Generic Interventions

‘With my films,’ boasts Bong Joon-ho, ‘sometimes people don’t know whether to laugh or whether it’s a serious scene, and they’ll ask me: “Was it supposed to be funny?”’^[1]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in David Gregory Lawson, ‘Interview: Bong Joon Ho’, Film Comment, 27 June 2014, <https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-bong-joon-ho/>, accessed 18 August 2017.

Across six feature films – from 2000’s low-budget black comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite to 2017’s big-budget capitalist parable Okja – the Korean director has fashioned less a distinctive style, more a singular tone. Or, more to the point, a tonal plurality. Whether a monster movie (2006’s The Host), a serial-killer procedural (2003’s Memories Of Murder) or a post-apocalyptic action spectacle (2013’s Snowpiercer), each Bong film is at once comic and tragic, a dark social satire wrapped in goofy absurdity. They’re genre movies, or close enough, yet their quirky sense of humour, moments of sublime artfulness and sense of genuine adventure make them rise above – or sink below – genre’s standard tropes. Bong is renowned for his fastidiousness: having grown up loving comic books,^[2]Livia Bloom, ‘Bong Joon-ho, Mother’, Filmmaker, 10 March 2010, <http://filmmakermagazine.com/5351-bong-joon-ho-mother/>, accessed 18 August 2017. he works with carefully plotted storyboards and goes into production knowing all his shots, never shooting coverage, effectively editing the movie while filming^[3]Christina Radish, ‘Ed Harris Talks Snowpiercer, Joining the Film, Being a Fan of Bong Joon Ho and His Unusual Shooting Style, Editing While Shooting, and Working with Chris Evans’, Collider, 25 June 2014, <http://collider.com/ed-harris-snowpiercer-interview/>, accessed 18 August 2017. (his nickname in Korean is a pun on the word ‘detail’^[4]Harry Robertson, ‘Directing Spotlight: Bong Joon-ho’, Seroword, 8 June 2015, <http://seroword.com/film/directing-spotlight-bong-joon-ho/>, accessed 18 August 2017. ). Yet, for all his visionary bona fides and cinematic singularity, Bong demurs being called an auteur: ‘I think such praise is for arthouse masters like Michael Haneke,’ he says. ‘Rather, I would like to make films that excite the mass audience.’^[5]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Sonia Kil, ‘Bong Joon-ho on Working with Netflix and the Controversy Over Okja at Cannes’, Variety, 16 May 2017, <http://variety.com/2017/film/news/bong-joon-ho-working-with-netflix-controversy-okja-cannes-1202428394/>, accessed 18 August 2017.

And there’s real accessibility in Bong’s films. The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja could all be considered colourful fables, the last of which having such a Spielbergian sense of cinematic spectacle and wide-eyed wonder that it’s almost a family film. Yet Okja’s an almost-family-film that, ultimately, talks about industrialised agribusiness, the peddling of genetically modified organisms, and ecoterrorism, while also taking terrifying trips into the forced insemination and mass slaughter of factory animals. So, y’know, it’s cute and touching, but deeply disturbing. And it’s also hilarious, and ridiculous, and stylish. It’s Bong being Bong, on a grand stage.

Okja’s an almost-family-film that, ultimately, talks about industrialised agribusiness, the peddling of genetically modified organisms, and ecoterrorism, while also taking terrifying trips into the forced insemination and mass slaughter of factory animals.

