In short: #ALIVE (2020)

Original title: #살아있다 (#sal-a-iss-da)

I think I’ve already mentioned that I’ve grown a bit tired of zombie/infected outbreak movies. Why, things have gotten so bad, I didn’t even like the much praised Train to Busan. Though my problem with that one was all that rather embarrassing and hilariously ineffective emotional manipulation that had me in tears of laughter come the climax.

So I wasn’t terribly interest in this South Korean Netflix production directed and written by Cho Il-hyeong with Yoo Ah-in as a survivor whose videogaming shut in tendencies are pretty helpful for once. Turns out I was wrong again, for the film’s actually well-made (okay, that’s basically a given in a movie from South Korea), effective and fun. It also doesn’t desperately try to milk one’s tear ducts as if they were cow udders, coming by its actual emotional beats the honest way, through careful characterisation, and an intimate presentation of our protagonist’s desperate situation. While the zombie and action sequences are fun and well done, the film’s core is in its presentation of loneliness and quiet desperation, the way it feels when the world around you slowly falls apart, and a few too many of your hopes are crushed. But the film’s also great at the more positive things, the sudden large importance of small hopes and achievements, and the life-saving heft of human companionship, as seen when the film introduces its other protagonist, as played by Park Shin-hye.

I also admire the film’s willingness to underplay its more tragic elements, treating them with dignity instead as a way to make its audience feel something (damn it!). Which of course is the best way to actually make an audience feel something.

Really, by now, basically everyone can film a generic zombie movie sequence or ten and call them a movie. The difficulty is in getting the human elements of such a story right, and that’s what #ALIVE does best.

Three Films Make A Post: Band Together

Bandslam (2009): In part, Todd Graff’s film is of course your typical teen music comedy drama with a bit of a conventional streak, but since I’m not usually complaining about this sort of thing when it comes to other genres, it would be weird to suddenly start with that sort of thing here. Particularly since the film may be typical to some degree, it’s also a great example of the form, certainly not lacking in imagination on how to fill out the genre format it inhabits, and charming as a level 20 bard. Its portrayal of a certain type of teenage alienation isn’t quite as paper-thin as it seems, either, it’s just treating those parts of its tale with a very light hand, so it can enable the proper hopeful happy ending where most everything is set right with the world without needing to pretend the world is perfect.

You Were Never Really Here (2017): From a bit of a different planet comes the great Lynne Ramsay’s movie about a mercenary vigilante (and PTSD sufferer) portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in an un-showy and therefore brilliant mood, who is specialized in hitting people with a hammer while finding kidnapped girls. The film’s really not interested at all in fulfilling any genre expectations, instead using the loose genre framework to draw a portray of a deeply alienated personality in a way that must be consciously chosen to alienate most viewers at least a little. The film’s approach is somewhere between the dreamlike and the oblique, editing out actions and only showing us their consequences, divorcing acts from those committing them. The film’s not called like it’s called by chance or committee.

Burning aka 버닝 (2018): Speaking of alienation, that’s a core concern of Lee Chang-dong’s film, too. Here, though, like in many South Korean films made in the second half of the 2010s, it’s an alienation mainly caused by class divides and by poverty and all the pains and indignities and deepening of certain personal traumas and flaws that come with it. This is also a pretty oblique film, slowly exploring the world of its main characters, circling themes and ideas through careful, detailed observation but never quite turning into the thriller some of its plot elements suggest,  keeping a distanced and observant poise throughout. It also teaches that you can’t really be an effective thriller protagonist when you call yourself a writer of fiction but really don’t get when somebody talks to you in metaphors, or that it is a very bad sign when (the same) somebody tells you he has never cried in his life and doesn’t know if he’d recognize sadness if he felt it.


But seriously, it’s a great film if you don’t go in expecting it to eventually turn into a tight South Korean thriller and are fine with it staying the slow but thematically rich character and social portrait it starts as.