There are brief glimpses of confounding breadth present in JUNG_E, most cogent when projected across the extensive digital dreamscape that is this world’s reality. Director Yeon Sang-ho — convening with his almost absurdist, certainly volatile, visions of bureaucratic observation — proposes here a fusion of post-apocalyptic and pop-utopian aesthetics, recalling, to a lesser extent, the beauty and comprehensive panache which elevates Mamoru Oshii’s Garm Wars: The Last Druid, a Japanese- Canadian co-production. But where Oshii utilizes artificiality to organize a sweeping exploration of the dissonance of live and digital textures, Yeon gropes about in an attempt to reconcile the central melodrama within the filmic world he has constructed.
You can currently stream Yeon Sang-ho’s JUNG_E on Netflix.
Published as part of InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 3.