[HanCinema's Film Review] "Cobweb"

Usually, when I write that a film's too clever for its own good, it's a backhanded coompliment. A movie that focuses on being clever at the expense of telling a coherent story is, well, incoherent. "Cobweb" is a very weird exception to this case. "Cobweb" is unlikely to make very much sense to anyone who doesn't have a decent understanding of seventies era South Korean film. But this is pretty much the whole point. Removed from that highly specific context, the characters in this film are more than a little bit unhinged.

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Director Kim (played by Song Kang-ho) is a man with a vision. He wants to tell a story never before told in South Korean film. And that vision is...a thriller about a wronged woman who goes crazy. If this sounds like "Woman of Fire" which was itself a remake of "The Housemaid - 1960" by director Kim Ki-young, well, that's kind of part of the joke. Director Kim's story isn't that original, and even diagetically, he's obviously influenced heavily by another director who's a sort of Kim Ki-young analog, except even crazier.

This creates one of the film's more jarring tonal mishmashes. The black-and-white film-within-a-film portions of "Cobweb" are highly charged and highly melodramatic- yet not exactly in the style of actual seventies era South Korean films. They're closer to modern South Korean horror and independent films in terms of genre and tone. Which isn't really wrong, those movies all take influence from older weird South Korean films like what Kim Ki-young tended to specialize in.

Yet the behind-the-scenes color portions of "Cobweb" are, if anything, even weirder than the film-within-a-film, with Director Kim in a constant panic trying to finish the film on time before the producers pull the plug. It's never entirely clear what Director Kim's ultimate vision for the project is, nor is especially well explained why the censors or anyone else care about the specific changes he's trying to make. Nevertheless, Director Kim's loyal staff defuses the situation by coming up with a very stupid rationalization for his actions that's...well...let's just say very seventies.

"Cobweb" isn't a romantic look at the yesteryear of South Korean filmmaking by any means. It focuses mainly on the absurd dramas of film production, with Director Kim's legitimacy as an artist rather paradoxically confirmed by his genuine obliviousness to everything that's going on with his cast and crew. If the film-within-a-film is about overreacting to petty deceptions, "Cobweb" writ large is about Director Kim doing his best to onfuscate those petty deceptions.

The end result is all too human, yet also all too difficult to appreciate for someone who can't somehow hold both overly cynical and overly romantic views of the filmmaking process. "Cobweb" had a very modest box office performance of around three hundred thousand, despite having the benefit of Song Kang-ho as a lead. I'd like to think this is the kind of story that will appreciate better over time but, well, I'm kind of thinking like Director Kim when I write that, which is a bit unsettling.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Cobweb" is directed by Kim Jee-woon, and features Song Kang-ho, Lim Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Jeon Yeo-been, Jung Soo-jung, Park Jung-soo. Release date in Korea: 2023/09/27.

Available on Blu-ray from YESASIA

DVD English Subtitled

DVD HK English Subtitled

Blu-ray HK English Subtitled