we share the wrestlers’ on-edge apprehensions.

At the other end of the professional arc is Terunofuji Haruo, a Mongolian yokozuna whose doctors warn him that his body has reached its limit, but who is determined to go for one more championship win, or at least until a new yokozuna to carry on the rituals can be found (yokozuna are thought to be closest to God, and ceremony also factors large.) His wife, Tsegmed, and baby also feature prominently. She is unswayed by celebrity, and her solid support through his years of hardship when he was coming up in the field, when he dropped into the unpaid division and had knee surgery (“I married the man, not the fighter,” she says), are praised by her husband as the backbone of his will to succeed. The sequences on their relationship are a welcome inclusion in an otherwise very male-dominated film.

While the yokozuna does not relish the prospect of a lifespan cut by ten to twenty years, he says he finds meaning in sacrificing to shore up national pride. This fits with a film that plays it fairly safe by including nothing too critical or scandalous about sumo. That said, in a landscape of commercially-inclined documentaries that are all too happy to reach for lurid spectacle to sell their stories, the mindful respect that drives Shirai’s portrait stands out as refreshing.

Director: Erik Shirai
Editor: Frederick Shanahan
Cinematographers: Hiroshi Hara, Erik Shirai
Producers: Maria Delgado, Teddy Leifer, Sam Stanley, Sigrid Dyekjaer, Yusuke Kamata
Cast: Terunofuji Haruo, Hiradoumi Yuki, Yonezawaryu Daiki, Kosei Motomura
Music: Rutger Hoedemaekers
Sound: Takuya Kawakami, Yamato Kamei, Fusako Aratake, Yasuhiro Arihara, Yasuaki Kusachi, Andrew Tracy
Production companies: ESPN/Disney (US), Rise Films (UK), Real Lava (Denmark), Generation 11 (Japan)
Sales: ESPN (Maria Delgado)
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Audience Competition)
In Japanese, Mongolian
99 minutes

Marczak accompanies a father on his regular, obsessive searches of Poland’s Vistula River, as he looks for more than a year for his son, who vanished from a bridge without a trace — one case among more than half a million young people reported missing in Europe and the US each year. Haunting, unflinching, and finally regenerative through the tenderest hints of reconnection with world as it is, this is a portrait of unexplained tragedy and humanity’s desperate need for meaning that defies the easy conventions of true-crime spectacle in every way, and reaffirms Marczak as a distinctly unique voice in Polish cinema.

The 2023 disappearance of sixteen-year-old Krzysztof Dyminski, who was last seen on CCTV standing on Warsaw’s Gdanski Bridge, gripped Poland, as his family and the police, uncertain whether he jumped or walked away, followed up a flood of reports of believed sightings from the public. Rather than delving deeply into Dyminski’s backstory, Closure becomes less focused on solving the mystery, than charting the psychological shifts of Krzysztof’s father Daniel, as he struggles with whether to end the river search that has begun to consume his life, and to find a way to make peace with the terrible uncertainty that gnaws at his waking hours and dreams.

There is no romance to these searches on the river: they are bleak and gruelling, as crews sift through heavy weeds and debris, and place the tiny expedition parties in a state of constant tension. There are false alarms, and, more disturbing, even viscerally nauseating to the seekers, the discovery of actual bodies of others who have lost their life in the Vistula, occasionally bringing closure to other families. Underwater footage reinforces a sense of the muddy depths of a realm that can never be thoroughly trawled. There is still no sign of Krzysztof in the water, but a parallel social media deep dive of his TikTok account by Marczak reveals the teen had an interest in others’ posts about death, suggesting suicide ideation and online life as an isolating, unseen undertow.

The family grasps at consolatory hope in any form, even if it leans into superstition. Daniel, despite many months of fruitless river expeditions, says he feels they are close to finding his son now. He has resisted setting a date to end the search, and in talks around the dinner table with his wife Agnieszka and surviving son Patryk, he pushes an autumn culmination back into winter. The family relate dreams they have had in which he is still alive, which they go over for clues. Daniel throws loaves of bread off the bridge to track their path, an ancient method for locating the drowned he was told about. In conversations with Marczak around a campfire, Daniel unloads his troubled replaying of the past and his crisis of meaning. His friends and relatives express concern he will cross a line after which there is nothing left to him but the river.

But quietly, miraculously, as the solution-oriented father starts to shift in his grief, he is able, in moments underplayed and never forced, to appreciate and reconnect with the present moment and beauty of what remains. The defining turning point is simple, as Daniel asks Marczak to record the birdsong they hear  to listen to during car rides, but it hints at a change that is deep, fundamental, and a sort of roadmap for a bearable future. By the end, as Daniel marks his fiftieth birthday, the film has become more for the living than the dead, a poignant portrait not only of a loss, but of the seasons of grief and the regenerating power of supportive community — and proof that documentary cinema can serve as a tool of healing connection and focused reflection.

Director, screenplay, cinematography: Michal Marczak
Editor: Anna Garncarczyk
Producers: Monika Braid, Michal Marczak, Remi Grellety, Katarzyna Szczerba, Karolina Marczak
Composers: Pawel Mykietyn, Dirk Dresselhaus, Ilpo Väisänen, Hildur Guðnadóttir, William Basinski
Sound: Katarzyna Szczerba, Konrad Blaszczyk
Production companies: Braidmade Films (Poland), Warboys Films (France)
Sales: Autolook Filmsales
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Audience Competition)
In Polish
105 minutes

Clayface first turned up as an adversary to the Dark Knight back in 1940, and while various villains have taken the name over the decades, the character’s general main attribute is his ability to shape-shift, his face and body often taking on a clay-like appearance when he isn’t specifically impersonating someone else. In the hands of screenwriters Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini (Drive), Clayface becomes a monster movie in the Universal Horror vein — the creature is a tragic, lovelorn figure wronged by society — with a heavy dollop of gloppy body horror.

Matt Hagen (Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries) would seem to have it all, leaving behind a tough childhood in the slums of Gotham City to become a movie star and newly-minted Oscar nominee. But returning to Gotham on a press tour, Matt makes the mistake of picking up the slinky but dangerous Mia (Joana Ribeiro, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote), even though she’s involved with local mobster Markos Szabo (David Dencik, No Time to Die). Szabo and his goons cut up Matt’s face, ruining his leading-man opportunities. Between Matt’s attempts to fight Szabo in Gotham’s crooked courts and the multiple surgeries he undergoes in an attempt to repair his face, the actor is left penniless and devastated.

A ray of hope appears in the medical experiments of Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who’s working on nanobytes that will repair tissue, flesh, and organs to their original state. Matt convinces her to take him on as a human test subject, since he’s got nothing to lose, and at first, his face seems to be restored. His anger eventually leads to an instability in his appearance: initially face-meltingly monstrous, later developing an ability to take on the appearance of others. These complications only fuel his desire for vengeance upon Szabo and everyone else who ruined his life. As Caitlyn’s police-detective boyfriend John (Max Minghella) starts investigating the murders of Matt’s enemies, the nanobytes take an increasing toll on Matt’s body and soul.

For a horror movie based on a comic-book villain, Clayface makes sure that the characters matter before the mayhem starts. We feel for Matt, a seemingly nice guy to everyone around him, as he pays a huge price for a minor slip-up. Harries possesses a physical malleability — he’s got the kind of looks that can switch from standard-issue handsome to menacing with the tiniest shift of angle — that makes him a perfect choice for the role, fully believable as both matinee idol and flawed anti-hero. A less thoughtful script would have treated Caitlyn as a plot device only, but her well-intentioned desires to help Matt and to develop what could be a revolutionary health-care innovation gives the character more substance than that of stock mad scientist, particularly thanks to Ackie’s empathetic performance. (Clayface hits theaters not long after co-writer Mike Flanagan’s take on Stephen King’s Carrie premiered on Prime Video; that miniseries also takes the time to plumb the depths of its complicated antagonists.)

Director James Watkins (the Speak No Evil remake) mounts some memorably terrifying (and squishy) moments, particularly a sequence in a turbulence-tossed airplane in which Matt attempts to cut apart his eyelids, which have begun to grow together, with some tiny but very sharp scissors. (Somewhere, Buñuel and Dalí are smiling.) Production designer James Price (Poor Things) gives us another rainy Gotham where 1940s skyscrapers share space with an endless array of dark alleys and steam tunnels; the only giveaway to this film being shot in Europe in a nightclub bathroom where the stall doors go all the way to the floor.

