A quirky dream set mostly in a mental hospital. This is one of the strangest movies I’ve seen and that’s saying something.
Young-goon (Su-jeong Lim) thinks she is a cyborg because her Granny thought she was a mouse. Her Granny liked to eat nothing but radish. But the white-coats took her away when Young-goon was just a little girl. And she left without her dentures. This event tore up Young-goon’s heart.
Il-Sun (Rain - interesting story about this actor, if you do the research) is a thief and possibly a hypnotist. He is in the psych ward to avoid jail time. These are an unusual bunch of characters. The writing is funny and special, uniquely absurd. Therapy is anything but progressive or useful. It seems that the lunatics run the asylum.
Gop dahn thinks that she can fly with the aid of static electricity. Sul-mi tells brilliant lies (because the shock therapy causes her to lose her memory so she fills in the gaps with fiction.) Her lies are part of the narration, until the doctor arrives, informing Young-goon and the viewer that what we just heard was all bollocks.
The camera moves with style. The opening sequence of images is more interesting than the rest of the film. Each character is unique.
The start is visually striking, yet a little confusing due to the multiple foreign vocal tracks, and switching back and forth between the two key events. These events tell the story of the mother, Grandmother and Young-goon herself.
It begins with the mechanical voice telling Young-goon her instructions. She plugs herself into the mains and turns it on, successfully recharging her battery. Meanwhile her mother tells the doctor of Granny’s mental imbalance - when she found Granny feeding some wild mice and she said these were also her children.
Young-goon is a girl with no eyebrows, due to the electrocution. She had such a deep connection with her Granny that her own belief that she is a cyborg may not be as simple as hereditary mental illness. It could be emotional transference.
There is a missed opportunity here for expressing the psychology, emotional torment and state of environment which exists for an inmate in the loony bin. Instead we are seeing these exotic characters how they would be seen from the outside, by an observer who is privy to their every spoken word and action – such as a white-coat.
Il-sun seems able to steal just about anything from his fellow inmates, including Thursday. He stole one inmate’s politeness, which cured him. Then he gave it back.
"I’m a Cyborg but that's ok" is a lot of fun to watch and it’s really nice looking, but the writing doesn’t feel all that meaningful. Girl thinks she’s a cyborg, won’t eat human food, won’t talk to humans. Doctor tries to make her normal. Girl defeats doctor and hallucinates killing all the doctors. Doctor continues oblivious to these delusions, to try and make her eat and talk. Boy likes girl, boy tries to help girl.
It’s funny, and fresh and interesting, but what really shines is the truth about therapy – it doesn’t matter what the delusion is, once they know it, they can start to work on your health. The real guts, the meat of the story doesn’t come about until the end. The pacing is all out of whack, the middle lags.
Young-goon is a sad, miserable cyborg who can’t let go. After a tongue pumping, she has a change of heart and, it seems, is saved by the boy, Il-sun. This part is as brilliant as it is strange: Il-sun figures out a way for her to cling to her fantasy but extend that fantasy to include eating human food, (because she is dying of starvation,) - he emulates the mechanical voice that she treasures from the beginning of the film, as he teaches her to eat. But she is anxious, will she go through with it? And if so, how will her life play out? She is a cyborg, she is a broken person, the solution is to leave her broken and manage life around it?
Perhaps this is the meaning, in drama we find it, but not clearly expressed in art.
2.5 stars
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