Rating: 2.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2022 | 37/52 | Kaiju
A sort of Korean-speaking child surveys the playground to find a Princess Peach doll she’s lost. Her mother, also sort of speaking Korean, tells her they’ll keep looking tomorrow. The girl spots the doll. But then, off in the distance, she sees the faint outline of a large moving creature against the night sky. The wind picks up as the creature approaches.
25 Years Later In New York City, Gloria arrives at the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Tim. She gives Tim an excuse about where she was all last night and why she’s strolling in so late. Tim tries not to be angry and tries not to start a fight, but he knows she’s hungover again, and he’s growing tired of it. He’s packed her things to kick her out—he’s going out and expects her to be gone when he gets back. Once Tim leaves, a group of Gloria’s friends move up to the apartment to continue the party, but Gloria is heartbroken.
Cut to Mainhead, New Hampshire, where Gloria gets out of a taxi, grabs a key from under the mat, and goes into her childhood home, which her parents usually rent out. With no bed, she goes out to buy an air mattress. Walking the street, her childhood friend Oscar spots her and asks if she wants to hang out at his bar. He notices that she has a nervous tic where she scratches the middle of her head. As she drinks, she gets more flirtatious and blunt, leading Oscar’s friend, Joel, to make a pass at her, which sends Oscar into a rage. Back home, she dreams of being a child and seeing something in a lightning storm.
When Gloria awakens, her sister tells her that a giant monster-like creature has attacked Seoul. Gloria sees footage of the monster online. After drinking with Oscar that night, she goes to the playground to think and sleeps all night. While she slept, the beast appeared again at 8:05, the same time as it did yesterday and the same time as it did 25 years ago. But this time, it just stood around and made weird hand gestures, scratching the middle of its head. By watching its other gestures, Gloria figures out that she somehow causes it to manifest when she walks through the playground.
The film follows Gloria as she tries to understand what is happening and what she can do to stop it.
The monster, while an on-the-nose metaphor for addiction, works well enough. The ones addiction hurts the worst are those we cannot see. In our lowest moments, we may not care who we hurt because the addiction is the surface problem for something more profound—some loss or some self-destructive concept of self.
The biggest mistake the film makes is trying to dot every I. The film falls into a tired routine that should be over 20-30 minutes before the end. Also, the tonal disconnect between the kaiju stuff and the dramedy about a woman getting her life together makes it difficult to stomach the destruction in South Korea because we feel like hundreds of people are dying due to a character’s destructive tendencies.
Also, hire people who speak Korean if you plan to include Korean-speaking people in your film. I know the 2010s were still a bit of a representation wasteland, but the lack of care here is problematic, to say the least.
I appreciate the film’s attempt to blend the fluffiness of Kaiju with serious subject matter, but the result leaves much to be desired. Its representation of the lives of people with an addiction and the people around them is sharp, but the metaphors it uses don’t perform the roles the filmmakers think they do.
I, too, know the pains of an air mattress that doesn’t stay inflated.
** SPOILER TALK ** Jason Sudeikis gives a troubling and accurate portrayal of a particular brand of addiction—one that stems from a sense of inadequacy or unreciprocated feelings. It’s the core wound of many nice guys, incels, and other toxic men. The sense of entitlement that culture breeds in men says that if they make the right moves or say the right things, the world will reward them. But what they want isn’t reciprocity — it’s control. Because when they don’t get what they want, they act out violently, uncaring of who they hurt in the process.
We get some of this with Tim, whose codependency is all too familiar. The behavior of the person with an addiction becomes a slight against the codependent, who wishes to heal or fix the person with an addiction but can’t. The person with an addiction must heal themselves. So, the codependent takes on controlling behavior, wanting regular check-ins or some information that can give them a sense of peace or security. It may be a less nefarious form of control, but control is still the name of the game.
It’s telling that the film has more to say about its male secondary characters than about its female lead.