Making the title character an actor provides an apt metaphor; over the course of Clayface, we see that Matt seems to lack a fixed internal life. He adapts to situations and other people as they come along. When the possibility of acting is seemingly taken away from him, he has no resources, no Plan B. The shape-shifting creature was always part of who he is, even if the ultimate version turns out to be more monstrous than he can bear. This duality will neatly serve any possible future installments where he might come into conflict with Batman — another split personality — and the two can square off as dark and darker knights.

Director: James Watkins
Screenwriter: Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini; story by Mike Flanagan
Cast: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan, Nancy Carroll, Joshua James
Executive producers: Michael E. Uslan, Chantal Nong Vo, Lars P. Winther, Paul Ritchie, Rafi Crohn, Trevor Macy
Producers: Matt Reeves, Lynn Harris, James Gunn, Peter Safran
Director of photography: Rob Hardy
Production design: James Price
Editing: Jon Harris
Music: Volker Bertelmann
Sound design: Ben Barker, supervising sound editor & designer; Glenn Freemantle, sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Studios, Domain Entertainment, 6th & Idaho
In English
108 minutes

Love gets under the skin in Earbug—and into the brain. In Kim Hyo-mi’s animated debut, physical intimacy allows an insect-turned-alien to enter the brain through the ear and reveal hidden feelings—a tempting shortcut for a novelist struggling to write about love. Yet access to the mind does not unlock the heart, sex does not necessarily amount to love, and others’ revelations offer little protection against her own terrible memories.

Combining everyday life with grotesque fantasy, KAFA (Korean Academy of Film Arts, which produced) graduate Kim centers his tale on twenty-something would-be author Jeong-yeon (voiced by Ji-in Jeong), whose creative paralysis is rooted in her unresolved family history. The film is most affecting when confronting the damage inflicted on a child caught in her parents’ marital collapse. Elsewhere, proliferating symbols and unconvincing relationships weaken a drama whose emotional clarity does not always match its visual ambition.

Working at a convenience store to support herself, Jeong-yeon shares a run-down home with school friend Na-jung (Do-ha Beom), a painter. While Na-jung seemingly pursues her ambitions with ease, Jeong-yeon wonders how she can write convincingly about love, something she has never experienced.

She begins dating Kyung-hoon as research, her search for material reducing him to a means of completing her novel. At the same time, the earbug promises access to others’ innermost feelings, yet Jeong-yeon repeatedly fails to translate its revelations into fiction, perhaps because she mistakes sexual intimacy for love.

The roots of this confusion lie in childhood. After seeing her mother enter a hotel with another man, Jeong-yeon summoned her father, whose subsequent, repeated threats of suicide place a terrible burden on her. The discovery shattered her parents’ marriage, leaving a trauma that haunts both intimacy and her writing. Love, ironically, remains the subject she longs to explore.

Using motion capture of human movement, Kim renders emotion and gesture with precision and expressive freedom, avoiding the stiffness often associated with 3D animation. Kim’s greater achievement, however, lies in the directness with which she confronts Jeong-yeon’s trauma. When Jeong-yeon accompanies Kyung-hoon to a motel for their first physical encounter, the claustrophobic blood-red corridors evoke a horror film, turning romantic anticipation into dread. Intimacy draws her back into a space poisoned by memory. The room number, 2006, invites speculation about links between her past and her self-imposed deadline of writing a great novel about love by age 26. Here, artistic ambition, sex and traumatic memory become painfully entangled.

Other images give her anxiety a menacing physical form. Protective-suited figures patrol the streets to contain an infection, spraying people who turn into insects and are promptly crushed. Churches briefly allow young people to kiss and express themselves through music, until parents or men in hazmat suits intrude to pursue them or to police their sexuality. In the chaos, the ear becomes a testament to resolve artistic yearning and the struggle to preserve identity. Such passages take the animation beyond literal experience, but their accumulation can demand the viewer pay more attention to decoding symbols than to following Jeong-yeon’s emotional trajectory.

Generational conflict is more readily legible. Older male judges scrutinise Jeong-yeon patronisingly, while parents urge their twenty-something offspring to abandon creative aspirations for “real jobs”. Housemate Na-jung’s apparent affair with a married gallery director further entangles ambition, sex and power. Whether this relationship belongs to the film’s reality or is coloured by Jeong-yeon’s suspicions remains uncertain, as her parents’ history makes the possibility of projection difficult to dismiss.

Na-jung’s characterisation is also weak. Jeong-yeon shows such strong dislike for her that it makes their longstanding friendship hard to believe in, with little affection or shared history to explain their bond. The revelation that wealthy Na-jung chose shabby accommodation because her luxurious home offered little artistic inspiration further strains credibility, introducing an unconvincing conceit about creativity’s need for hardship. Additionally, Jeong-yeon’s insistence that Na-jeong stop smoking weed and seeing a married man echoes the parental policing the film critiques. Her attitude towards cannabis may also reflect Korea’s strict legal and social prohibitions, though viewers outside that context may find her moralising less sympathetic. Nevertheless, Ji-in Jeong and Do-ha Beom’s excellent voice performances bring a natural conversational rhythm to scenes that might otherwise feel overwhelmed by imagery.

The film’s naturalistic details are keenly observed. Jeong-yeon’s hunched back captures a writer’s desk-bound posture and subtle shifts in facial expression lend nuance to Jeong-yeon’s portrayal, particularly when jealousy colours her feelings towards Na-jung. Less effective are the large white highlights in her eyes, recalling Japanese shoujo manga heroines and adding a decorative quality at odds with her naturalistic voice and behaviour. A late suggestion of hollowness offers psychological significance, but comes too late to dispel the distraction.

Ravel’s Boléro is an inspired musical choice. Its insistent repetition and accumulating layers heighten tension, while the melody becomes an earbug itself, lingering beyond the auditorium.

For English-language viewers, the subtitles pose a more immediate obstacle. Often stretching to three or four lines, they cover much of the frame and vanish before even fast readers can finish. Needless verbosity—“first of all” instead of “first”—compounds the problem. This is especially damaging in a film whose visual compositions deserve sustained attention.

Despite its shortcomings, Kim’s debut is most compelling when revealing how creativity becomes entangled with an experience its creator has never fully confronted. The fantasy may be uneven, but the raw wound at its core is vividly felt, making Kim’s next feature an eagerly awaited prospect.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Hyomi Kim
Cast: Ji-in Jeong, Do-ha Beom, Dha-sol Kim, Kyoung-do Lee
Producers: Yeon Chan-heum, Hyomi Kim
Animation: Hwang Tae-seok, Yeon Chan-heum
Music: Dong-wook Kim, Geon-ho Lee
Sound: Ju-suk Lee
Production company: Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA)
World Sales: M-Line Distribution
Venue: Busan Intl. Film Festival (Vision Korea)
84 minutes

A park bench promises a glimpse of the future in Nothing Has Happened Yet, but the more revealing moments arrive when its protagonist gets up and walks away.

In his third feature, writer-dirctor Shin Sun explores the uneasy coexistence of a desire for certainty and the unpredictable encounters through which life acquires meaning. Anchored by Park Hanbitnara’s thoroughly convincing central performance and Shin’s measured approach, the film finds considerable warmth in this tension, even as its philosophical reach occasionally exceeds its dramatic scope.

Premiering in Busan’s Vision Korea section, Nothing Has Happened Yet follows Eun Yul (Park), who returns to her home island of Geoje after a breakup. With her comes a copy of Swiss author Robert Walser’s 1917 novella The Walk, a gift from an ex and a companion to her proposed thesis on doing nothing. Her hometown, where “nothing happens”, would seem an appropriate place to begin. Yet the possibility of withdrawing from the world soon proves as elusive as the future she believes she can foresee.

The very ordinariness of park benches makes the significance Eun Yul attaches to one particular roadside bench all the more intriguing. Here, she believes, closing her eyes and clasping her hands allows her to see scenes from her future. She cannot say when they will occur, only that she will eventually recognise them. 

But the bench thus offers more than a supernatural possibility. For someone nursing emotional wounds from childhood and apprehensive about what may come next, it provides a place where uncertainty might just briefly become bearable. Shin leaves room for doubt about Eun Yul’s supposed psychic gift, directing attention instead towards her need to believe in it. 

Having resolved to avoid meeting anyone, she nevertheless ends up drinking and dancing with her childhood friend and neighbour Min Jung (Kang Soyi) and her partner Ji Geun (in a nuanced performance by Ha Seong-guk). When Eun Yul tells them about her ability, his fascination contrasts with Min Jung’s sharp questioning. Whether unsettled by this scepticism or by her own changing circumstances, Eun Yul finds the future increasingly harder to bring into focus.

These encounters expose the contradiction at the heart of her project of doing nothing. A life organised around anticipating what will happen remains subject to interruptions that cannot be predicted. Familiar faces reappear unexpectedly, strangers briefly become intimate companions and attempts to explain herself risk having her dismissed as mentally unstable. 

