Aquatic and crispy shades of green, ochre, and blue dominate Park Sye-young’s apocalyptic The Fin. The title serves a double-entendre, referring not only to the end days (a play on the French word for end, fin) but also the titular malformation in the dried-out landscape of the future: fish fins.
In a future where water has become scarce, government propaganda emphasizes how an unclean face becomes symbolic of a patriotic citizen. Meanwhile, the poisoned world gives rise to ironic mermaid mutants, known as Omegas. People go to great lengths to conceal their transformations; it’s a dirty secret hidden by foot wraps, self-mutilation and prosthetics, as Omegas not only face the threat of expulsion but also exploitation, as they are pushed to the edges of cities to do grueling work to uphold the thin veneer of civilization. One Omega, though, ventures back into the world of the humans. He’s been tasked by a friend with returning his remains to his daughter.
The Fin begins from the perspective of Sujin, a newly trained government employee. In Park Sye-young’s imagined apocalypse of saturated colors and neon, Korea has been united. People work toward an imagined future where water has been restored. The illusion of this goal is built, on the surface, around personal sacrifice, but that idea unravels under the weight of both fantasy and oppression. The Omegas become scapegoats for the real villains that have corrupted our world, while people spend their days tirelessly working and briefly indulging in the empty pleasures of former fishing shops and fake Ocean landscapes.
Not unlike his previous features, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra and Base Station, Park Sye-young uses limitations to emphasize the cracks in contemporary life. The film’s landscapes are crafted by real-world locations transformed through context and through filmmaking. Here, highly saturated colors create a dappled effect of rot and decay; an ironically waterlogged vision of inhospitable hues and textures. Like the killer mold in The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, this film seems infected with the invasive green algae that strangles our fresh-bodied waters — eerily beautiful but ultimately deadly.
Part of a new generation of young filmmakers who place the environment at the forefront of their work, Park weaves climate anxieties with a whole range of other pressing contemporary anxieties, from housing to immigration. Through his allegorical filmmaking, we see how the planet’s increasingly inhospitable surface disproportionately targets the poor and most vulnerable. The climate crisis becomes not only a thematic backbone to his work but an aesthetic one, as the film’s visuals and sparse style all seem borne out of deep consideration for the consequences of the brutal destruction of our natural world.
Indeed, transformation remains at the fore of the film. Obviously, through the fish-like mutations that grip sections of the population, but less obviously via the journey of Sujin. Through her, we navigate this new world, but we’re hit by waves of discomfort and uncertainty. Propaganda is everywhere, some of it glowing and smiling, but a lot of it pervasive and subconscious. Little cracks in the surface of the illusions start to weigh on her and, exasperated by further confrontations and interactions with Mia, the daughter who inherits her father’s fin remains, Sujin’s faith in the government’s fascist fantasy of liberation, sacrifice, and purity wavers.
What makes a revolution? That transformative question hangs at the edges of The Fin. While Park’s film doesn’t offer a full cathartic release, it signals brief flashes of hope. We aren’t doomed to uphold the same values and ideas that lead us down the path to destruction. At the very least, the film turns its back on the values of fascism, a fantasy uniting force that does nothing for community or healing, but instead only pushes further down the road toward the end of the world.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
Comments are closed.