Young-goon (Lim Su-jeong) thinks she's a cyborg - which is a problem
inasmuch as she once, while at work, cut her wrists to insert some wiring
into her arms. Consequently she is sent to a mental hospital. There, she
spends her days in a state of catatonia, not responding to anything, not
talking to anyone, and also not eating - after all, a cyborg doesn't need
to eat. It's only at night that she roams the corridors of the institution
and talks to vending machines and stuff, feeling closer to them than to
humans.
Eventually, she opens up to one fellow patient, Il-sun (Rain), a
kleptomaniac who thinks he might become invisible because his parents
neglected him and who also thinks he can not only steal people's
possessions but also their traits and talents ...
Soon, we learn how Young-goon got the way she was: She was broght up
mostly by her grandmother, whom she really loved, but then her mother (Lee
Yong-nyeo) found out that grandmother actually thought she was a mouse and
kept some mice in her backyard, referring to them as her family.
Consequently she was taken to a mental hospital - at which point something
in Young-goon broke, and from that time on she figured she has to at one
day kill all the people in white, this being doctors and nurses, to avenge
her granny. Often she fantasizes about this, but eventually she breaks
down, almost starved to death and has to be fed artificially. She of
course thinks she is merely recharged and - out of gratitude more than
anything else - opens up to one of the doctors (Choi Hie-jin), telling her
her story - but still fantasizing about one day killing her.
Il-sun eventually figures out he has to make Young-goon eat on a
regular basis, so he convinces her that rice is actually recharging her
batteries - which she believes, but she soon figures she needs more
energy, much more, to become an atom bomb, so she and Il-sun break out of
the institution and camp atop a cliff, pointing an antenna to the sky so
it can catch the next lightning to fully charge Young-goon.
The other morning, despite a heavy thunderstorm, lightning fortunately
hasn't struck ... but love has.
The basic idea of this film is simply wonderful: A woman believing to
be a cyborg - that seems to be an instant winner. Unfortunately, director
Park Chan-wook it way too much in love with his basic idea to build a good
story around it - admittedly the problem of many Park Chan-wook films -,
instead he delivers little more than a few loonie bin jokes, provides the
characters with very clichéd background stories, and in the end reveals
the filmm to be nothing more than a cheesy romantic comedy.
That said, the film isn't all bad, at times it's positively humourous
and at times Park Chan-wook at least delivers wonderfully playful images -
it's just that as a whole, the film falls short of its promise.
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