Walser’s book provides a fitting point of reference for this going back and forth between reflection and encounter. Walking gives Eun Yul time to think, while continually exposing her to people and situations beyond her control. She searches for answers in Walser and the summoned images, yet she is unable to entirely retreat into the security of her predictions. 

Shin weaves textual echoes from Walser, recurring encounters and moments of recognition into an intricate whole. There is pleasure in tracing the connections without finding every one resolved, and the film’s title gradually acquires a double meaning. That nothing has happened yet can express anxiety about the future, but also relief that a feared outcome has not materialised. It leaves room, too, for possibilities that Eun Yul has not imagined.

Park’s performance supplies the continuity that keeps these strands together. She makes Eun Yul’s faith in the bench, her vulnerability to doubt and her continued curiosity about others feel not only convincing but compelling throughout. Her performance carries the film through its more abstract passages, giving emotional substance to ideas that might otherwise remain merely suggestive. Shin’s controlled direction allows that presence to register without forcing its implications.

Kim Tae San’s choice of Schumann’s piano music lends an impassioned poignancy to Eun Yul’s contemplation against Geoje’s rural landscape when dialogue falls away. 

The film’s insistence on returning to Eun Yul’s relationships with men, however, limits the film’s scope. Her former boyfriend, a possible romantic connection and her position within another couple’s relationship occupy so much of the narrative that the film’s broader philosophical inquiry repeatedly contracts into a question of how to negotiate her love life. These entanglements give her uncertainty an immediate emotional basis, but their accumulation proves to be somewhat restrictive. An early vision of a man and woman dancing and kissing further complicates matters. The dim lighting and their fleeting presentation in profile make it difficult to establish whether the woman is Eun Yul. Viewers who assume it is her may anticipate a development considerably more consequential than the mundane circumstances that subsequently emerge. The ambiguity creates an expectation the film does little to reward, making the eventual clarification feel frustrating rather than revealing.

The setting is also less fully realised. Although Geoje is repeatedly invoked as a quiet rural retreat where little happens, the countryside appears curiously sanitised. With no visible farming or animals to give it a stronger sense of everyday rural life other than cats, it functions more convincingly as a space for contemplation than as a lived environment. The distinction matters in a film so attentive to the unexpected things a walker might encounter.

The dialogue further weakens the sense of place. Despite Geoje’s distinctive dialect, characters who supposedly grew up there and left as adults speak in standard Seoul accents. Local speech is largely confined to elderly extras. This raises a broader question about films set in Gyeongsang Province. Why is its dialect so often muted in central characters, yet confined to extras serving as local texture and background? This choice distances the protagonists from the place meant to have shaped them.

Towards the end, the editing also loosens its grip. An extended passage interspersing scenes and photographs from Eun Yul’s childhood interrupts the film’s previously measured movement, and its accumulating associations begin to feel less purposeful. The backward glance has an evident place in a story concerned with memory and recognition, but its length dissipates momentum and leaves the narrative briefly adrift.

Shin recovers his bearings by returning to the mysterious bench and, more movingly, through Eun Yul’s encounter with a crying high-school student whom she consoles. Here, the film finds a moving expression of solidarity, whether Eunyul is comforting a stranger or, more poignantly, reaching back towards her own teenage self. After so much searching for signs, it is this simple act of attention that gives Nothing Has Happened Yet its most persuasive sense of possibility.

Director, screenplay, editing: Shin Sun
Cast: Park Hanbitnara, Ha Seong Guk, Kang Soyi, Park Bong Jun
Producers: Shin Sun, Park Hanbitnara, Kim Min Seong
Cinematography: Ahn Kyoung Hoon
Costume design: Park Hanbitnara, Kim Sung Ha
Music: Kim Tae San
Sound: Kim Ju Hyun
Production company: Pauline
World Sales: TBC
Venue: Busan Intl. Film Festival (Vision Korea)
98 minutes

Unsurprisingly complimentary as the comments might be, they did provide a very precise picture of what has made the festival a must-go for industry executives, filmmakers and cinephiles alike as it enters its fourth decade. Celebrating its first year as an “A-list” festival – a ranking bestowed by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF), and one that elevated its standing alongside big beasts like Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto – the festival reported a total attendance of 277,027 for its screenings of 315 films during its ten-day run this year, an increase of 14% over the 30^th edition last year.

More than 900 international guests graced the festival this year, according to its final report. Apart from the Oscar-winning Malaysian-Chinese actor Michelle Yeoh, recipient of the honorary Asian Filmmaker of the Year award, the festival also hosted Alfonso Cuarón (in town with his son Jonás for a masterclass and the Asian premiere of the latter’s Campeón Gabacho), Maggie Gyllenhaal (who presented her short film Flesh Impact), Hirokazu Kore-eda (whose Look Back will premiere in Korea after its bow in Busan), Lav Diaz and the French actors Isabelle Huppert and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

While local film buffs were palpably chuffed by these international “guest visits” – as shown by the near-impossibility for international guests and journalists to score tickets to talks on the festival’s otherwise well-designed online ticketing system – the Busan audience demonstrated exceptional enthusiasm and support for their own filmmakers as well. This is of course largely due to the festival’s very tangible support of Korean talent. For example, there was the decision to give the prestigious opening-film berth to The Table: Day and Night. A sequel of sorts to his 2016 film The Table, Kim Jong-kwan’s latest film is an occasionally charming yet mostly lightweight portmanteau of four different love stories unfolding in the same café.

But it’s a moot point to judge The Table: Day and Night on its own artistic merits. Just as The Table provided a platform for its then up-and-coming cast (Jung Yu-mi, Han Ye-ri, Jung Eun-chae and Im Soo-jung), the significance of Kim’s latest film lies with its young actors, according to festival director Jung Hanseok.

“I believe the actors in this ensemble are among those who will carry Korean cinema into the future,” he told The Film Verdict after the opening ceremony on October 6, referring to a cast that includes the multilingual Shim Eun-kyung (who starred in Japanese filmmaker Sho Miyake’s Locarno winner Two Seasons, Two Strangers) and Kim Min-ha (of Pachinko fame). “I cannot remember the last time I saw such an impressive group of actors brought together in one film. It also struck me as exactly the kind of film that more than 5,000 people could enjoy together on opening night. That’s why we selected it as the opening film.”

Jung’s vision is embodied further in the three Korean films chosen for the festival’s top-tier competition this year, each of them selected as an indication of the many trends and possibilities emerging in the domestic film industry today.

With its bifurcated structure and a story driven by fateful encounters and awkward relationships, Lim Ha-yeon’s Beach Fictions is perhaps a film that bears the closest resemblance to the Korean films (that is to say, the ones by Hong Sang-soo) getting traction on the festival circuit. More telling, however, is the presence of Long Long Night, which signals the potential in animation films that has long been overlooked in Korean cinema. The highly-stylised horror movie Shaving offers proof of how a younger generation could up the ante and steer genre filmmaking in different ways.

In the context of the festival competition, however, they prove to be no match to the one veteran in their midst. With his 11^th feature, the 67-year-old Iranian auteur Majid Majidi scooped Busan’s top prize with Midday Meal, in which a conscientious teacher is driven to extremes in taking care of his impoverished charges, risking his own financial well-being as he confronts the imminent closure of his school and the disintegration of his future life with an ailing mother. Featuring a barnstorming turn from non-professional actor Mohammad Rahimi, Majidi delivers a blistering j’accuse against the social injustice that is pushing Iran’s rural poor into oblivion.

Accepting his award at the festival’s closing ceremony on October 15, Majidi paid tribute to his late mother and “all the brave people of Iran who have stood firm through all these years [in] resisting oppression”.

“You are all aware that our cities have recently been brutally bombarded,” said Majidi. “One school in Minab was hit, and innocent students suffered. . . About 150,000 facilities have been bombed, including schools and hospitals, leaving around 5,000 casualties. What crime did our people commit? Nothing, except that our people wanted to live independently.

“They will stand firm until the end and fight to gain their independence back. I wish for a world where there would be no war. And I pray for a future where the world would be full of peace, love, and brotherhood,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, returning Busan alumni featured prominently among the laureates. Indonesian filmmaker Eddie Cayhono’s Ibuku, which won the Special Jury Prize, was a project presented at Busan’s Asian Contents and Film Market 11 years ago. In her acceptance speech for the Best Director prize, Taiwanese filmmaker Robin Lee Yun-chan told the audience how she was in the same dress she wore 20 years ago when she went to Busan to present her last film, The Shoe Fairy, in the festival’s New Currents section.

