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[HanCinema's Film Review] "The Avian Kind"

Jeong-seok (played by Kim Jung-pal) is searching for his wife (played by Jung Han-bi), who in flashback frequently discusses her wish to undergo a mysterious surgery. Why does she want the surgery? Well, that's...a good question actually. There were about a dozen conversations in "The Avian Kind" I could count that discussed the surgery, but nothing that could be reasonably interpreted as an explanation for why all these women want to be radically transformed.

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Hm, yes, they are all women. Perhaps this is significant in some way. Maybe as some sort of intellectual abstraction for...married life? The stress of living in a wealthy family? The unhappiness inherent in being successful? Maybe it's an abortion metaphor? In spoken Korean the word for surgery is frequently used as a euphemism for abortion, so that was the first place my mind went. Although really, "The Avian Kind" is practically built for mental wandering. It's not like anything actually happens in this movie or anything like that.

"The Avian Kind" is what I can safely describe as a movie done in the introspective, literary style that predominates the kind of books you were forced to read in high school. So if you're the kind of person who really hated those books, no doubt you're going to hate this film too. The thing about writer / director Shin Yeon-shick is that he would never condescend to his audience by explaining what's actually going on. You have to figure it out for yourself.

While I can appreciate this kind of screenwriting to a limited extent, there really is something mildly enraging about a film that's explicitly about transformation on the literal level...never really discussing transformation on a literal level. "The Avian Kind" spends most of its runtime focused on Jeong-seok or his wife just wandering around a mountain indefinitely. Even the late appearance of guns demonstrates surprisingly little urgency.

This is the kind of movie where every so often I have to furrow my brow, thinking to myself, just what exactly am I even watching here? Do the characters in this film even have personalities? Or are they just abstract concepts that we're supposed to project ourselves into? Am I supposed to identify with Jeong-seok as a man who's given up the important things in life to solve a mystery with almost no clues? Am I supposed to admire his wife's desire to transcend humanity in some weird way?

"The Avian Kind" is the kind of film that begs more questions than answers. This might be potentially interesting except that these don't appear to be questions that anyone actually asked except as part of some weird intellectual thought experiment. I imagine there's an audience for this kind of film out there somewhere, but if so you should probably be reading about this movie in an academic journal or something. There's little in the way of even hypothetical value for a more mainstream moviegoer here.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Avian Kind" is directed by Shin Yeon-shick and features Kim Jung-pal, Kim Soy, Jung Han-bi and Kang Shin-hyo.

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