Okja was made for US$50 million for Netflix, which offered the director total artistic freedom;^[6]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Lee Hyo-won, ‘How Bong Joon-ho’s Okja Fetes Bonding with Animals, “Co-existence” Between Streamers and Film’, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 May 2017, <http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/how-bong-joon-hos-okja-fetes-bonding-animals-existence-between-streamers-film-1005849>, accessed 18 August 2017. the director is complimentary about the streaming giant: ‘If you want to make something strange, it is a good place to go.’^[7]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Ryan Gilbey, ‘Okja Director Bong Joon-ho: “In Films, Animals Are Either Soulmates or Butchered”’, The Guardian, 16 June 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jun/16/okja-director-bong-joon-ho-in-films-animals-are-either-soulmates-or-butchered>, accessed 18 August 2017. But this did mean that the film attracted controversy when it premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, its imminent streaming release ruffling the feathers of traditional cineastes, from the head of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) to 2017 Cannes jury president Pedro Almodóvar.^[8]Nancy Tartaglione, ‘A Fest Divided: Netflix Controversy Clouds Cannes; Will France Embrace Change?’, Deadline Hollywood, 19 May 2017, <http://deadline.com/2017/05/netflix-cannes-controversy-okja-meyerowitz-stories-france-1202098053/>, accessed 18 August 2017. Yet those concerns soon blew away due to both the quality of the film and the reception it received following its Netflix premiere. Okja became, almost instantly, Bong’s most widely seen film, hailed by many as the first masterpiece made directly for a streaming service.^[9]See, for example, Jason Bailey, ‘How Okja Makes the Case for Netflix Original Films’, Flavorwire, 28 June 2017, <http://flavorwire.com/607612/how-okja-makes-the-case-for-netflix-original-films>; Nick Schager, ‘Okja: Bong Joon Ho on His Loopy, Lyrical Netflix Masterpiece’, The Daily Beast, 19 June 2017, <http://www.thedailybeast.com/okja-bong-joon-ho-on-his-loopy-lyrical-netflix-masterpiece-one-of-the-best-films-of-the-year>; Kaitlyn Tiffany, ‘Okja Is the First Great Netflix Movie – Here’s Why That Matters’, The Verge, 26 June 2017, <https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/26/15747466/netflix-okja-bong-joon-ho-snowpiercer-cannes-hollywood>; and Jason di Rosso, ‘Review: Okja Pits Tilda Swinton Against Giant CGI Pig in Netflix Action Masterpiece’, ABC News, 30 June 2017, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/review-netflix-debut-original-feature-okja/8663192>, all accessed 18 August 2017.

It’s a great introduction to a filmmaker at once accessible and confounding, whose films manage to move through an array of moods – or even strike contrary, conflicting notes in chorus – while maintaining a singular feel. Even in the case of Mother (2009), in which an overbearing mother obsessively fights on behalf of a son suspected of killing a young girl, the movie moves through murder mystery, black comedy, psychological thriller, arch melodrama and even dance. ‘I’ve never consciously mixed genres and atmospheres,’ says Bong. ‘It just naturally comes together that way for me. I don’t know why exactly, it’s part of my instinct.’^[10]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Vinca Van Eecke, ‘Interview with Bong Joon-Ho’, Festival de Cannes website, 17 May 2011, <http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/69-editions/retrospective/2011/actualites/articles/interview-with-bong-joon-ho>, accessed 18 August 2017.

Bong was born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1969. His hygiene-obsessed mother ‘thought theatres were infested with germs because they never saw any sunlight’,^[11]Bong, quoted in Gilbey, op. cit. so he didn’t go to the cinema much growing up. But, through watching movies on TV – he had an early formative experience with The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)^[12]Van Eecke, op. cit. – Bong became a film buff, knowing he wanted to become a director by the time he was fifteen.^[13]Bloom, op. cit. Though he was studying sociology at Yonsei University in the 1980s, he was a member of the school’s film society; upon graduation, he enrolled in the Korean Academy of Film Arts, where he made the short films White Man and Memories in My Frame, released in 1994,^[14]‘Bong Joon-ho, a South Korean Film Director and Screenwriter’, Korean Times, 15 November 2009, <http://www.koreantimes.org/bong-joon-ho-a-south-korean-film-director-and-screenwriter/>, accessed 18 August 2017. a year after South Korea was liberated from three decades of military dictatorship. This period ushered in a more permissive culture both socially and cinematically, Bong becoming part of a new wave of Korean directors – Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon, Hong Sang-soo – who would find fame and acclaim in the new century.

