Top Ten Korean Movies of 2016 (Sort of)

Zombies on the loose. Backstabbing lesbian lovers. Amoral cops. A young man with a disease that causes him to wake up each morning in a different body. 2016 was a lousy years in some respects (job, politics, family) but at least it gave me what I needed in terms of Korean movies. Below are my ten favorite movies — all viewed within the last twelve months — in alphabetical order. It was easy to pick 'em; impossible to rank 'em.

1. Alive: In Park Jung-bum's grimly naturalistic epic, poverty is one helluva oppressor and tenderness the sweetest, most unexpected thing life has to offer.

2. A Barefoot Dream: Kim Tae-gyun's ripped-from-the-sports-pages tearjerker is about an East Timor soccer team coached by a middling, former pro soccer player (Park Hee-soon) from South Korea.

3. The Beauty Inside: This wondrous sci-fi pic from Baek Jong-yeol asks how would our relationship to our soulmate change (or even survivor) if the exterior appearance kept changing every day?

4. Cyrano Agency: Imagine a future in which a matchmaking agency "scripts" your first encounter, subsequent dates, and wedding proposal. Now make it a rom-com.

5. The Handmaiden: Park Chan-wook's always made fascinating female characters but never more so than here in this lesbian erotic thriller based on Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith.

6. A Hard Day: How often do narrative and character shortcomings make you reflect? This sleazy cop procedural, starring Lee Sun-kyun, pleases by disappointing in interesting ways.

7. Kundo: The Age of the Rampant: The better of two martial arts flicks I really enjoyed this year, the other being The Kick, has the advantage of Ma Dong-seok in a major role.

8. Miss Granny: The central performance from Shim Eun-kyung, as an old woman miraculously gifted her young body again, is deliriously good. Plus, she can sign.

9. The Scarlet Letter: Is this the most harrowing love triangle in Korean film? It's certainly in the running. I first saw it over ten years ago and it's lost none of its power.

10. Train to Busan: Although it falls tenth on this alphabetical list, this zombie flick — with a great ensemble cast — was the most thrilling movie of the year. In short, number 10 is number 1.

Alive: Barely

Bad people do bad things. That's pretty obvious. But good people do bad things, too. And sometimes with the best intentions. Other times, it's simply because need becomes too great to remain unfailingly good. In Park Jung-bum's epic Alive (which runs about three hours), we see this over and over again — Jeong-cheol (played with hyperrealism by Park himself) — fights and connives to scrape together a living for himself, his mentally ill sister Soo-yeon (Lee Seung-yeon) and her young daughter Ha-na (Shin Haet-bit) with no resources to draw on outside of his wits. He'll do construction, factory work, anything he can to keep his little family unit together. That means he's not above selling out the elders who have taught him how to process soybean paste or unhinging the front door of an orphaned boy's home to make a point. You may question his logic now and then but you're also excruciatingly aware that his thinking is colored by having to sleep in a tent in an unheated house and to steal a large radish from a local store in order to survive. Bulgogi and scallion pancakes are not on his menu.

To call Alive gritty would be an understatement. More like artfully soiled or ingeniously smudged or willfully covered in crap. Poverty is one hell of a great oppressor and any act of tenderness — the desperate plea for charity that Myeong-hoon (Park Myoung-hoon makes to his brother; the human shield assumed by ex-girlfriend Jin-yeong (Lee Eun-woo) when some drunkenly indignant customers go on the attack — registers as an unexpected gift of the highest rank, when it's all you can do to get by. For it is love and kindness that make humanity defensible as a species. Without it, you almost wish humankind would simply stop propagating and leave the now-damaged planet to the other species and plants which have some how made it this far despite our rapaciousness, despite our meanness, despite our disregard. And Alive documents that too. It's not a pretty picture. But it's a necessary one. Writer-actor-director-cinematographer-producer Park is definitely a multitalented one to watch.