I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)

Park Chan-wook's 2006 curio arrived from a moment when the Korean director was best known for vengeance and scalpels, and it chooses instead to spend two hours inside a psychiatric ward with a young woman who believes she is a cyborg and a kleptomaniac who believes he can steal souls. The film's treatment of its patients is its most distinctive quality. They are not monsters, not punchlines, not case studies. They are roommates. Young-goon refuses food because a machine does not require it. Il-soon brushes his teeth compulsively and wears a rabbit mask he made himself. The camera observes these rituals with affection and no editorializing whatsoever. That is a genuine achievement, and it is achieved by showing, never by telling.

What the film declines to do is argue. There is no thesis about the pharmaceutical industry, no indictment of the mother who failed Young-goon, no scene in which a wise patient explains the true meaning of sanity to a chastened doctor. Her mother's neglect registers as sadness, not as a systemic complaint. The factory where Young-goon assembled radios is a fact of her biography and nothing more; the film has no interest in labor or capital. The refusal to eat, which a later decade might have recruited for a body-acceptance parable, is here simply a delusion with a body count of one. The movie is too busy being strange to be instructive.

The female protagonist has will and a plan, which is more than the genre typically allowed in 2006, though the film routes her interiority through romance and illness instead of any argument about her place in the world. The cast is Korean because the story is Korean. There is no other kind of character here, no other kind of story. What remains is a delicate, uneven, occasionally baffling romance that treats the mentally ill as people worth loving. It was, as a Korean critic later suggested, early. Being early is not the same as being preachy, and this film knows the difference.