Bong always wanted to make genre films,^[15]Kee Chang, ‘The Lost Interview: Bong Joon-ho’, Anthem, 13 April 2017, <http://anthemmagazine.com/the-lost-interview-bong-joon-ho/>, accessed 18 August 2017. but he uses the prism of genre to offer ‘historical, political background’ and explore elements of Korean society.^[16]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Alan Bett, ‘Bong Joon-ho: The Most Gilded of the Golden Generation’, The Skinny, 19 June 2014, <http://www.theskinny.co.uk/festivals/edinburgh-festivals/film/bong-joon-ho-the-most-gilded-of-the-golden-generation>, accessed 18 August 2017. ‘It’s fun for me to bury my political comments here and there,’ he says, ‘[and] a double blessing for me to convey some political commentary in the film and have it work within a genre’.^[17]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Kevin B Lee, ‘The Han River Horror Show: Interview with Bong Joon-ho’, Cineaste, vol. 32, no. 2, Spring 2007, trans. Ina Park & Mina Park, <https://www.cineaste.com/spring2007/interview-with-bong-joon-ho/>, accessed 18 August 2017. His first film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is a black comedy about, um, dog-eating (‘I have no idea how the producer greenlit this film!’ Bong laughs, during an interview for this story), in which a handful of apartment-tower residents intersect via various dognappings. Dogs aren’t allowed in the apartments – but, since the liberation, no-one, laments its ageing janitor (played by recurring Bong collaborator Byun Hee-bong), follows the rules.

While there’s comedy mined from characters driven to distraction over a barking dog, leaping into the bushes in classic slapstick, or giddily preparing the delicacy of dog stew (‘The puppies performed in this movie are safely supervised,’ a title pronounces before the film even begins), the story is set against the Korean financial crisis of 1997–1998. Its luckless leading man, Yun-ju (Lee Sung-jae), is an under-employed professor whose professional status has led to total emasculation. His pregnant girlfriend wears the pants in their relationship: she earns more than him; demands he crack bags of walnuts and scratch her back; and, in the ultimate humiliation, buys a fluffy poodle she calls Baby, lavishing it with more attention and affection than he’s seen in a long while. His eventual bout of dog-murdering is a way to exercise power in a life where he has none. He soon learns that the only way to advance your career in Korea is via a good old-fashioned bribe, foreshadowing the depictions of bribery and corruption that recur, both explicitly and implicitly, in every Bong work (Korean audiences, he says, ‘see [bribery] everyday in movies and TV as well as in real life’^[18]ibid.).

Though there’s a sense of restraint in Barking Dogs Never Bite – the film is low-budget and set in a solitary location, betraying none of Bong’s later wild ambition – this film showed his flair for physical comedy, chase scenes, pacing and comic timing. Its ensemble of down-and-out characters also introduced his favourite form of characterisation: the loveable loser. That’s persisted throughout his filmography, even in his otherwise-dark films Memories of Murder and Mother (as well as his part-of-an-omnibus short films: 2008’s Shaking Tokyo, about a pizza-box-hoarding hikikomori; and 2004’s experiment Influenza, which captures the downward spiral of its hapless main character on real-traffic, ATM and security cameras, our observations via the surveillance state stitched together, Bong says, ‘like a video diary’). In Memories of Murder, those loveable losers happen to be the police force. Buffoonish Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho, Bong’s favourite leading man) heads a team of dickhead detectives investigating a string of small-town serial murders in the mid 1980s, a period evoked via rudimentary technology and student protests. After rainy nights, the bodies of women are found dumped in canals, rice paddies, drainage ditches – and the overmatched police both chase after the wrong men and don’t know where to turn next.

Inspired by Alan Moore’s Jack the Ripper graphic novel From Hell, Kim Kwang-rim’s stage play on the same subject, and the real-life Hwaseong serial murders, Memories of Murder uses the familiarity of the procedural to explore – and critique – society.

Inspired by Alan Moore’s Jack the Ripper graphic novel From Hell, ^[19]Yonah Sichrovsky, ‘Bong Joon-ho Interview: “I’m Fascinated by Groups of People Trapped Inside of a Space. In That Sense Haemoo Is like Snowpiercer”’, Eastern Kicks, 28 May 2015, <http://www.easternkicks.com/features/bong-joon-ho-interview>, accessed 18 August 2017. Kim Kwang-rim’s stage play on the same subject, and the real-life Hwaseong serial murders, Memories of Murder uses the familiarity of the procedural to explore – and critique – society. The police investigation parallels a social investigation, the filmmaker feeling as though he was ‘exposing Korean society and the military regime by looking into the serial killings’.^[20]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Pamela Jahn, ‘Mother: Interview with Bong Joon-ho’, Electric Sheep, 1 November 2009, <http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2009/11/01/mother-interview-with-bong-joon-ho/>, accessed 18 August 2017. While there are elements of the serial-killer genre so popular at the time – devilish clues pulled from the vaginas of attractive young corpses! – the film is a critique of institutional failure, standover cops, police torture, small-town mentalities, mindless parochialism and father-knows-best paternalism. Various suspects are arrested or cross-examined, but none of them are the guy; like David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), the investigations ultimately prove fruitless, no-one ever brought to trial for the crimes.

