Fantasia International Film Festival is known in part for its commitment to showcasing diverse work from all over the world, and this year’s roster is proving to be bursting with riches. From webcomic and anime adaptations to wholly new perspectives and mythologies, the filmmakers at work here are bringing their best and loudest voices. Korean media in particular has enjoyed immense popularity since the SQUID GAME and PARASITE phenomena, but it is also growing to be one of my personal favorite areas of media to date. There’s something to be said for both creating innovative and approachable content and not spoon-feeding the audience, even when they aren’t familiar with your culture, to form something that feels fresh for us all. Writer-director Park Syeyoung’s FIFTH THORACIC VERTEBRA, which just made its international premiere at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival, weaves heart and creature features into something wholly original and subtly heartbreaking. Exploring the full range of humanity’s strongest emotions in our most vulnerable settings and moments, VERTEBRA is told from the perspective and across the lifecycle of a mold growing on a mattress. As the mattress makes its way across South Korea, the mold grows, learning more about humanity?—and eating a few spines?—with every new stop.
Clocking in at just 62 minutes, FIFTH THORACIC VERTEBRA uses every moment to plant you firmly in its environment of strained relationships and carnivorous fungi. Park Syeyoung helms nearly everything, from sound design to cinematography, making this the true definition of bringing an artistic vision to life. With unique camerawork and color schemes as the backdrop for each new perspective, we are effectively dipped in and out of several different dreamlike moments of human vulnerability. From breakups, to quickies, to death, the mold learns, consumes, and grows around our most intimate moments. Like a voice lingering in the walls of an empty house, it absorbs the last impressions made on the mattress, from borderline violent bitterness to a poignant sense of longing.
The atmosphere of VERTEBRA lives in the liminal space between softly romantic and violent, as the creature develops along its lifecycle into something desperate to make sense of its complexities and the subtleties of the world around it. It’s a monster movie that gets to the heart of most classic monster-movie approaches, where the violence is both intentional and accidental, rooted in emotion and misunderstood. Syeyoung’s film asks us to remember the power of nature and our smallest moments; neither can be stopped from growing, and while it may be a painful process along the way, the result is almost always beautiful and full of love.
Don’t let the dreamlike cinematography and larger existential approach dissuade you completely from the idea of VERTEBRA as a monster movie, though. While it is certainly complex and unusual, it is also certifiably gross at times. Each scene of spine eating is marked by some truly stomach-churning sound effects and, when the monster begins to develop its own appendages, the rapidity of its movements is enough to unsettle you even as the creature itself is exploring the depth of love that can exist in death.
FIFTH THORACIC VERTEBRA is, in short, unlike anything you’ve seen before. A testament to the kind of creative successes that can come from providing a platform for diverse stories and approaches, and to the idea that monsters can just as easily remind us why we live as frighten us. You may not look at your mattress quite the same afterwards, but you will certainly be left in awe.
Tags: creature feature, Fantasia Film Festival 2022, Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, Film Festivals, Korean Film, Korean Horror, Park Syeyoung
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