'I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK' - Odd Romantic Comedy from South Korea.

This is an odd film – there's no real denying it, so we may as well just get that out of the way. It can best be summed up as a romantic comedy, set in a mental institution, about a young woman who believes she is a cyborg and a young man who believes he can steal souls. It is a light-hearted, and rather surreal, comedy directed by Park Chan-wook, a well regarded Korean director better known for much darker, and often much more violent, films.

Young-goon, a young woman who works in a factory making radios, believes that she is, in fact, a cyborg. After a misguided attempt to 'recharge' herself is taken as an act of attempted suicide, she find herself committed to a mental institution for her own safety. Young-goon's mother was aware of her daughter's problems, but was largely ambivalent to them – encouraging her to keep them a secret. And, her grandmother, the person that Young-goon was closest too, suffered from delusions of her own, and was similarly committed years earlier.

There, among a cast of similarly eccentric patients, she meets Il-soon – a young man institutionalised for anti-social behaviour who believes that he has the power to steal aspects of another person's identity (or, their souls), and who believes that he is at constant risk of shrinking away into nothing. Young-goon's stay in the institution is complicated by her belief in her own cyborg nature, though. She refuses to eat – believing that she can recharge herself in other ways. She starts out largely ignoring the other, human, patients in order to try to communicate with electrical appliances. And, she believes that it is her mission to rescue her grandmother from the 'white-coats' that took her. Il-soon, meanwhile, spends his time stealing aspects of other patients personalities, and giving them back later, for his own amusement. This is something which makes him unpopular with the other patients, despite their willingness to play along with the delusion.

Il-soon finds himself drawn to Young-goon, though – moved by sympathy to try to help her. And, the two unlikely young lover's begin to become close.

It's an odd film – I can't really stress that enough.

And, yes, it is a comedy – and it is, quite often, genuinely funny. Along with the more light-hearted and surreal humour drawn from the interaction of the patients are elements of the darker humour that Park Chan-wook is better known for. Scenes in which Young-soon believes herself to be fully charged, which triggers hallucinations of her violent rampage through the institution, have no real business being as hilarious as they are.

It also manages to be a surprisingly touching film. While the various eccentricities of the patients (Young-goon and Il-soon in particular, of course, though they are far from along) are played for laughs, the humour is presented in a way that you never feel that it is the patients themselves that are being laughed at. The occasionally tragic circumstances that brought each of the patients to this point in their lives are not shied away from, either – though, the film does not feel the need to dwell to much on it.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK has earned positive reviews overall, since its initial release (and, this is another one, in case that wasn't clear), but proved to be something of a disappointment at the Korean box office – it was the number one film at its opening weekend, but ticket sales dropped off dramatically by the second, and it was ultimately pulled from most screens. This can be attributed to the drastic difference when compared to the director's other work, though. The film itself is a highly entertaining, if odd (seriously) and very surreal, romantic comedy.