Korean cinema continues to prove its global dominance not just through streaming platforms, but through visionary films that challenge and expand the very language of cinema. With The Fin, director Park Syeyoung delivers a haunting work, an unsettling look at control and survival in the aftermath of ideology.

Set in a post-unification, ecologically devastated Korea, The Fin presents a society where mutated beings known as Omegas are hunted and enslaved for cheap labour. At the film’s centre are Mia (Yeon Yeji), an Omega in hiding who works at a decrepit indoor fishing store, and Sujin (Kim Pureum), a newly recruited government worker whose increasing curiosity unearths a deeper, repressed awareness of the state’s grotesque machinery. Their uneasy entanglement becomes a reflection on power and resistance in a world where memory is fragile and freedom is an illusion.

Park’s direction is uncompromising. Shot in ghostly colours and rich, grainy textures, The Fin avoids traditional dystopian gloss for a murky, lived-in aesthetic that feels tactile and otherworldly. The cinematography, handled by Park himself, captures the decay of industrial interiors and forgotten fishing stores quite well. Cameras tremble and hesitate, reflecting the psychological unease of the characters. Natural light is often replaced with dim fluorescents or fragmented shafts that cut across faces like old wounds. Visual “imperfections” are treated not as technical flaws but as part of the film’s organic, textural language.

The editing by Park alongside Clémentine Decremps, Jiyoon Han, and Benjamin Mirguet, deserves special mention. Breaking away from traditional narrative arcs, the film flows in rhythms closer to memory than chronology. Jump cuts fracture space and time; sound frequently bleeds from one scene into the next, collapsing reality. The result is an unsettling collage of uncertainty.

Kim Pureum gives a strong performance as Sujin, slowly shifting from blind loyalty to a more emotional and vulnerable state that feels real. Yeon Yeji is as good a character as can be. But it’s Goh-Woo, who plays the messenger Omega, that leaves the impression. Though his character is defined by concealment and trauma, Goh portrays Omega with a great intensity that dominates every scene he appears in. There’s a well of pain beneath his eyes, but also a flicker of unspoken defiance that gradually undermines Sujin’s ideological certainty.

Every space in The Fin sounds like it’s slowly dying, as though the world is rotting from the inside out. The fishing store, a central metaphor in the film, is part arcade, part aquarium, part tomb. Once intended as an escape for overworked urbanites, it is now a fading monument to lost leisure, overrun with fish and fluorescent decay. It’s in these collapsing artificial oceans that The Fin finds its most potent imagery.

The Fin starts like a typical genre film, but soon moves beyond that. What matters isn’t the plot or how the story ends, but the mood, the feeling, and the emotions it leaves behind. It feels like Park draws inspiration from filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, not just in their filmmaking style, but in their search for something unclear and ambiguous. Ultimately, The Fin feels more like a goodbye than a story. It reflects on what we’ve lost in the rush for progress: our connections, traditions, memories, and nature, and asks what new things might come from the cracks we try to hide.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image © Park Syeyoung

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