The 1970s were a particularly dark period for the Korean film industry. Shortly after South Korean filmmakers began to gain international recognition in the decade prior, a period of intense censorship followed, which hit an authoritarian peak in the seventies – at the time, many speculated there was no country in the world whose government interfered in artists’ creative efforts to that extent. It is, in short, a particularly juicy period to place an archetypal behind-the-scenes comedy, and it helps give Kim Jee-woon’s ode to the joys and anxieties of filmmaking an edge when placed next to similar films.  

Admittedly, that cultural specificity only goes so far, and the filmmaker – returning to the comedy of his earliest films after international successes in the horror genre – does rely on various tropes in fleshing out his ensemble of characters, which make this feel more familiar than it should on paper. The central tension is still driven from whether the ambitious director Kim Yeol (Song Kang-ho) can complete unauthorised reshoots on his oddball horror without the censorship department clocking on, but to ensure this doesn’t become too inside baseball for a general audience not in the know about the history of the Korean film industry, this is surrounded by an array of broad, wacky set pieces. As a result, Cobweb satisfies as a comedy, but doesn’t feel particularly indistinguishable from other movies about making movies, despite a richer, more unique cultural milieu. 

Introducing the film at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival, where Cobweb had its UK premiere, director Kim expressed some solidarity with his protagonist’s quixotic quest – after all, there are very few directors who wouldn’t relate to wanting an extra couple of days of shooting, the only thing they believe stands in-between them and a masterpiece. The character Kim is known in the film industry as a workmanlike director of potboilers, a reliable genre filmmaker who never lived up to the potential of his debut, but after rewriting his movie, believes he’s finally got a masterpiece on his hands. 

Shooting extremely quickly while the studio head is meeting investors in Japan – and telling the censorship board he’s deliberately making an “anti-communist” movie so there’ll be no interventions from them – Kim reassembles his team, but the pieces don’t fall neatly back into place. Everything from unwelcome guests to disappearing cast members derail the already time-limited shoot, and viewed out of context throughout, it isn’t immediately clear that his movie (designed as a very deliberate pastiche of the era’s social dramas by Jee-woon, with more than a few overt nods to the most celebrated of them all, The Housemaid) is going to live up to his goals.  

Naturally, the movie climaxes with the newly reshot final act of the film-within-in-a-film – or, in this case, theCobweb-within-a-Cobweb. By this point, we’re more than two hours into the action, and it still isn’t quite clear what the narrative of the movie they’re making is beyond its broad narrative beats, with the closing moments offering context to scenes we saw getting shot at random but remaining vague about the overarching story they fit into. It’s an infectiously enjoyable movie but falls into the trap of several behind-the-scenes comedies – in particular, 1995’s Steve Buscemi vehicle Living in Oblivion – by not really giving us a feel for the movie beyond whichever scene we’re allowed to see getting shot. It’s a movie about the creation of art which keeps the audience removed from the complete picture; whether Cobweb (the film-within-a-film) is a masterpiece or a joke is to be judged entirely by its ending, with very few glimpses of the action leading up to that. 

I expect that this won’t matter to most viewers, as Jee-woon’s film still works as a madcap farce, with the protagonist racing to keep various plates spinning against the clock. It’s a distinctively Korean story, but its farcical comedic sensibility means it translates surprisingly well to British audiences thanks to its sitcom-style shenanigans; there are countless examples of TV episodes in which the highly-strung protagonists must race against time to achieve the impossible, and it’s no slight against Cobweb to say that, at its best, it resembles them. Ultimately, it was this familiarity that won me over – it’s to the detriment of a far richer story from Korea’s recent past, and what could have been a more incisive tale about filmmaking during this era, but whilst watching, I confess I was laughing too much to care. 

Rating:

Written by Alistair Ryder

The film was screened at this year’s Busan International Film Festival and London Film Festival

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