In a memorable ending, Detective Park – no longer a cop, now a travelling juicer salesman (!) – returns to the drainage ditch where, with the discovery of its first body, the film began. While lost in his memories of murder, Park is interrupted by a little girl, who tells him that another man was recently there, gazing at the drain – likely, we intuit, the killer. Park turns and looks down the barrel of the camera, Bong hoping the real-life Hwaseong murderer, ‘in the very comfortable seat of the multiplex theatre’, would come under this gaze: ‘The fourth wall is often broken for dramatic or comic effect, but how often to stare into the eyes of a real life murderer, to accuse him?’^[21]Bong, quoted in Bett, op. cit.

Mother is, in many ways, a sister picture to Memories of Murder. It’s also about the murder of a young woman in a small town, and it features many of the same story beats: an opening in a field of wheat; local cops ill-equipped to deal with a homicide case; staged re-enactments of murders, with newly arrested suspects, as media photo-ops; the demonisation of local ‘retards’; forced confessions; comic scenes of drunken karaoke; chase sequences through tin-sheet back alleys. Just as Memories of Murder’s detective from Seoul, Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), grows obsessed with the case, so, too, does Kim Hye-ja’s unnamed, eponymous character in Mother. That’s because her intellectually disabled son, Do-joon (Won Bin), has been accused of killing a local schoolgirl, our protagonist steadfastly refusing to believe that could’ve happened. After local cops and a smarmy lawyer fail to do her bidding, she assumes the role of sleuth: pinning photos and evidence on her wall, questioning locals, snooping around, eventually uncovering salacious details about the dead girl and those who might want her silenced.

She’s operating out of unconditional love, but this seems as sexual as it is maternal (‘Yes, this is a sex movie,’ Bong admits^[22]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Jon Herskovitz, ‘An Interview with South Korea’s Box Office Champ Director Bong Joon-ho’, Reuters, 15 June 2009, <http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2009/06/15/an-interview-with-south-koreas-box-office-champ-director-bong-joon-ho/>, accessed 8 August 2017.). A single mother and only child, they’ve spent their lives together in intimate proximity; at night, they share the same bed, Do-joon curled up in a fetal position, hand on his mother’s breast. Her single-minded obsession, then, is no crusade for justice, but a descent into her damaged psyche, leading to a gruesome climax – ‘the mother becomes a black hole in which the individuals around her get sucked into this particular incident’, Bong offers.^[23]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Sam Adams, ‘Bong Joon-Ho’, The A.V. Club, 9 March 2010, <http://www.avclub.com/article/bong-joon-ho-38936>, accessed 18 August 2017. Mother is simultaneously tragic and comic, delightful absurdity present in both the bonkers story and the central casting of Kim, an iconic figure from Korean television whom Bong grew up watching; the idea, according to the director, was: ‘Let’s take Korea’s “national mother” and make a really weird movie.’^[24]Bong, quoted in Chang, op. cit.