In the Vision Asia competition, Mongolian director Byamba Sakhya also made a triumphant return to Busan after 13 years away, with his social-satire-meets-rebellious-romance Zogsool scooping the NETPAC and Fipresci awards. In the Vision Korea sidebar, social realist dramas Beyond Love’s Horizon and Full Moon are the big winners with three prizes each. Just as in the main competition, however, a younger generation of Korean filmmakers have offered glimpses of their very diverse tastes and talents, ranging from the subtle and slow-burning human dramas of Baler and Cosmic Trace to the artisanal, reflective and sometimes achingly funny stop-motion animation of The Flower.

Even beyond all these competitive sections and their litanies of endless prizes, the festival offered undiscovered gems aplenty. Among those receiving world premieres at Busan this year is Dhara, Anuruddha Jayasingha’s beautifully filmed feature about the blooming relationship and socio-philosophical conversations between a monk and an injured militant in a far-flung monastery in rural Sri Lanka. Similar in its reflections about the clash between the political and private spheres in history and life, Margharita Ferrari’s directorial debut FÖA – Once Upon the Future offers a taut screenplay and remarkable performances as the film pits a pregnant teenager against three activists trapped together in an apartment in downtown Genoa during the local police’s brutal crackdown on the anti-G8 demonstrations in July 2001.

And these are just the films. Founded partly as a project designed to kickstart Busan’s transformation from a run-down industrial port city into a more sophisticated 21^st century metropolis, the festival prides itself for its civic engagement and for its attempt to foster a sense of place for people across the geographical and social spectrum. A spin-off now into its ninth year, taking place in Nampo-dong, the neighbourhood where the festival was based before the move to venues in the newly developed Centum City in 2011, is the Community BIFF. This initiative gets audiences  involved in the selection of films (in programmes called “Request Cinema” and “The Cinephiles Strike Back”) and other activities. Meanwhile, BIFF Everywhere comprised 39 screenings of 28 films in locations across the city, including in markets, temples and even the airside spaces at Busan’s airport. Just like the extraordinary army of eager volunteers teeming around the main venues, these satellite events provide the Busan International Film Festival with its own distinctive ambience and identity, just as much as the glitz, glamour and garlanded auteurs on show at the centre of things.

With reporting by Clarence Tsui and Cho Hyo-jin.

Street Fighter, however, is a little bit of everything that amounts to a lot of not-much. It’s a film that can’t quite land on a tone, nor does it explain its world and its premise in a way that will make sense to newcomers to the IP. All of that would be forgivable if the martial-arts sequences delivered, if the thrill of inventive choreography and camerawork let the stunt performers shine, but after a few exuberant fights early on, the rest find themselves lost in an over-edited sludge of low-wattage sameness.

An animated flashback opens the action at a tournament in 1987, where Ryu (Andrew Koji, Bullet Train) is fighting to be world champion. (Anachronism alert: he gets pumped up for the match by listening to a song that won’t be recorded until 1992.) Despite the warnings from his sensei, Ryu wins the battle by tapping into his inner darkness, his eyes glowing red while a far-off entity goads Ryu into embracing his shadow self. After the victory, Ryu is horrified at what he could become, and he abandons fighting altogether.

In 1993, flamboyantly fascistic M. Bison (David Dasmalchian) wants to steal Ryu’s dark power for himself, so he announces a new tournament to bring Ryu out of the woodwork. Bison sends Chun-Li (Callina Liang, Presence) to gather the world’s greatest fighters, including tall Russian bruiser Zangief (Olivier Richters, Reacher), masked claw fighter Vega (musician Orville Peck), boxer Balrog (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), battling monk Dhalsim (Indian superstar Vidyut Jammwai), and wedge-haired American Guile (wrestler Cody Rhodes). Oh, and also Ken Masters (Noah Centineo), Ryu’s one-time best friend and fellow student; they haven’t spoken in years, and over time, Ken has become a shameless glory hog and professional pitchman, a powerful fighter who’s also a joke.

And then, they all fight. Centineo and Rhodes deliver wisecracks, while Dasmalchian, Kyle Mooney (as a nerdy INTERPOL agent), and Eric André (as a constantly-yelling sports announcer) shoot for the highest of high camp. That would all be well and good, were it not for the fact that we’re meant to take so much of this seriously. Ryu’s inner struggle and turmoil, not to mention Chun-Li’s quest for vengeance against her father’s killer, are deadly earnest affairs, their disparate weightiness unbalancing everything else.

Director Kitao Sakurai (Bad Trip) comes from the world of comedy (he was one of the developers of Adult Swim’s The Eric André Show), but here he never succeeds in juggling the broad variety of tones that the script has tasked his ensemble to enact. Nor does he demonstrate any particular acumen for directing action. The two most memorable fights arrive courtesy of tongue-in-cheek absurdity: Ken attacks Ryu in a hotel room, with Ryu inflicting pain on his old friend purely through defense and deflection, and in another Ryu fights a much larger opponent in a steam bath, where both are clad only in towels. Those both take place early in Street Fighter, eventually giving way to a series of look-alike scenes, dimly-lit, where dozens of adversaries clash in unmemorable bouts.

Notably, and in the absence of anything else, the camera of cinematographer Ken Sang (They Cloned Tyrone) is equal-opportunity in its leering: the Dolls (Bison’s henchwomen), clad in uniforms that fall somewhere between “cadet” and “flight attendant,” get full up-and-down pans over their tight pencil skirts, but the male fighters’ physiques are also subject to that same gaze. This sort of bake-shop objectification will matter to someone.

This year’s Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat 2 proved that, after many failed attempts and fan-service sequels, video-game adaptations can be given new life on the big screen, mixing thrills, action, humor, and self-awareness. Street Fighter assembles those elements but never lands on a formula that functions.

Director: Kitao Sakurai
Screenwriter: Kitao Sakurai and T.J. Fixman; story by Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman, based on the CAPCOM video game
Cast: Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Calina Liang, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoai, David Dasmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Andrew Schulz, Eric André, Vidyut Jammwal, Orville Peck, Olivier Richters, Hirooki Goto, Rayna Vallandingham, Alexander Volkanovski, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Jason Momoa
Executive producers: JJ Hook, Jay Ashenfelter, Kenzo Tsujimoto, Haruhiro Tsujimoto
Producers: Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Jason Momoa, Takayuki Nakayama, Stefan Makhoul
Director of photography: Ken Seng
Production design: Kevin Kavanagh
Editing: James Thomas, Delaney Del Vecchio
Music: Leo Birenberg, Zach Robinson
Sound design: Scott Martin Gershin, supervising sound editor: sound designer
Production companies: Paramount Pictures, Legendary Pictures, CAPCOM
In English
119 minutes

Busan Award – Best Film
Midday Meal (Iran)
directed by Majid Majidi

Busan Award — Special Jury Prize
Ibuku (Indonesia/Japan)
directed by Eddie Cahyono

Busan Award – Best Director
LEE Yun Chan
To Be Ordinary (Taiwan)

Busan Award – Best Actor
ZHOU Xun
for The First Taste of Loneliness (China)

ex-aequo
HIMENO Kashun
for Satoko Always (Japan)

Busan Award – Artistic Contribution Award
Sound director Li Danfeng
for The First Taste of Loneliness (China)

New Currents Award
Birds in the Dark (India)
directed by Shashank WALIA

Special Mention
Beach Fictions (Korea)
directed by LIM Hayeon

BIFF Mecenat Award (Asia)
Agaar
directed by YANG Bo (China/France)

BIFF Mecenat Award (Korea)
Can I Talk to You?
directed by YI Seungjun(Korea)

BIFF Mecenat Award (Special Mention)
A Woman Dancing on the Waves (Korea)
directed by CHOI Se-dam

Sonje Award (Korea)
Toe’s
directed by YUN Taerang (Korea)

Sonje Award (Asia)
Fatima
directed by Soroush SHAHPOURI (Iran)

Sonje Award (Special Mention)
The Boy Who Fell to Earth (Korea)
directed by JUNG Jaeseo

NETPAC Award
Zogsool (Mongolia/Germany)
directed by SAKHYA Byamba

FIPRESCI Award
Zogsool

Set around the collapse of an unremarkable family unit in contemporary Japan, the 24-year-old director’s film – which he also wrote and edited – is pervaded by a beguiling but odd atmosphere. Slow in its pacing and ardent in the ambiguity surrounding its characters and their action and interactions, it has unique and almost ethereal tone. Making its bow in the Vision: Asia strand at the current edition of Busan International Film Festival, it’s methodical in its construction and offers a clear calling card for its young director’s ability, even for those audience members who might struggle to tune in to its unearthly frequency.

