Edited

Snowpiercer is the last of the big three South Korean directors’ English-language cross-over attempts.  Of course, by “big three”, I don’t mean to say these three, Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon, and Bong Joon-ho, are the three best South Korean directors working today (I couldn’t by definition claim that). But they are undoubtedly the three with the most foreign attention shined their way. Chan-wook and Jee-woon went simple with their English-language endeavors, creating the deliciously naughty psychological horror Stoker and the terrifically-fleshy and well-directed by hum-drum Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Stand respectively (seriously, it’s a display of the director’s talent that it shines through in a script so unfitting and as positively lame as that film’s). Joon-ho’s film took a bit longer to release and aims a bit higher. But lofty narrative ambitions don’t always benefit a film without a script to back it up (thus The Raid, for its elegant, brutal simplicity, was a much better film than the still-good Raid 2). It’s a good thing then that Joon-ho decided to jettison narrative sense or substance mid-way through the film. As for what he replaced them with? It’s much more depraved, much giddier, and above all, much more wonderfully off-the-wall indeed. It’s a study in contained chaos, and like the best of the South Korean New Wave, madness is never far around the corner.

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