November 28, 2023

It is no secret that Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is an impeccable piece of cinema. No longer most effective did it scoop the highest image Oscar in 2019, it catapulted audience over the 1-inch subtitle barrier right into a treasure trove of South Korean motion pictures.

On that very same sparkling pile sits some other very good South Korean flick, 2020’s The Name. Launched on Netflix, The Name stocks the similar Oscar-nominated editor as Parasite: Yang Jin-mo. When you like your storytelling environment friendly, distinctive and wrought with suspense, The Name will generously supply.

Jeon Jong-seo as Oh Young-sook inside her room, holding a phone. She's wearing a dirty frock

Oh Younger-sook (Jeon Jong-seo) is a power to be reckoned with.


Netflix

The Name is ready in rural Korea, the place 28-year-old Kim Search engine optimisation-yeon makes the shuttle house to seek advice from her estranged, unwell mom. Crucially, she loses her telephone at the teach adventure over. This deadly error sees her pressured to make use of a cordless telephone. After one fateful telephone name, a real nightmare unfurls.

Search engine optimisation-yeon interacts with some other 28-year-old girl — Oh Younger-sook — who cries for assist from her personal “loopy” mom. The trailer-advertised disclose: Each girls are in the similar area, however from other instances. One is in 2019, the opposite in 1999. Cue superior ’90s Korean grunge tune.

With this unusual connection, Search engine optimisation-yeon within the provide timeline is enticed to tinker with the unlucky occasions in her previous. The one catch is that this will depend on her friendship with the opposite girl at the line, whose cases may well be way more hellish than her personal.

The reality those girls have interaction with out assembly head to head finds the profound talent of actresses Park Shin-hye and Jeon Jong-seo. They embark on a cat-and-mouse tug of warfare, tiptoeing throughout a minefield of unknowns and possible threats. The strain is unrelenting.

The ensemble is rounded out by way of the ladies’s moms, performed by way of the similarly atypical Kim Sung-ryung and Lee El. Lee El specifically produces the type of unhinged guardian efficiency that haunted children like Carrie, Coraline and Norman Bates.

Each facet of the filmmaking procedure has obviously been siphoned via a mild sieve. The eye to element is immaculate. In addition to editor Yang Jin-mo, the filmmaking group contains Avengers: The Age of Ultron and The Nice Gatsby colorist Vanessa Taylor. You can realize a red hue sheathing the scenes with Search engine optimisation-yeon within the provide timeline, representing her disappointment and depression. Up to now, Younger-sook’s scenes glint with pink, refracting anger, threat and violence.

The tension you are feeling as the sport performs out is testomony to how deeply The Name attracts you in. Sure, it items a high-concept time journey mind-melder, however it is all propped up by way of the pillars of the mother-daughter relationships. Oh, and there is a lesson in there someplace about the cost of converting your destiny, however fortuitously this is not thrown with a splat for your face.

Like a Bong Joon-ho movie, right here director and author Lee Chung-hyun drops a stunning halfway twist that adjustments the whole lot you recognize concerning the taking part in box. All of it wraps up in an emotionally gratifying finishing earlier than squeezing out one closing heart-clunking wonder.

The Name is verdant, creative, refined storytelling that leaves you humming for the type of top-notch motion pictures that do not steadily to find their approach onto Netflix. Dislodge it from the again of Netflix’s streaming cabinets ASAP.

https://www.cnet.com/tradition/leisure/more-people-need-to-watch-this-south-korean-time-travel-gem-on-netflix/