The narrative – though expecting a linear causal storyline might not be the best approach here – concerns a couple and their two children. Kumiko (Mari Kusu) and Hideki (Tomomitsu Adachi) are married and live in their reasonably-sized suburban home with their two sons, the older, Takeshi (Riku Onishi), and the younger, Kento (Koe Odani). From the film’s opening scenes in the house, there is a slight tension, an underlying silence that seems to leave their words to one another echoing in a strange limbo. A shopping trip to a clothing store sees both Takeshi and Kento make presumptions of their mother, who bears them with a pointed remark and an eye roll. Their father, meanwhile, seems to struggle to gain a foothold in the house, half-ignored by everyone and fed up after long days at work which he feels unappreciated for.

The dissolution of the family – or, at least, Kumiko and Hideki’s marriage – is on one hand the main story of Hinotama and, on the other hand, the setting against which the main story takes place. The other story is the one that gives the film its title and is mostly concerned with Takeshi bumping into a girl from his past, Akari (Himena Irei), and a subsequent longing to seek out a mysterious ball of fire that she tells him about. In Japanese folklore, hinotama are like the equivalent to the western will-o’-the-wisp and are often associated with ghost stories and kitsune. Here, this fiery ball becomes something Takeshi searches for, a MacGuffin that allows him to largely ignore the family fracturing around him.

The immaculately framed and blocked sequences within the home – first the family home and then a smaller apartment that Kumiko moves to with the boys – play into a tradition of Japanese cinema that utilises the presentation of the domestic space to convey emotion and drama. The four players are somehow dislocated from one another, their interactions mannered as they are observed through doorways or windows, in a graceful dance that often creates ever-widening distance between them. Yoshio Kitagawa’s compositions make use of the structure to form separate spaces in the home and imply intimacy or fissures where the performances remain somewhat more implacable. The homes themselves are spartan and clean – conveying both fastidiousness but also a sterility that bleeds into the marriage.

The images are no less rigorously constructed when outside the home, though there they perhaps convey a similarly specified element of Takeshi’s mind. An early sequence in which he trades classroom notes with a friend is framed like Wes Anderson might have shot it, and a later scene sees Takeshi in art class where rather than sketching a sitting model, he has drawn an intricate and perfect cube. There comes to be something about the hinotama, this unexplainable and combustible myth, that draws Takeshi away from the proscriptions of his everyday world. As he becomes less present with his family, Kento is forced to take on more of the emotional burden of the divorce.

There are also scenes and sequences that seem to repeat, recur or appear out of time. As Takeshi is drawn further into his research about the ball, his friend Akari – who may or may not really be there – posits the idea that hinotama cannot be seen in real time, only recalled with hindsight. Suddenly the disintegration of both linear time and the family unit intertwine and Takeshi is given a way to interpret his family, and his parents divorce, that gives new meaning to memories he had all but forgotten. We in the audience are thus, perhaps, given our own license to revisit and reinterpret. Whether such a search for meaning will be enough for those viewers who have found Hinotama ponderous is hard to say, but it remains a peculiar and arresting debut.

Director, screenplay, editor: Takenoshin Yaza
Cast: Riku Onishi, Koe Odani, Himena Irei, Mari Kusu, Tomomitsu Adachi
Producer: Tomohisa Ishii
Cinematography: Yoshio Kitagawa
Music: Gabriel Brady
Sound: Masato Komaki, Yuki Yaei
Production design: Shusaku Tsukamoto
Production company: Lamp. K.K. (Japan)
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision: Asia)
In Japanese
112 minutes

Read more of our coverage of Busan International Film Festival.

Defying the advent of automated special effects and AI, the Korean filmmaker’s feature-length debut is a stop-action animation which thrives on painstaking artisanship and – perhaps just as importantly – a story steeped in human frailty and warmth.

The film is made almost entirely with miniature figurines carved out of wood and moulded with clay, proof there’s still a lot of value in crafting art by hand, with heart, and through dedication to whatever form interests the maker. Nodding both to mainstream comedy (with the use of devices such as quick stuttering zooms) and arthouse drama (through its monochrome flashback sequences), The Flower is at once accessible and inventive, a film that speaks to all ages with its reflection on mortality and how it fits in with the pragmatism permeating modern life.

The Flower begins with the long-hospitalised Mr Lee (voiced by Park Ji-il) learning of the diagnosis of his terminal disease and deciding to return to his crumbling crematorium to wind down his days. He soon discovers his staff have altered the business a lot while he is away. His manager Mi-yeon (Beom Do-ha) hawks gold-plated urns to grief-stricken relatives, the meek in-house Catholic priest Peter (Lim Jin-woong) offers rituals for whatever denominations families demand, and the Buddhist monk Yun (Yang Hee-moon) charges excessive “spirit money” and, most ominously, is conspiring to have the whole place demolished to make way for his own temple.

In a series of comical verbal to-and-fros, Kim delivers belly laughs and competent drama to great effect, with the best scenes mostly revolving around the rows between the scatter-brained manager Mi-yeon and seemingly amoral monk Yun, who leaves everybody aghast when he growls: “The director finding his way to the Buddha might give us a chance to survive!” Amidst all this, the director also interweaves moments of intense melancholy linked to the grumpy Mr Lee’s own reflections and nightmares about what he witnessed in his work, and what he sees for himself in the future, for example; or his subdued yet enlightening conversations with his wayward staff.

It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal Mr Lee will soon die, an inevitable development made intriguing by the bizarre consequences that entails. His demise is more than necessary: it provides the other characters a pause for thought and a chance for redemption, of course. But Kim also uses the void Mr Lee leaves behind to heighten our sense of the space in the crematorium. Handling his own cinematography and editing, Kim recreates the film’s objects and backdrop with meticulous care, giving the viewer impressive close-ups of the endearing clutter lying around the run-down place.

One of the more sensual highlights of the film is a feast Father Peter whips up to mark Mr Lee’s return to work. It’s a very ordinary commoner’s spread – eggroll rice, kimchi stew and so on – but Kim’s wizardry manages to evoke the taste and emotional resonance of these dishes. Though raw in places, The Flower remains an immersive experience that deserves appreciation and admiration.

Director, screenwriter, producer, cinematography, editing: Kim Si-jin
Cast: Park Ji-il, Beom Do-ha, Yang Hee-moon, Lim Jin-woong
Production company: Korean Academy of Film Arts
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Korea)
In Korean
71 minutes

In Full Moon, a teenage girl wants everyone to look at her — provided they can’t see too much.

Sixteen-year-old Hye-mi dreams of taking centre stage in her school dance team, yet keeps her parents firmly out of the spotlight. Her father has Down syndrome and her mother has borderline intellectual functioning; at home, she shoulders responsibilities that leave little room for the carefree teenage life she tries to project at school. Jeong Ji-hye’s second feature finds its rich emotional centre in this collision between the desire to be noticed and the fear of being exposed.

A warm, pastel-toned coming-of-age drama, Full Moon reaffirms the director’s interest in those whose lives are constrained by social prejudice. Her 2022 feature debut, Jeong-sun, followed a middle-aged factory worker and single mom who was subjected to the circulation of an intimate recording. In Full Moon, the writer-director approaches questions of shame and visibility through a girl still learning to negotiate the gaze of others. The storytelling sometimes anticipates its own revelations, but Jeong’s remarkable facility with actors gives even the more explanatory passages a compelling emotional life.

Jeong arrives with a considerable reputation to uphold: Jeong-sun won the Korean Competition Grand Prize at Jeonju and went on to receive the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actress award at the Rome Film Festival. Her second film remains rooted in the same region. Shot in Busan and her hometown of Yangsan, Full Moon also draws on local participation, featuring students from her former middle school and residents in its Great Full Moon festival.

The community setting provides the backdrop to a story whose stakes are, for Hye-mi, intensely private. Stirringly played by Jung Min-ju, she is preoccupied with friendship, dancing and her crush on a boy named Jun. But the ordinary business of being a teenager becomes complicated when the family she wants to keep hidden threatens to enter the world she has carefully constructed. On top of this, her parents’ constant dependence on her produces an uneasy reversal of roles: she must often behave like an adult at precisely the age when she most wants permission to be carefree.

Jeong’s strongest decision is to allow Hye-mi’s conflicting feelings to coexist. Her embarrassment does not cancel her strong attachment to her parents, nor does her sense of responsibility make her immune to resentment. The film understands how exhausting it can be to love someone while fearing what others might make of them. Hye-mi’s wish for an ordinary family life is neither comfortably admirable nor simply selfish, and the excellent performances preserve that discomfort without turning it into a lesson in morality.