This ‘weird movie’ was an unexpected next step following the rousing success of The Host, which, on its release, became the highest-grossing local film in Korean box-office history.^[25]‘The Host Set for All-time Box-office Record’, The Chosunilbo, 1 September 2006, <http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2006/09/01/2006090161026.html>, accessed 18 August 2017. It’s easy to see why The Host was such a success in its homeland: it’s a monster movie that plays as both farcical comedy and sentimental family drama. And, befitting Bong, it’s another social critique: the monster – a mutation, part-squid, part-Xenomorph^[26]The extraterrestrial species in the Alien film franchise. and part–Steve Buscemi in Fargo, that rises out of the Han River – is a symbolic manifestation of American military occupation.^[27]Bong Joon-ho, paraphrased in Barrett Hooper, ‘A Monster of a Host’, Now Toronto, 29 March 2007, <https://nowtoronto.com/movies/features/a-monster-of-a-host/>, accessed 18 August 2017. The story begins in 2000, with a US army officer commanding a Korean underling to dump hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde into the sink, knowing that it’ll end up in the nearby Han. This opening sting was actually inspired by a real event that happened in 2000: ‘[It’s] a cliché in that kind of monster B picture like Alligator [Lewis Teague, 1980], some crazy scientist pours something into the sewers and bad things happen,’ Bong explains. ‘There’s a borderline between genre convention and real political scandal.’^[28]Bong, quoted in Bett, op. cit. From there, The Host doesn’t mess around, getting from the formaldehyde-dumping to the monster rising out of the river in twelve minutes, the creature instantly going on a bloody rampage.

Ultimately, there’s a sense of triumph in The Host as ordinary Koreans band together to defeat forces greater and more powerful than them, be they an occupying army or a CGI creature.

The Host is also the ultimate exemplar of Bong’s fondness for loveable losers. The only thing that can stop this monster is, it turns out, a family of idiots. They’re played by a band of recurring Bong favourites: Song plays the stupidest, a single father who, working at his family’s kiosk on the Han River, is forever falling asleep and fucking up, much to the annoyance of his pissed-off daughter (Ko Ah-sung, who’d again play Song’s daughter in Snowpiercer). The family unit is rounded out by other Bong regulars: Byun, who’s been in four of his six films) as the cantankerous grandad; Park Hae-il (also from Memories of Murder), the drunk uncle; and Doona Bae (who starred in Barking Dogs Never Bite), the archery-ace aunt.

When the monster nabs the daughter, the family manage to stop squabbling long enough to band together to break into the quarantined zone, elude the US military and slay the monster, with ol’ drunk uncle drawing on the Molotov-cocktail-throwing skills he learned during his student-protester days. There’s trauma and casualty along the way, and Bong shows particular affection for an unnamed homeless man and a pair of street kids who live in the sewers and underpasses that’ve been cordoned off. Ultimately, there’s a sense of triumph in The Host as ordinary Koreans band together to defeat forces greater and more powerful than them, be they an occupying army or a CGI creature. ‘I like putting these characters in impossible situations that they can’t deal with,’ Bong says. ‘That’s what makes powerful drama.’^[29]Bong, quoted in Kevin B Lee, op. cit.

Okja is another monster movie, in its own way. Its titular creature is a genetically engineered female ‘super-pig’ that’s bigger than a hippopotamus but as playful as a puppy, and full of visual allusions to the titular creature in My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Co-written by Bong and English social satirist Jon Ronson, the film is effectively about the friendship – and the love – between Okja and the young girl she’s grown up alongside, Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun). They live with Mija’s grandfather (old standby Byun) in the Korean mountains, frolicking amid the verdant forests, cascading waterfalls and blue rock pools of their bucolic splendour. Okja may be Mija’s best friend, but she’s also a corporate branding exercise, a commodity and a future foodstuff. When she’s taken away to New York by her corporate owners (embodied by Tilda Swinton’s platinum-haired, white-dentured, gaily bright CEO) to be paraded in a super-pig contest, the film becomes an intercontinental action movie in which Mija and a host of Animal Liberationists attempt to emancipate Okja, with many car chases, heist-like plans and on-foot escapes ensuing. Bong found the ‘unexpected success of The Host’ allowed him to be ‘more free and risk-taking’^[30]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Steve ‘Frosty’ Weintraub, ‘Bong Joon-ho Exclusive Interview – Tokyo!’, Collider, 18 March 2009, <http://collider.com/bong-joonho-exclusive-interview-tokyo/>, accessed 18 August 2017. – and, with Okja, he swung big.

Whereas Bong’s early films were more about Korean social issues, his two international, English-language pictures have been about broader, global issues; each, in its own way, is about globalisation.

