Paradise Lost / 실낙원 - Movie Review

The Movie: Paradise Lost / 실낙원

The Director: Yeon Sang-ho

The Cast: Kim Hyun-joo, Bae Hyeon-seong

The Story: A psychological thriller that unfolds when Ryu Sun-woo, a son presumed dead in a school camping bus disappearance nine years ago, miraculously returns alive to his grieving mother, Ryu So-young.

The Rating: 6 / 10

The Review:

Director Yeon Sang-ho has two movies released this year, this one and Colony, the spiritual sequel to all time zombie classic Train to Busan, both of which deal with the dangers of technology and how things can go drastically wrong. The director's efforts over the years have been a hit or miss, mixed bag of stories that cross all different genres with Train to Busan being the clear centerpiece of his resume which unfortunately makes it a bit of an outlier. Paradise Lost is a movie that loses itself in a story about people losing their way after traumatic events and it never hits as hard as I was hoping it was going to.

There are always so many what ifs when it comes to cinema and this is one of those movies that seemed like it was going to be a high-stakes emotional thriller and it ended up being more of a slow burn drama without much to get too excited about. The highlight of the movie is Kim Hyun-joo's performance as Ryu So-Young, a mom struggling with the loss of her son, and is easily the emotional core of the story. Everyone else in the movie is just kind of there and even Bae Hyun-Sung, who plays the older version of So-Young's son Sun-Woo, doesn't bring much to the table at all as the antagonist.

One of the things I've always loved about Korean cinema is how highly emotional and engaging they are so now, after watching as many movies as I have from Korean filmmakers, my expectations are probably skewed to having that same experience with every movie. While this movie reaches for some of those emotional highs and it's pretty entertaining at times, it fell short for me and the ending was predictable as well so that didn't really help. I'm also wondering if the topic of AI is starting be overplayed now that it's also a non stop tiopic in the news.

Back when movies like The Matrix and The Terminator franchise were gving us our first taste of AI concepts it felt like science fiction set far in the future, even Spielberg had to call his movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence because we didn't really know what that was at the time. Now, everyone uses AI or is affected by AI in some form or another so it's not as novel of a concept as it might have even been a year or two ago so maybe that's affecting how we're receiving all these movies that explore the topic.

I really wanted to like this movie but the virtual reality kid stuff was just weird and the son's return just fell flat for me with no real suspense or excitement. Hopefully, director Yeon Sang-ho can get back on track although Train to Busan is seeming to be more and more the exception with how good it is compared to the rest of his resume. Thank you for reading this review!