Her activities at school give these tensions a visual and thematic framework. The dance club offers her a chance to be the object of attention, and the astronomy club allows her to turn her gaze elsewhere. The distinction opens up the film’s broader concern with looking: who gets to watch, who must endure being watched, and how easily even sympathetic attention can become intrusive and painful. This theme extends into the home when her mother wants to be on a neighbor’s YouTube channel. Hye-mi vehemently opposes the idea, invoking the dangers of the internet to conceal her deeper fear that her parents’ disabilities will become public knowledge. Yet her mother’s wish to be seen echoes Hye-mi’s own desire for the spotlight, exposing the uneasy contradiction between the recognition she seeks for herself and the invisibility she demands of her parents.

A costume malfunction during a dance performance becomes more than a passing humiliation. Here, however, the screenplay’s tendency to over-anticipate is particularly apparent. By drawing attention beforehand to the outfit’s poor fit, Jeong makes the impending tear easy to predict. The setup takes some of the surprise out of a scene that should feel abruptly and painfully beyond Hye-mi’s control. Similar spoilers pop up in the camerawork. When Hye-mi abandons the performance and sits around watching, the camera moves from a wider view towards her, pressing an emotional point that has already been made.

These reservations, however, are softened by the cast. As in Jeong-sun, Jeong demonstrates an exceptional eye for casting and an equally impressive ability to draw stellar performances from her ensemble. The achievement extends beyond the leads: supporting characters and even fleeting appearances have a specificity that makes the world feel inhabited. Taeyang Lee, in particular, makes a striking impression as Hye-mi’s crush, Jun, bringing even his brief cameos vividly to life.

The film’s regional identity is less consistently convincing. Yangsan’s school grounds and the Great Full Moon celebrations give it a tangible geographical setting, while the use of a real school band adds an appealing local texture. Yet dialogue is delivered in something closer to standard Seoul speech than the region’s distinctive cadences, weakening that sense of place.

Ultimately, Full Moon finds its strength in Jeong’s assured work with her actors, whose finely judged performances lend emotional depth to an unconventional coming-of-age story. If the script sometimes tells us too clearly where to look, the performances give us ample reason to keep watching.

Director, screenplay: Jihye Jeong
Cast: Minju Jung, Taeyeon Kim, Kumsoon Kim, Soy Kim, Minhwi Kang
Producers: Nagyong Choi, Junsang Lee
Cinematography: Jin-hyeok Jung
Editing: Sunmin Kim
Production design: Jio Kim
Costume design: Kim Hee-jae
Music: Minhwi Lee
Sound: Park Cho-rong
Production company: Cinemaru
World Sales: M-Line Distribution
Venue: Busan Intl. Film Festival (Vision Korea)
96 minutes

Bua (Ornpreeya Jory) is fifteen years old and mixed race, meaning her colouring makes her stand out in her small village in the Samut Sakhon province of Thailand. She lives with her grandmother (Sawanee Navinthananchai) on their charcoal farm and lives a sheltered life; wearing dungarees, messing around with her best friend Meng (Nakrit Chantasombat), and dreaming of one day visiting her estranged mother in Bangkok. However, Phensiri Klangsurin and Intira Jaroenpura’s well-made and sobering drama, set against the backdrop of the 1970s student protests, explores the burgeoning of Bua’s womanhood and the leering eyes and wandering hands of the men around her that will teach her an unwelcome and grave lesson about the world she is coming of age in.

It’s a fairly unrelenting character trajectory for the protagonist and one that young actress Jory does a reasonable job of navigating. She must go from wide-eyed and naive dreamer to having the safety of childhood unnervingly punctured and then into a full-blown world of sexual advances and abuse from older men within the movie’s runtime. There are occasions when the speed of this feels almost too breakneck, and the overwhelming emotions threaten to prove too difficult to manage, but Jory treads a fine line and grows into the role as it becomes more demanding. While her character arc has a lot to fit in, Klangsurin and Jaroenopura are evidently keen to give the film’s difficult themes and subject matter time to breath, keeping the pace fairly sedate even when the drama is ramping up.

The first indicator of something untoward comes early in the film when Bua’s grandmother sends her to the home of the local Chief (Sirakoop Medhanee) who, expecting her, asks Pat (Fonpa Pramoj Na Ayudhya) to begin teaching her in the ways of womanhood, specifically through the lens of Bua learning how to behave and dress for beauty competitions. Bua’s sexuality is already being assessed and commodified by others even before men begin to openly show interest in this young girl. Unfamiliar with the social expectations on young women, she eagerly begins to take lessons, not blinking twice when reading the aforementioned line in her uncle’s diary about life being a song sung by men. That uncle, Somneuk (Chanintorn Jitpreeda), is newly returned from the big city where he has apparently been involved in the protests, but now that he’s back, begins taking an interest in the pubescent Bua.

From that point, Bua does become a difficult watch and while never egregious in its depiction of sexual abuse, its patient pacing also draws out the horror of the situation. It is then the repeated undermining of hope that makes the film’s second half a little gruelling, as individuals who might step in to rectify the situation either turn a blind eye, are nullified, or remain painfully oblivious. There is a recurring shot in the film – first seen in the early moments – of Bua beneath the water of a pond and the suffocating milieu is potently presented. Nisarat Meechok’s editing allows for symbolic cutaways and visual allegory, while the unhurried pace only amplifies the stifling atmosphere.

This is also helped by the supporting performances, not least Jitpreeda who is eminently unlikable as Somneuk, presented as a soulful musician and deep thinker but also a snivelling abuser and lifelong wastrel who has seemingly only reappeared at the family home because he is running away from something or someone in Bangkok. The inappropriate interest he shows in Bua is evident straight away and the subtlety of his sliminess and controlling aggression towards his niece make him feel like a real-world threat rather than a fictional villain.

This might make it sound as though there is no light at all in Bua, and that is not quite the case. She and Meng’s friendship – evidently lifelong love on Meng’s side – is touching and allows a little warmth. Once the abuse has begun, Meng is the primary source of any time Bua is allowed a smile. However, these are few and far between, and although Klangsurin and Jaroenopura don’t make every scene feel ominous and portentous, it is hard to pull clear of the gravity of the downward spiral that Bua is in. Of course, this is a serious and vitally important subject matter, so the onus is not on the filmmakers to make light of it, but the inexorable march can feel gruelling at times. There are some brief flickers that offer cause for hope – and the tying of the narrative to the crescendo of the protests offers some semblance of a suggestion for a changing future – though an audience looking at this from half a century in the future will rightly understand that this is not some problem of the past and there is still much work to be done. Bua offers a powerful, if relentlessly bleak, portrayal of a sickeningly prevalent issue.

Directors: Phensiri Klangsurin, Intira Jaroenpura
Screenplay: Phensiri Klangsurin, Punyisa Sattayakom, Pass Patthanakumjon, Wilasinee Ruangprajuabkun
Cast: Ornpreeya Jory, Nakrit Chantasombat, Chanintorn Jitpreeda, Sawanee Navinthananchai
Producers: Kongkiat Khomsiri, Piyaluck Mahatanasab
Cinematography: Nisha Jurairattanaporn
Editing: Nisarat Meechok
Music: Komsan Vorasrisothorn
Production design: Wuttikorn Sripothong
Production companies: Shinesaeng Ad.Venture, Kongkiat Production, North Star Production (Thailand)
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision: Asia)
In Thai
129 minutes

Read more of our coverage of Busan International Film Festival.

Boasting an attractive cast and enchanting imagery of tastefully designed post-industrial badlands, There Will Be Snow looks elegant but feels strangely void of elegy. Still, the NYU-educated Chen has delivered something that does look strikingly different from that of her Chinese peers – a quality that might propel her film to a sustained run on the festival circuit after its premiere at Busan’s Vision Asia section.

Set in an imaginary future of a fictional country, There Will Be Snow mostly unfolds in a bleak city plagued by food shortages, frequent blackouts and frustratingly long (and fist-flinging) queues – all consequences of its disconnection from a national online network that could allow users to gain access to work and play with ease. Living in a second-tier city in every sense of the word, residents dream of the chance to move over the perennially frozen river and into the Bright Zone, an upper-class area where people are reportedly happier and healthier with their affluent, automated lives.

So far, so Orwellian. Dystopian its setting might be, Chen’s film is just not that kind of story. Rather, There Will Be Snow revolves around the smaller and more intimate dilemmas faced by Gu Chen (Zhao Tian’ai), a dancer offered the opportunity to start a new job and a new life in the Bright Zone. Her initial excitement at leaving Glaceterre is somehow dampened by the appearance of Xu Chu (Chen Xiao), a Fireworks system engineer who has taken a break from his comfortable uptown life to search for the traces of his youth. Thus begins a long and meandering trawl through dilapidated neighbourhoods, sooty factories and floating ice, as the pair reminisce about their own good old days and those of their forgotten nomadic ancestors.