Here, he marshals a starry cast – Swinton, as in Hail, Caesar! (The Coen Brothers, 2016), playing dual roles as duelling twins; Jake Gyllenhaal; Paul Dano; Lily Collins; Steven Yeun; Shirley Henderson; Giancarlo Esposito – in a bright, bustling, boisterous picture that mixes genuine sweetness with the tart theme of corporate critique. Okja rails against industrialised agribusiness, lamenting the lives of the creatures who’ve been turned into grist for capitalist machinery, becoming bloodless supermarket products whose countless deaths are unseen by those who eat them. ‘I’m not against meat consumption,’ Bong offers, nor is his intent for ‘the audience to turn vegan’. But Okja’s feel-good family fable includes a detour into a massive slaughterhouse, where the super-pigs – sentient, emotional, empathetic – are murdered en masse. ‘It’s only been recently that animals have been included in the mass-production, conveyor-belt factory system – that they’ve been turned into products,’ he continues. ‘I really want to show the pain, and the lives that animals have to go into, when forced into this capitalistic endeavour.’

Bong’s first English-language endeavour was Snowpiercer, also a big-budget action picture peddling an internationalist parable. The film was victimised by its own distributor, the infamous Harvey ‘Scissorhands’ Weinstein – who agitated to, of course, heavily cut the film, shunted it to on-demand and never released it in the UK^[31]Tim Robey, ‘54 and the Curse of Harvey Scissorhands’, The Telegraph, 8 May 2015, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/54/directors-cut-harvey-weinstein/>, accessed 18 August 2017. – but went on to find a cult following. It’s set in 2031, when humanity’s attempts to combat climate change by altering the atmosphere have, instead, plunged the world into a new ice age. The only survivors inhabit the ‘rattling ark’ of the titular train, a perpetual-motion machine dreamt up by the cultishly worshipped visionary Wilford (Ed Harris). The train is a ‘metallic prison’^[32]Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Simon Abrams, ‘Director Bong Joon-ho Breaks Down Snowpiercer’s Ending’, Vulture, 29 June 2014, <http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/director-bong-joon-ho-talks-snowpiercers-ending.html>, accessed 18 August 2017. for the entirety of human civilisation, with class division written in obvious symbolism. Far from the decadence of first class, the tail end of the train is a Dickensian hell, steerage crammed full of soot-stained faces (played by Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Ewen Bremner) fed a steady diet of Soylent Greenish protein blocks. Evans, not straying far from his history of superhero roles, portrays the eventual leader, Curtis, of a ‘Spartacus-type revolt’^[33]Bong, quoted in Lawson, op. cit. that attempts to wrest control of the train away from Wilford and his Thatcheresque lackey, Mason (Swinton). As Curtis and his insurgent tail-enders push towards the front of the train – always shown moving from the left of the frame to the right – each carriage feels like a new level in a videogame.

Amid generic action tropes (characters dying off one by one, gunfire aplenty, villainous Vlad Ivanov as an unstoppable killing machine), there’s a great set piece reminiscent of Park Chan-wook’s iconic fight scene in Oldboy (2003), in which our crusaders come face to face with an entire carriage of axe-wielding goons in black leather trench coats and balaclavas. In Bong’s familiar fashion, even that fight scene is enlivened with laughs: a slippery fish thrown into the fray, and the fracas stopped midway for a New Year’s countdown. There are moments of genuine zaniness (especially Alison Pill as a grinning teacher, indoctrinating kids in the way of Wilford) amid the social satire, with Bong and production designer Ondrej Nekvasil delighting in their hyper-stylised depiction of upper-class carriages – a parade of gold-plated saunas, gilded salons and grotesque discotheques. Eventually, Snowpiercer rattles towards inevitable revelations about Curtis’ tragic history (‘I know what people taste like. I know that babies taste best!’), what the protein blocks are made of, and the secret politics at play on the train.

Whereas Bong’s early films were more about Korean social issues, his two international, English-language pictures have been about broader, global issues; each, in its own way, is about globalisation. (His upcoming film The Parasite – a four-hander set in a solitary location – circles back, though; he describes it as a ‘microscopic look at a small Korean family’.) Snowpiercer’s grimly ironic conclusion offers mock-hopefulness for humanity while blowing the blessed train to smithereens – an ending both optimistic and pessimistic, in a film that is at once light and dark, smart and stupid, hilarious and horrifying. It’s another hit from the Bong: a middle-brow genre movie by a ridiculous cinematic visionary.