Fallen: The Future Is Weird

For all its meta conversation about science fiction, revenge porn, and film criticism, the opening scene of Lee Jung-sub's Fallen creates a palpable sense of suspense. You sense one of the characters discussing scifi screenwriting sensation Baek Jo-kyeong (Yang Ji) is up to no good but which one and why is a mystery. Shortly thereafter when the antisocial artist wakes up, battered, handcuffed, and leather-masked in an oil barrel, you — like her — are desperate to find out how she got there (and how that mask mysteriously turns into duct tape soon thereafter). Yet what follows isn't so much an explanation or an elaborate escape so much as two dueling narratives — one akin to Six Characters in Search of an Author meets Molly's Game; the other, a tribunal of sorts in which the Twelve Angry Jurors (or thereabouts) must decide whether to grant immunity to two figures who may or may not be from the future and who may or may not have life-saving cures for the sick relatives of all those present. How do these two stories relate?

Well, there's some business about the mother of the scifi writer being a serial killer and the author's daughter being blessed with artificial intelligence (because the humans of tomorrow can be hybrids, don't you know?) but despite scads of exposition, unhelpful flashbacks, and some ever-menacing drones, I'm still not sure why that one guy had cool-looking magic marker lines on his shaved head or what the two young women playing with sparklers were intended to signify. Unwatchable? Apparently not since I stuck with Fallen to its cockamamie end. Recommended? Not to anyone I know... not the scifi geeks, not the literary eggheads, not the radical sisters, not the South Korean cinephiles. I suffered for you. I wrote two paragraphs. Let's all move on. Goodness lies ahead.