A disaster caused by man's negligence, personal protective gears, humans clamouring and climbing over each other for a commodity that would otherwise be taken for granted and a dangerous outdoors. Sounds familiar? Welcome to Chung Jae-hoon's powerful “Fall Out”. The short made its debut at the 24th Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, where it played in the Korean Fantastic Shorts segment.
“Fall Out” is screening at Fantasia International Film Festival
In an apocalyptic future, a nuclear disaster has rendered New Town uninhabitable, yet those that survive try to brave through the excessive heat, frequent earthquakes and a toxic outdoors that causes bloody skin rashes all over the body. With no electricity and water, the only respite is ice, which is rationed heavily and has people fighting over it to obtain. In an apartment building in New Town live Hyo-jin (Lee Ji-won), her mother Jong-bok (Song Ah-young) and little brother Hyo-sung (Baek In-sung), who is suffering from the worst rashes of the three and desperately needs ice. On an ice collecting expedition outdoors one day, Hyo-jin spies the apartment manager sneaking a large crateful of the frozen, liquid gold up to his apartment and their desperation to get their hands on some of it is about to prove disastrous for all parties involved.
It truly is a dog-eat-dog world in Chung Jae-hoon's vision. Not only does the family of three have the air outdoors and other survivors to fear, sometimes it even is themselves that they need to be wary of. The smile on the mother's face as she wins a round of Rock, Paper, Scissors with her daughter to decide who will go outside to get the week's ice says it all really. While the story isn't particularly new or the ideas particularly fresh, Chung infuses a frantic energy to the narrative, thanks to a sharp edit, done by himself, that wastes no second of its 20 minutes runtime, culminating in a very memorable final scene.
While Chung essentially treats it as a survival thriller, the few moments of dry humour work surprisingly well too. Furthering the thriller element is Lee Hae-min's cinematography, which follows the tropes audiences would be familiar with in Korean thrillers. The setting of the story gives an opportunity to drench the picture with a newspaper-filtered yellow haze that accentuates the overall look. The music, composed by Ha Tae-min, also has a familiar but effective feel to it. The actors' performances are satisfactory as well, with Lee Ji-won, who was recently seen in “Hitman: Agent Jun” coming out trumps.
“Fall Out” may not have the most original of stories, its similarities with today's COVID-19 world also blatantly apparent, but Chung Jae-hoon's execution of it definitely is most commendable. The 26-year-old certainly seems like a man quite able to handle the genre and it would be interesting to see how he can handle a bigger budget and a grander scale. Maybe a feature length expansion of this very story is on the cards?
