[HanCinema's Film Review] "Usu"

In the fairly grim opening scene of "Usu" director Oh Sehyeon presents a very long shot of a sad looking man sitting in an apartment by himself and trying with no success to get an unnamed character played by Yoon Je-moon to come have a drink with him. In the proceeding scene, Yoon Je-moon's character ends up getting a couple of his colleagues together to go to a funeral. For the next hour or so, they're on a rather boring road trip.

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That isn't exactly meant to sound insulting. To the extent "Usu" has an interesting idea, it's that this is a road trip movie which aims to replicate the actual circumstances of a road trip as opposed to the romantic idea of a road trip as it's more commonly seen in popular culture. The three lead characters mainly just sit around in a car having inane conversations while looking at the scenery. Every so often they stop- supposedly the funeral home they're going to is at the Usu River, which isn't exactly a landmark.

Joining Yoon Je-moon's character on this journey is a junior colleague played by Kim Tae-hoon and a woman played by Cha Yu-jin who seems to have a different job entirely than the other two, and it's never entirely clear how they all know each other. "Usu" introduces the viewer to Cha Yu-jin's character by having her surprised to see Yoon Je-moon's character. Then she walks away, with the long shot emphasizing the awkwardness of the mise in scene before she comes back to talk to him.

The overall effect of all this is that even anticipating death or being in the wake of death, our three lead characters aimlessly wander with little more than a weak sense of obligation compelling them to do much of anything. Cha Yu-jin's character lies about being married for no obvious reason. There are similarly purposeless conversations between the other two characters concerning the sexual experience of a man not in the car.

There's a common cliche of middle aged characters who hate their jobs and don't know how they got to where they are in life. No one in "Usu" hates their job, but their lives in general operate so blatantly on inertia they just feel indifferent to everything, even death. I should note, incidentally, that "Usu" is very much the kind of movie that's ambiguously metaphorical. There are many different ways to interpret the ending despite the fact that almost nothing really happens.

As far as the nothing really happening genre of film goes, "Usu" is fairly well paced at only eighty minutes. "Usu" is also blatantly enough a film about half-hearted loneliness and wandering that it never really manages to be pretentious, just because there's nothing the movie's really pretending to be. This is a film about listless ambition even in the context of threatening suicide. By the end, it's surprising and almost endearing how one of our heroes is nice enough to tell someone he barely knows where the key to his workplace is.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Usu" is directed by Oh Sehyeon, and features Yoon Je-moon, Kim Tae-hoon, Cha Yu-jin, Yoon Ye-rim, Seo Eun-ji, Moon Jung-woong. Release date in Korea: 2022/11/24.