Written: Preview

Critics often write about the viewer’s experience of a film, where the actor enables him to “get inside a character”. But is this real empathy or is the relationship the audience has with fictional characters more akin to subjugation or sadistic manipulation? These and other issues are examined in this self-reflexive South Korean film conceived as a complex meditation on the identity of the character in a fictional story. Man A (Lee Jin-seok) wakes up to find he has an injury, he’s in a bath in a strange place, from where he is directed to another place against his will. He then encounters the alter ego of his creator, the actor who plays him, who enters the story as a parasite, and he meets other characters along the way whose own goals are also unrelated to the prescribed screenplay. The film was made in a small studio which, itself, becomes a set inside the film; it reflects upon all levels of the filmmaking process, from the script and actual shooting, to the given film style and the “eye” of the camera.

South Korean director Kim Byung-Woo uses intense cut-ups and surreal environments, to create a Kafkaesque metafilm about a man lost in the blur between fiction and reality. While protagonist A is trying to find his way through a brightly colored cinematic world, the director is portrayed on screen, searching for the missing script that contains the production’s end. At the same time, the writer has written herself into the plot, to warn A against the stalking actor portraying him. With clever acting and a thought-provoking script, the art of moviemaking is dissected to the very core. As a confused A asks his creator and writer: Are you writing me, or am I being written by you? Indeed.