With Chen Gu’s own occasional remembrances of her bloodline and background – she claims to hail from the endangered Evenki ethnic minority (with a current population of around 35,000 in real-life China), and speaks of the disappearance of the tenements where her grandparents used to live – There Will Be Snow could be readily interpreted as an allegory for the drastic changes imposed on those living on China’s geographical and social margins during the country’s onward and upward march towards prosperity and prominence.

With these themes vanishing as quickly as they appear, it’s perhaps beyond the point (or pale) to over-interpret Chen’s film too much. Maybe it’s best to just be enchanted by Hu Mingjue’s flowing depiction of Wang Yi’s opulent production design, a partnership that makes There Will Be Snow appear so out of its time.

Director, screenwriter: Story Chen
Producer: Li Xiaoyu
Cast: Zhao Tian’ai, Chen Xiao, Wu Junting, Bai Sha, Shi Ailing
Cinematography: Hu Mingjue
Editing: Liu Xinzhu, Du Junlin
Production design: Wang Yi
Music: Oliver Cussac
Sound: Zhang Yancheng
Production companies: T. H. Entertainment
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Asia)
In Putonghua
90 minutes

Central to Zogsool (which means “a stop” in Mongolian) is Khardaa (the excellent Bulhan Chuluunbat), a single mother who works at a petrol station on the fringes of a small provincial town. As the film begins, her hard-boiled contempt towards everyone around her is more than palpable. She doesn’t flinch when she mocks a mean-looking ruffian’s attempt to pay for petrol with sheep, and smirks and chastises a well-meaning local sports teacher when he asks her to approve (and, more importantly, pay for) her talented teenage daughter’s wish to enter a martial arts competition in the city. “You know nothing about my life… and you stink,” she spits as she walks away.

Sakhya soon reveals the reason behind all this cynicism. Her benign-looking boss (Tumurbaatar Tsegmid) actually demands (and gets) occasional sexual favours from her, while the mayor (Munkhbayar Sharkhuu) refuses to pay what he owes her. And when Covid hits and the authorities transform her gas stop into a quarantine zone, her life becomes even more complicated. She is asked to guard and take care of a long-haul truck driver confined to his cockpit for fear of him carrying the virus into Mongolia from his recent sojourn in China.

But Sumber (Tsolmon Damdindorj) soon proves to be a kindred spirit for the reclusive Kharvaa, with his enforced loneliness matching her emotional detachment from everything around her. It’s here that Zogsool pivots from fatalism to hope: starting off with a series of quirky exchanges (via physical gestures and texting) which resemble meet-cutes in rom-coms, the pair soon develops feelings for each other. Their inevitable union signals their ultimate rebellion against the powerful tyrants who have exploited and marginalised them for so long.

Having made his name with plainer and more solemn fare, Sakhya surprises with a screenplay that offers slapstick situations and absurd humour aplenty – and DP Khangai Boldsaikhan’s camerawork also contributes to this, with his ability to contrast the physical and psychological emptiness of Khardaa’s working milieu with the endearing intimacy of the Sumber’s cramped and messy compartment. But Zogsool thrives mainly because of its two leads. Chuluunbat is a revelation in the measured way she evokes a beating heart beneath her character’s jaded exterior, while Damdindorj’s on-screen metamorphosis from a savant trucker to a sensitive soul is equally endearing.

Director: Byamba Sakhya
Screenwriters: Byambha Sakhya with Ariunsaikhan Davaakhuu
Producer: Ariunaa Tserenpil
Executive producers: Oyundari Khurelbaatar, Onon Gan-Erdene
Cast: Bulgan Chuluunbat, Tsolmon Damdindorj, Tumurbaatar Tsegmid, Bodijin Zolbayar
Cinematography: Khanghai Boldsaikhan
Editing: Sanchir Sakhya
Production design: Ariunsaikhan Davaakhuu
Music: Sansargereltekh Sangidorj
Sound: Vincent Villa
Production company: Guru Media, Bucket GmbH, Nomadia Pictures
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Asia)
In Mongolian
97 minutes

Tracking the tortuous tribulations engulfing a young, professionally underachieving couple and their terminally ill elders over the course of one single and very difficult year, Cosmic Trace provides ample imagery and space for the engaged viewer to reflect on what one of them describes as “a lifetime that you and I couldn’t fathom”. Fuelled by a carefully crafted screenplay peppered with surprising twists that echo the uncertainty of chance in life – those who seem predestined to die survive, while the robust suddenly succumb – the film also propels itself further into the void with episodic computer-generated sequences of its characters reduced to floating atoms in the dark wide cosmos.

Having already graced A-list festivals with each of his previous three features – A Fresh Start at Locarno, Autumn, Autumn at the Berlinale and Winter’s Night at Tallinn Black Nights – Jang’s decision to premiere his latest outing at home is perhaps a surprise. And it’s definitely a coup of sorts for Busan, where Cosmic Trace could easily have been slotted in the main competition rather than the Vision Korea section. But never mind: to misquote the characters in the film, life (and film festivals) moves in mysterious ways, and Jang’s film – with its very original vision and its echoes of, among others, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Michael Haneke’s Amour – will certainly leave plenty of traces on the festival circuit very soon.

Cosmic Trace begins (and actually ends) with its two protagonists staring at the skies and talking about the constellations and meteor showers hovering high above them. It’s a thinly-veiled allusion, perhaps, to how human beings are merely tiny speckles of transient matter in a universe with a configuration that is beyond our realm of understanding. Back on Earth, the pair surely can’t understand what they’re doing or have done wrong, with Hyeon-ji (Jang Serim) stuck with producing no-budget videos about a cheaply costumed, child-saving “Galaxyman” for a YouTube channel while Ji-hyeon (Kang Seung-ho) flounders repeatedly at auditions, weighed down by his past as a renowned child actor.

The couple keep their calm when multiple crises stack up in their respective families. Just as Hyeon-ji’s grandmother’s health worsens, she catches sight of her physician father Ki-cheol (Bong Man-dae) leaving a hotel with another woman – a misunderstanding that stands unresolved when he suddenly dies. On the other side of town, Ji-hyeon’s mother Kyeong-ja (Kim Hyun) – the modest, mild-mannered owner of a grimy but surprisingly profitable recycling dump – is diagnosed as having untreatable cancer.

Jang succeeds in teasing measured performances from his cast, as they strike a very delicate balance in evoking their characters’ predicaments and anguish without puncturing their near-fatalist attitudes towards the ebb and flow of their lives. Melodrama is out of the question, just as notions of karma are cast to the wind. There are hardly villains in Cosmic Trace, not even someone remotely bad. Rather than following his peers into the fortune-making world of plastic surgery, the upbeat Ki-cheol sticks with his markedly unglamorous (and much less profitable) job of reconstructing cleft lips in a hospital. The gaunt Kyeong-ja, meanwhile, is a paragon of virtue, as she defies the pain of her illness to carry on, only secretly channelling her thoughts into letters designed to be read posthumously by her son.

That said, Jang never shies away from the harshness of life. Kyeong-ja’s slow demise is certainly brutal to watch, with the viewer inevitably empathising with her struggle and the conflicting feelings of her helpless loved ones. Doing the splicing himself, the director manages to condense stretches of the quotidian and the extreme – all filmed with precision in light and time by DP Yang Jeong-hun – into a coherent whole.

In the conversation concluding Cosmic Trace, Ji-hyeon asks Hyeon-ji: “Have you ever thought about how you want to die?” She replies: “On my own terms.” That sums up Jang’s work well: with this moving ode to the living, the dying and the dead, the director has delivered a unique piece, a film that is at once beautiful in its look, brutal in its depiction of the world, and benevolent in its empathy for the grief-stricken.

Director, screenwriter, editing: Jang Woo-jin
Producers: Jang Ji-won
Executive producers: Jang Woo-jin, Jang Ji-won, Han Sunhee
Cast: Jang Serim, Kang Seung-ho, Kim Hyun, Bong Man-dae, Kim Soo-hyun
Cinematography: Yang Jeong-hun
Music: Hang Minhee
Sound: Lee Jusuk
Production companies: Cosmos Pictures, Widelog Co Ltd
World sales: M-Line Distribution
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Korea)
In Korean
106 minutes

Hooshmand made her acting breakthrough last year in Cinemartyrs, a genre-mashing historical drama in which she plays a beleaguered filmmaker who gets more than she bargains for when she tries to fill in some gaps in history by re-enacting a 19th century war massacre. Compared to that, her performance in Ria goes straight to the heart rather than the mind, as she plays a young woman who channels all the anger she accumulates during the day – the exploitation she experiences and witnesses at work, the frustration of having to scavenge for food – and projects them to her audience during nightly gigs in the slum she and her fellow hardcore punks call home.

