In Musan City, a decaying small town that exists only on screen, a grieving mother puts on a pair of AR glasses and spends time with her 10-year-old son. He has been gone for nine years, one of the children on a camp bus that vanished. Then the real boy comes home, grown up and a stranger, and the comfort the glasses offered starts to turn into something far more frightening.
That is the setup of “Paradise Lost,” the new psychological thriller from Yeon Sang-ho, the director of “Train to Busan” and the series “Hellbound.” It sits at the opposite end of the scale from “Colony,” which Yeon premiered in the Midnight Screenings section at Cannes earlier this year. “Paradise Lost” went on to Toronto’s Special Presentations section, where Yeon had also taken last year’s micro-budget “The Ugly,” and then screened as a Gala Presentation in Busan. Screenings sold out at both festivals.
Kim Hyun-joo, who worked with Yeon on both seasons of “Hellbound” and on “Jung_E,” plays the mother, Ryu So-young. Bae Hyeon-seong (“Hospital Playlist”) takes his first big-screen lead as Sun-woo, the son who returns. Yeon wrote the screenplay with Ryu Yong-jae, drawing on an original idea of theirs that author Oh Seong-eun turned into the novel “Black Inferno.” Wowpoint produced, and CJ ENM, which presents the film with Wowpoint, handles distribution. The film has sold to 118 countries, with Well Go USA handling North America, where it released Nov. 6.
“On one level, AI is something mechanical or technological. But when you look more closely, we can see what is beneath it. I think it is ultimately what we share as human knowledge and also collective intelligence,” Yeon tells Variety.
As he argued around “Colony,” that pooled knowledge is now beginning to threaten our individuality, he says, the very qualities that make each of us human. “The relationship between a mother and her son is perhaps one of the most deeply personal and intimate relationships we can have,” Yeon continues. “We can never truly know what lies in the depth of another person’s psyche.”
The film borrows its title from Milton’s epic poem. “Just like the story where the first of mankind are expelled from paradise, I thought that the loss of paradise is precisely where the human identity begins,” Yeon said in the film’s production notes.
He has used AI as a storytelling device before. In 2023’s “Jung_E,” an AI recreation allowed a daughter to free her mother from an idealized, self-sacrificing image, something he says would not be possible in the real world. “With ‘Paradise Lost,’ I wanted to take a much more grounded approach, using AI as a point of contrast, I would say, to explore something that is uniquely human,” he says.
AI may be built on humanity’s shared patterns, he adds, but it can also behave in very unpredictable ways, beyond our ability to fully control or comprehend. “In that sense, I think AI itself represents an uncharted territory. Something as mysterious and unknowable to us as a black hole.”
Where “The Ugly” followed a son digging into his father’s buried past, “Paradise Lost” swaps in a mother and son.
“I think the family is the very first form of society that we encounter as human beings,” Yeon says. “And because the family is our first experience of society, it plays a fundamental role in shaping much of our sense of self and also our personal identity.”
“The Ugly” was shot for KRW200 million ($150,000). “Paradise Lost” was also made lean, for KRW500 million ($374,000) over just 14 shooting sessions. Yeon leaned on Kim, whom he knew understood his directing style extremely well after several projects together. The schedule meant few takes and limited locations.
“But when you think about it, many of the most legendary films in Asian cinema were made under similar constraints,” Yeon says. “In a way I found that those limitations allowed me, and allowed us, to explore the material more creatively, and they also demanded an extraordinary level of focus and concentration from everyone involved.”
Korea’s theatrical industry is going through a major transformation, Yeon says, and some feel the market has shrunk considerably. “But I don’t necessarily see that as an obstacle to making good films. A smaller industry doesn’t automatically mean fewer great films will be made,” he says. Making “Colony” and “Paradise Lost” in the same year gave him firsthand experience of two radically different scales, which he hopes will help him lead productions of any size with greater confidence.
International sales covered the film’s net production budget ahead of release. Among Korean distributors, CJ ENM is one of the most active in working with overseas partners, Yeon says, and that experience counts. “Whether a Korean film is a box office success or not, whether it is a mainstream commercial production or something with a more niche sensibility, I believe there are audiences somewhere in the world who will appreciate it,” he says.
Making a film available everywhere is not enough on its own, he adds. “Global streaming platforms already release films simultaneously across multiple territories, using algorithms to recommend content based on individual preferences. But I don’t think we have necessarily established just how effective that approach is at helping films find their audiences.”
Yeon has two projects in post-production. The first is a Japanese-language Netflix series, based on the manga “Parasyte: Tamiya,” on which he serves as screenwriter and showrunner. It moves one of the original’s villains, Tamiya Ryoko, to the center of the story. “What I found particularly fascinating is the way Tamiya, who is a parasite rather than a human being, gradually tries to understand humanity,” he says.
The second is “Devotion,” a horror feature due next year. It grew out of the way people now put versions of their identities on display and hide behind the personas they build. Its Korean title, “Yeto,” is a Buddhist term for an imperfect world marked by suffering, the opposite of the realm of ultimate bliss.
For a filmmaker who thinks being human starts with the loss of paradise, it is a fitting next stop.
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