A truly lovely, beautiful, absurd, funny film - with one of the few truly original title sequences I’ve seen in years, not to mention truly original concepts, with execution to match. It does seem to be the case that Korean film - or at least, that which reaches us, which one assumes is the best stuff (if not, then I’m moving to Korea) - manages a level of visual beauty, conceptual complexity and emotional depth that Hollywood should beg on bended knees to be able to achieve.
One of the highlights of last year’s festival, for me, was The Host - I’m a Cyborg masters a similar combination of High SF, low comedy and emotional depth (I’ve used ‘emotional depth’ already, haven’t I? Sorry)
It takes a level of audacity yo couch the story of a young women’s pschotic breakdown and eventual redemption (and not cure) in such broad terms. I can only imagine with horror how Hollywood would approach it (I suspect Robin Williams would be involved in some way… [shudders])
The film’s central character is a young woman who believes that she is a cyborg - tipping over the edge after her ailing grandmother is taken away to a nursing home (the grandmother believes she is a mouse, and eats only radishes). The girl’s mother, already frustrated by her mother, has the girl institutionalised after she attempts to ‘recharge’ herself by cutting her wrists and wiring herself to a plug point.
In the asylum, she refuses to communicate except to machines (the lights above her bed, a vending machine). She catches the eye of a fellow patient, a young man with anti-social, kleptomanic tendencies - he has the ability to steal the essence of his fellow patients (ping-pong prowess, chronic apologeticness) and eventually the girl, convinced that her purpose is to kill all the doctors so she can rescue her grandmother, asks him to take her sympathy, because it is preventing her from doing so.
Having taken her empathy, the young man is, of course, infused with sympathy for the girl, growing more concerned for her as she stops eating, convinced that she will get the sustenance she needs from lighting batteries.
The patients’ delusions are beautifully realised, whether the early sequence in which a woman pushes the catatonic heroine around the hospital, outlining patients’ maladies, only to be revealed as a chronic fantasist, or the way the patients all reinforce each other’s delusions (particularly in believing that the hero can steal their abilities), to the grander, fully realised sequences where the heroine believes she is killing all the hospital’s staff, shooting bullets from her fingers. There’s a particularly beautiful sequence where the girl, being given electroshock treatment, believes she’s being ‘recharged’ in a gleaming white laboratory.
That the film manages to carry off any of this is pretty miraculous. One of the reasons, I think, is that for all it’s flamboyant fantasies, it never offers up a simple cure - instead going for a form of acceptance (hence “but that’s OK”). The delusion that the boy can steal the girl’s sympathy leads him to help her start eating again by convincing her that he’s constructed a ‘rice-megatron’ that converts food into electrical energy, and pretending to insert in into her back - but the story’s coda implies that neither is entirely free of delusion.
To be honest, it’s kind of futile to attempt to describe the film - better just to seek it out yourself when it gets a wider release - which it’s surely likely to get - as the director, Chan-wook Park, said when introducing the film, it’s not nearly as violent as his earlier films - he described it as a ’sweet desert’ for anyone who’s seen his ‘Vengeance’ trilogy.
