New Normal

Story: Hyeon-jeong (Choi Ji-woo) lives alone and finds out through the news that a girl was killed in her neighborhood. Then the doorbell rings. The smoke detectors in her apartment are supposed to be replaced, but there was no notification, so she is skeptical. Nevertheless, she lets the technician (Lee Mun-sik) into the apartment, who soon starts to behave extremely weirdly.
Hyeon-so (Lee Yoo-mi) goes on a blind date after getting an almost perfect "match" in her app. However, there is also a killer on the app. In the meantime, Hoon (Choi Min-ho) hears about the app from his friend who finally convinces him to believe in the supposed fate that lies behind blood types and zodiac signs, so when he finds a love letter with directions in it in a vending machine he goes on a scavenger hunt.
Gi-jin (Pyo Ji-hoon) is head over heels in love with his neighbor, who works as a flight attendant. He doesn't have the courage to confess his love to her, but keeps following her when she leaves the apartment, until one day he has the guts to do even more...
Yeon-jin (Ha Da-in) works in a 24-hour convenience store and has to deal with the most impossible customers. She curses her life and consoles herself by giving someone tips on an internet forum on how to make a corpse disappear. Until she starts to have doubts that the person posting is just joking around ...

Review: The news, that keep popping up at the beginning and are constantly running in the background later on in the movie as well, give us the impression that this is not just a simple horror thriller, but instead a movie which wants to addresses the problems of modern city life and tries to cast a critical eye on it. This criticism can sometimes take quite a cynical form, but it is this tone exactly that turns "New Normal" into a special experience. Murder and manslaughter, kidnappings, organ trafficking, evil lurks everywhere. The movie is divided into chapters, which are actually six episodes that could be watched more or less separately, but there are always overlaps and the general topic ultimately holds everything together. The events take place over four days, but the story eagerly jumps around between the days. Although it already becomes clear in the first episode that the director likes to play with our expectations, you eventually get the feeling that bad things are lurking around every corner and that Seoul is actually hell. It's easy to imagine that the news reports of terrifying atrocities, of which there are quite a few in Korea, were the hook for the script of this innovative horror thriller.

Despite the initial enthusiasm, however, disillusionment starts to set in after the first few episodes. It seems as if the movie follows the same pattern with each episode. Fortunately, it turns out that this is not always the case. The level of humor that shines through in individual episodes also varies slightly. In addition, the characters are quite different and sometimes they leave us in the dark about who is actually the villain here. Gi-jin, for example, is hopelessly in love with his neighbor, and what starts as "harmless" adoration turns into stalking, during which the boy comes up with more and more excuses to justify his increasingly radical actions to himself. Since every story has a little twist, you could imagine that he eventually turns into a murderer or becomes violent in other ways. The central characters are all a little twisted. Even the innocent-looking schoolboy in the second episode is called a sociopath by his classmates because he doesn't understand why you should selflessly help others. In "New Normal" you learn very quickly that the presumed victim may not be one at all.

Here, director Jeong Beom-shik shot his first movie after the Covid lockdowns, and it seems as if being locked up has caused serious psychological damage to his characters. At least it feels as if the news in Korea is just full of reports you simply cannot wrap your head around because they are so cruel and arbitrary. Director Jeong tells those typical headlines with a good dose of nihilism and cynicism, exactly the right amount that lets you cry out in horror "You can't be serious", but at the same time makes you facepalm and chuckle. We clearly understand the director's point of view and the lens through which he looks at everything when we see a neon light in the room of a protagonist depicting the words "Fuck the World" along with a raised middle finger. You never know what will happen next in "New World", but you can be sure that it's going to be tragic, cruel and, as mentioned before, somehow a little funny here and there too - if you choose not to cry about it. As a duo with his brother, Jeong Beom-shik has already released the rather classic, but technically and visually impressive horror movie "Epitaph", on his own, he last shot the found footage horror movie "Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum". So, he is not new to the genre.

Thankfully, this is a horror movie that gets by without unnecessary jump scares that would simply fall into the category of "cheap". Jeong doesn't have to stoop to that level anyway because his horror is more of the smoldering kind and derives from the characters and the world they create. As mentioned before, apparently everyone here has what it takes to become a murderer. Even in an extremely romantic episode about a scavenger hunt, at the end of which there should probably be true love, we feel tense because we have long since stopped believing that anything heartwarming or good could happen in the director's "New World". The horror works because it is taken right out of real life and it makes you feel like you should never drop your guard. This goes so far that you start to have a hard time feeling sorry for a few of the characters, because you can't understand how they can be so naïve and basically end up volunteering as victims. Maybe this might be too much of a gut punch for some viewers, but as mentioned before, there are also enough moments that manage to make you laugh, and the often cheerful soundtrack not only stands in stark contrast to what will inevitably happen, it also creates a nice self-ironic tone for the movie.

Since we have a few time jumps back and forth, there are also some interesting overlaps. Certain people who turn up again just create a tiny aha moment, others are a bit more important for the story. The conclusion is an episode about a young woman who has given up her dream of making music and who fantasizes about killing someone because she works in a shop where people constantly snap at her. Not only is the story the longest, but Ha Da-in also manages to give her character the most depth and inner vulnerability, despite her tough exterior. She seems both hard-nosed and naïve. It would have helped "New Normal" if there had been a few more characters with that level of sophistication. Nevertheless, you can only congratulate the director on an innovative horror movie that once again makes it clear that naivety and carelessness could end deadly for you. The pacing and wit with which the actually depressingly dark stories are told clearly make the movie stand out from other entries into the horror genre. Definitely worth a recommendation!

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