[HanCinema's Film Review] "Troll Factory"

The opening subtitles of "Troll Factory" insist that the plot of this movie is based on real events, though it stresses that no real people are depicted. This is something of an understatement. Incidentally, "Troll Factory" is based on a novel. While that novel was indeed based on real events, namely the use of malicious online comments to swing the 2012 Presidential Election, the film version is about malicious online comments being used to cover up corporate espionage.

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Somewhat confusingly, "Troll Factory" is still about politics, in the sense that the film rather pointlessly insists on framing the very idea of online communication as if it were responsible for the 2017 Candlelight Rallies. This is the kind of statement so genuinely baffling I'm not even sure what to say in response to it. Are we really at the point now that political organizing and candlelight vigils, concepts that long predate the Internet, can only be thought of in terms of the Internet?

As introductions go, I have to give writer/director Ahn Gook-jin credit for accurately predicting the rest of the film. If you didn't like the prologue, everything that follows is working under the exact same logic of attributing borderline magical powers to Internet posts. Sang-jin (played by Son Sukku) is a reporter who buys into a fairly weak story about a major corporation, Mansun, sabotaging a smaller corporation's racecar test and stealing their proprietary technology for that racecar.

There are, indeed, many devious things like this that corporations do. Where "Troll Factory" gets incoherent is its need to incorporate online trolls in the story. As the text itself notes, people don't generally care about corporate espionage anyway compared to random celebrity scandals. So the extent to which Mansun is willing to defame the story and destroy Sang-jin's career is just...really petty, frankly, and doesn't even make sense within the movie's own internal logic.

In general the way which "Troll Factory" implies that it's easy to get rid of journalists who step out of line is very silly. South Korean media, like media in most of the world at this point, has a heavily online component of news reporters who don't rely on formal accreditation for their credibility. The recent film "I, The Executioner" even includes such informal journalism as a major plot point. So why is "Troll Factory" acting as if nothing has changed in the last decade?

Well, again, because this movie is based on a nine year old novel based on events from over twelve years ago. That the action even takes place in comment sections or message boards at all rather than social media is already out of date, even bearing in mind how absurdly self-important all the major plot points in "Troll Factory" are played off as. It's just hard to take anything that happens in "Troll Factory" seriously. Credit to the actors, though- they sell the concept well enough that a person completely unfamiliar with online politics and corporate espionage in the real world might find the story halfway convincing. Unfortunately, I am not one such person.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Troll Factory" is directed by Ahn Gook-jin, and features Son Sukku, Kim Sung-cheol, Kim Dong-hwi-I, Hong Kyung, Kim Han-sol-II, Kim Hee-won. Release date in Korea: 2024/03/27.