The framing story of Jung Bum-shik’s omnibus slasher flick is difficult to parse at first. The various stories spool out in Seoul over a four-day period in May after it snows unseasonally, and for some reason an element of “chaos” is injected into the populace, but since Jung sticks to the specific, meaning isolated characters, some of whom appear in more than one story, the impression isn’t so much arbitrary madness as it is unfortunate confluences of character that lead to murder and mayhem. Fortunately, Jung has a sense of humor, and while it may not be to everyone’s taste the ironies are sharp enough to make the horrors more interesting, if not necessarily more unsettling. And like any good fiction filmmaker who works better in shorter formats, he knows how to plant a twist where it’s most effective. 

The order of the stories is non-linear, and as in Pulp Fiction, a movie that New Normal resembles structurally, characters who die in one episode may pop up in a later one. The opening tale, “M” (the titles are all taken from existing movies), is the simplest and least original. A single woman (soap opera queen Choi Ji-woo, working decidedly against type) is visited by a fire alarm inspector whose rapid fire double entendres and overly intrusive manner raises red flags in the mind of the viewer because the TV keeps mentioning a serial killer at large. Choi shows up later in another story, “Dressed to Kill,” about several young people trading profiles on a dating app in a dangerously reckless manner. The protagonists of the stories are hardly sympathetic, except for the put-upon female convenience store clerk (Ha Da-in) in “My Life as a Dog,” whose dreams of musical glory are dashed by the demands of capitalism, thus driving her to websites where feral people trade tips on how to kill those they hate. Jung gets a lot of mileage out of digital media, but it would be overly reductive to say that he’s targeting modern technology as the root of all the evil he depicts. In the best segment, “Be With You,” a lovelorn young man follows a very analog series of valentines stuck in vending machines to a possible date with a fetching young woman, whose plans for him turn out to be anything but romantic. 

Jung doesn’t connect the evils on display to some kind of overarching social malignancy. They seem organic and pegged to the usual deviant personalities, though I suppose you can infer that such deviancies have been exacerbated by the social fabric becoming less tightly woven. As such, New Normal comes across as yet another film about the horrors of everyday life in post-millennial South Korea. It’s a thrilling place to visit cinematically, but you wouldn’t want to live anywhere near there.

In Korean. Opens Aug. 16 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011). 

New Normal home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Unpa Studios