Reviews

A university researcher visits a sandy beach to catch rare beetles. He has nowhere to stay, so some villagers show him to a hut where a poor woman lives. The hut is weirdly located on the bottom of a deep pit. She makes dinner for him, and hangs an umbrella over him so that sand will not fall into the food. But when he wakes up in the morning, he realizes that it will not be easy to leave.

What follows is a long (2h 27 min) story of suffering, boredom, and horror, as the man fights to survive and to use his scientific knowledge to escape. There is not much to eat and drink in this monochrome desert. It really is a post-apocalyptic world in miniature, where the laws and rules of society have broken down, and the two inhabitants are fully exposed to the whims of the other.

The hut does not contain many objects either. Both the man and the watcher will soon learn to know most of them closely. One can easily say that this is a movie where the environment is a character. Various close up shots of grains of sand, or of sand crashing down with a threatening sound, accompanied by creepy horror movie music, makes it a capricious and dangerous character.

So it is then a triangle drama between the sand, the man and the woman. The latter two are not on good terms either, and don't talk a lot. It feels very uncertain what will happen; if they will escape, if they will kill each other, or if the sand will fall down and bury them alive.

While the movie is obviously a philosophical and technical masterpiece, it's a bit painful to see so much misery and suffering. I didn't fully like the man, though he has an active personality that makes him a good protagonist. I felt more sympathy towards the woman, and her unusual view on life.

A boy (Yuu) who becomes a hentai and commits sins in order to have something to confess to his father. A violent girl (Youko) who hates men but falls in love with Yuu when he is dressed as a woman, ending up believing she is a lesbian. And another girl (Koike) with an even more traumatic past who stalks them with depraved intentions.

Surrounded by a large cast of colourful and occasionally sympathetic side characters, these abused, angsty, and sexually frustrated teenagers are forced on an odyssey through murky realms of pornography, religion, and mental illness.

As a comedy, it is funny. As a tragedy, it joins up with A Clockwork Orange. There are outbreaks of ultra violence, but also moments of comradery.

Always over the top. Always exaggerated. In an impressionistic manner it depicts the pain of never being able to reach the object of love. Or the insanity of chasing illusions instead of seeing the human being in front of one's eyes.

On a deserted beach, littered with garbage, Youko screams a bible verse about love. She knows what she craves, but is too emotionally damaged to recognize it when she sees it.

Mitsushima Hikari, as Youko, thus made the strongest impression with her forceful acting. Yuu is also a great main character with a long story arc and many transformations. Never giving up, he fights to the teeth in every scene.

Unfortunately, the side characters, like Yuu's father and Youko's step mother, did not get satisfying resolutions to their somewhat interesting character arcs, but became puppets of the plot. Especially Koike was a disappointment since she was set up as a main character with her own backstory and internal monologue, but ended up with a lack of humanization.

Love Exposure by Sion Sono is a glorious epic. Raw an uncompromising. What is lacks in realism and budget, it compensates with force and imagination.

Dr. Lee Si Joon is an eccentric psychiatrist who likes to construct role-play scenarios for his patients. When he encounters the fiery idol Han Woo Joo, he is reluctant to treat her, and instead hires her as an assistant. It turns out that her underlying condition is as dangerous as he feared.

At first it was unclear what the genre would be, with a mix of comedy and some foreshadowing that it might develop into a thriller. It turned out a large part of the show was made up of episodical side-stories in the style of Dr. House and other hospital shows. A new patient makes a dramatic arrival, the team of junior doctors does some detective work on the patient's family and finds the hidden cause of the problem, Miss Han does some role-playing, Dr. Lee says something wise, and the patient is cured.

The side-stories are varied and somewhat entertaining, but compared to Dr. House and other shows, the cases are too easy to solve. There are also side-stories about the doctors themselves, and even a couple of stale, marriage-of-convenience love stories that are as romantic as if you'd place two mannequins together. The side-stories did not touch me, did not increase my knowledge, and was not a reason to watch the series. They bored me a lot, and I'd like an abridged version. I also think it would have been good to reduce the team to a smaller group of more likeable characters, like in the first season of Dr. House.

Instead, the advantage lies in being a series with a definite end, and a main story. It has an interesting premise, and I would have liked more focus on the main plot, and it could have been made more dark and thrilling. I actually got the impression that it is inpired by the American horror movie The Sixth Senth.

The incidents caused by Miss Han are exciting, but cleaned up too quickly. Instead, most of the conflict is created by the other doctors. Still it is a worthwhile main story, that takes a direction that is a bit unusual. Honestly, if someone would cut out the side-stories and condence it to the main story, I would give the series a higher score.

It is not mentioned, but the series illustrates how anxiety can get increased by technology, e.g. If someone forgets their phone and another person tries to call him. It was also odd that everyone refused to tell her the diagnosis even after she had been treated for a long time. I have the impression that patients usually get to know their diagnosis.

Dr. Lee was played well, but did not outplay Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. As a calm, reliable psychiatrist, he could have been played by any good male actor. I'm not complaining, but the character could have been made more interesting. The best thing was the fear in his eyes when he realized the true diagnosis and tried to drive away. It was also nice of him to run a podcast as a hobby.

The actress Jung So Min, who played Miss Han, on the other hand, is the only reason I watched the series to begin with. She is a star, with an iconic voice and style, and it would not have been the same with any other actress. Since she was able to play the villain protagonist Mu-deok in Alchemy of Souls, it is no surprise that she is able to play another personality disorder in Soul Mechanic. Not only does she play out the symptoms well, but she does it with great humanity and love. Miss Han is not only a patient, but a protagonist in the story, fighting hard against her disorder, to keep her job, and for the people that she loves. It is one of the most magnificent interpretations of a mental patient that I have seen.

There are a few American movies about the same personality disorder, but I have only seen one of them. I think the story of Han Woo Joo can be of particular interest and encouragement to people with the same diagnosis.