[HanCinema's Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival Review] "Paradise - 2024"

Il-do (played by Park Jung-pyo) and Woo-sik (Lee Ho-won) are co-workers and roommates in the criminal underworld. They work primarily in organ harvesting. Surprisingly enough, this isn't anywhere near as grisly as it sounds. As Woo-sik jokingly notes in the opening scene, sure, we're drugging you and leaving you in a large van next to the ocean. But it's not like we're killing you or anything.

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Neither Il-do nor Woo-sik even use force- whatever has these people so frightened they're willing to let their organs be harvested, it's got them submitting to Il-do and Woo-sik without a fight. And to be clear, neither Il-do nor Woo-sik are especially intimidating fellows. They're both scrawny and unassuming enough you kind of get the impression they're stuck with this job because it's one of the few jobs the gang has where being scary looking isn't helpful.

If this all sounds moderately amusing, I should make this very clear- "Paradise - 2024" is not an especially amusing movie. For all Lee Ho-won's best efforts to uplift the story with a little comic relief, "Paradise - 2024" is needlessly bleak. See, it turns out that Il-do has a brother named I-do, and they kept swapping places every year as kids. But then they stopped doing that, and I-do is back not really for revenge so much as wanting a real identity since technically speaking there is no I-do.

Why the parents of these two people went to the trouble of such a complicated arrangement is not especially clear, despite a climactic scene of exposition where the man in charge of the operation confirms that this is, in fact, what they did, at the urging of their mother. It might have something to do with I-do joining a league of elite international assassins. I must emphasize again that this is nowhere near as interesting in context as that sentence makes it sound.

There's just way too much going on in this movie. Out of nowhere we get a bunch minimalist action scenes where a mysterious foreign assassin guy waltzes around killing a bunch of people for reasons that are never terrible obvious. At its very best, "Paradise - 2024" can achieve some decent ennui as Il-do and Woo-sik ponder the questionable decisions they've made in life. Adding an identical twin assassin to all of that really doesn't help.

Incidentally, Il-do and I-do's names follow a common Korean naming convention for siblings, as "Il" can be read as " one " and " I " can be read as two. This isn't especially interesting, but it's the kind of modest observation that "Paradise - 2024" in general seems to be going for, like with the discussions Il-do and Woo-sik have about life or more, how neither of them seem to have very much to say about it really. In the end, though, I found myself wondering more about what this gang was up to that it was getting attacked by that international assassin than I was the exact mechanics of how and why Il-do and I-do were supposed to be swapping identities.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Paradise - 2024" is directed by Son Seung-woong, and features Park Jung-pyo, Lee Ho-won, Jung Min-sung. Release date in Korea: 2024/Second half.