Like the music – and the film in general – the role doesn’t call for subtlety. And she really dials it up to 11 when necessary, like the beginning of the film when she drives the moshing crowd crazy with a chorus that demands the masses “burn the state, crush the state, serve it on a plate”. The reason for Ria’s fury is quickly explained: their community is under siege by property developers, with thugs cutting electricity and water to houses or simply burning them down, to force people to leave. Meanwhile, other similar hubs offer solidarity and solace, and Belarmino goes out on a limb to recreate their ambience, where residents eagerly talk about their ‘zines and communitarian lifestyles.

The near-nihilist attitude of the young punks stands in stark contrast to the fatalist resignation of their mentor Olga (Sylvia Sanchez), a saintly figure whose way of doing good is to pick abandoned kids up off the streets and provide them with whatever they need. But it’s evident her approach to social justice is no longer enough. Now a sickly matriarch, Olga spends her time mourning her dearly departed partner (whose remains are entombed next to her bed) and observing the ascent of villainous capitalists in her community. Through Olga’s generous presence and ominous demise, Belarmino and his screenwriter Kyle Danelle Romero signal the futility of old-world courtesy: revolution, as they say, was never going to be a dinner party.

In some ways, however, Ria is indeed a party, a celebration of those who are hell-bent in their determination to fight a good fight for ideas and ideals they deem worthy to believe in. Admittedly, the film lags as the protagonist is momentarily dragged through well-worn narrative tropes commonly seen in social-realist melodramas. One of these is the stretch in which Ria nearly succumbs to porn barons, who use the hotel she works in as a clandestine set. On the surface, hope is certainly in short supply here. But the battling vigour of its characters, brought vividly to life by DP Geia de Vera, hints that all is not lost, despite the triumph of populist tyrants and their scions.

Director: Arvin Belarmino
Screenplay: Kyle Danelle Romero
Producers: Kristine De Leon, Alemberg Ang, Wesley Yap, Pavel Feldman, Alexander Seliverstov, Maria Sophia Atayde, Jossette Atayde, Jefferson Moneo, Rafael Laperal
Executive producers: Chad V. Vidanes, Alex Roc, Antonio Enco, Fabiola Caraza, Patrick Hackett, Pavel Feldman, Alexander Sliverstov
Cast: Nour Hooshmand, Sylvia Sanchez, Iana Bernandez, Veronica Reyes, Anastasia Bartolome
Cinematography: Geia de Vera
Editing: Renard Torres
Production design: Roma Regala
Music: Kid Moxie
Production companies: WAF Studios, Daluyong Studios, Nathan Studios, Human Films, Fildago Films, Prowler Pictures
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Asia)
In Filipino
95 minutes

Selvi, the name of Rathnakumar’s protagonist, translates simply as “Miss” in Tamil – and the young woman (played by Anjali Patil, who also produced the film) does look very ordinary at the outset. As the film begins, she is shown flying kites and chilling out on a beach in the most beautiful of dusks. Sharing the same provincial background and dormitory, she and her fellow homecare workers eat cake, discuss what movies to watch and talk about men. Amidst all this fun and laughter, however, Selvi appears more subdued than the other women. She is working more shifts than most to support her family in the provinces and to fund her ambition to become a fully-licensed nurse and move to Singapore for a better-paid job.

Considered by both her employers and her colleagues as the most reliable caregiver around – as evident from the way she is entrusted to take care of the senile patriarch (Raja Krishnamoorty) of an rich and demanding family – Selvi’s life begins to unravel when her younger co-worker and close confidante Kavitha (Swathy Krishnan), a family friend who got the job on her recommendation, tries to kill herself after yet another falling out with her boyfriend (Vinoth Kushan). Forced to take over her friend’s assignments and weighed down further by the heightened needs of her impoverished family at home, the fatigued Selvi finds herself spiralling into a cycle of slip-ups, dressing-downs and running around town so as to fulfil the obligations she imposes on herself.

Patil is a regular on the festival circuit, appearing in films of various languages and tone. Her breakthrough came with Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage’s award-winning With You, Without You (2012), where she also plays a character called Selvi. Here Patil is the beating heart of Rathnakumar’s film, evoking her character’s physical and psychological torment with her melancholy demeanour, subtle gestures and the occasional high-octane bursts of long-suppressed fury. The power of her performance is heightened by the packed and unforgiving urban landscapes as depicted through Bargav Sridhar’s dynamic handheld camerawork.

Director, screenwriter: Sailesh Rathnakumar
Producer: Anjali Patil
Executive producers: Hema Prakash Maoharan, Monali Bhardwaj
Cast: Anjali Patil, Swathy Krishnan, Vinoth Kishan, Archana Padmini
Cinematography: Bargav Sridhar
Editing: Sreekar Prasad
Production design: Shanoo Muralidharan
Music: Suren Vikhash U
Sound: Anand Krishnanmoorthy
Production company: Anahat Films
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Asia)
In Tamil
97 minutes

Clark stars as young Bela, who lives with her devoted Daddo (Jay Duplass) and her somewhat distant Mommy (Jessica Chastain). Also lurking in the house is Other Mommy (also Chastain), a mysterious figure who, according to Bela, “lives behind the doors.” Sometimes the girl opens a closet, and it’s just a closet; at other times, it’s a portal that lets Other Mommy in to play with her after her parents have gone to bed.

It’s unclear how long Bela has been playing with Other Mommy, but as the film begins, the child is clearly more and more uncomfortable with her friend’s request to “let me into your heart,” and when Daddo and then Mommy actually get a glimpse of this horrifying apparition (which goes around with increasingly grotesque aberrations of Mommy’s face), they realize the danger that Bela is in. (And if you want to avoid spoilers, you might stop reading here and come back later.)

The screenplay by Nathan Elston (Succession), adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents around the House, occasionally plays around with the horror-movie form; for instance, Daddo and Mommy see Other Mommy and realize that she’s real within the first ten minutes, so we’re spared the usual “it’s just your imagination, honey” scenes where no one believes Bela. Later on, when Mommy’s mother Grandma Ruth (Karen Allen) calls in a squad of paranormal experts, the sequence doesn’t play out in the expected Poltergeist/Insidious fashion.

Not that we don’t get some by-the-numbers sequences (the requisite moment in which the family realizes it’s Bela who’s haunted and not their house), along with a big finale in which the revelation of family secrets and trauma is unleashed as a weapon against Other Mommy — not a bad idea in and of itself, but the film hasn’t laid the groundwork for what it clearly intends as an emotionally hefty finale.

Director Rob Savage made a name for himself with minimalist spooky efforts like Host (where a COVID-era Zoom séance goes terribly wrong) and Dashcam (a found-footage horror tale shot entirely from the POV of a driver’s iPhone); here, he gets to stage some splashier set pieces, particularly one involving a children’s playground, and while the results are clever and a bit frightening, they also call to mind the manipulation of seemingly familiar spaces in Backrooms.

Young Clark is tasked with carrying much of the film — she’s in almost every scene — and she makes an effectively empathetic audience surrogate, letting us understand why she originally enjoys spending time with Other Mommy before eventually realizing her helpless terror as the situation worsens. It’s also nice to get some quality time with Karen Allen, particularly after she was so underused in the most recent Indiana Jones installment; her handful of scenes bring with them an earned gravitas, and more directors should be hiring this screen legend.

It’s too bad that Other Mommy seems to be borrowing so much from other horror films, and not always from the good ones: There’s an unmistakable subtext by which Mommy — and her ambivalence about parenthood, and her career aspirations — is the real villain here, and that’s a trope long past its sell-by date. It’s disappointing enough that the movie has filched so many of its good ideas from elsewhere, and even worse that it’s picked up some bad ones along the way.

Director: Rob Savage
Screenwriter: Nathan Elston, based on the novel “Incidents around the House” by Josh Malerman
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Jay Duplass, Arabella Olivia Clark, Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed, Karen Allen
Executive producers: Rob Savage, Michael Clear, Judson Scott, Josh Malerman, Ryan Lewis, Macdara Kelleher
Producer: James Wan
Director of photography: Lowell A. Meyer
Production design: Jeremy Woodward
Editing: Peter Gvozdas, John Cutler
Music: Patrick Jonsson
Sound design: Dan Kenyon, sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Universal Pictures, Blumhouse Atomic Monster
In English
93 minutes