Revolver Lily

There is a deep sadness to the idea of being incredibly good at something, perhaps even one of the best in the world, but for that talent to be associated only with death and sadness. At the beginning of Revolver Lily, Yuri Ozone (Haruka Ayase) has retired from her career as a famed assassin. She has settled into a life where she keeps the company of rich men happy to pay for having drinks with a beautiful woman. She lives with two women she seems very close to, one like a daughter, the other like a partner (later she will say that they are "pledged to death" to each other). The year is 1924 (a year after the devastating Great Kantō Earthquake, the political context, which plays an important role in Isao Yukisada’s film, is Japan’s military ambition as bloodthirsty leaders of its army and navy struggle for the resources to build up for future wars of conquest. Yuri is forced back into the life she has left behind when a boy (Jinsei Hamura), the last survivor of a brutal attack on his family (by, as we later find out, army men in civilian clothes), seeks out her help. She reads about the murder of the family in the newspaper and finds the name of someone she knows, and knows not to be a murderer, associated with the crime, and goes to investigate. Shinta comes across her accidentally, but she happens to be the person he was told to find for help. He is carrying vital documents, she is deeply reluctant, but can’t help but use her abilities to save him, again and again, as he gets himself into increasingly desperate situations, from those who seek to harm him. As she returns to her old life, memories of her past trauma – the loss of her own family, her own child – haunt her, explaining why she approaches this responsibility with stoicism and the sadness that comes with having to return to something she has left behind for a reason. Eventually, when she realises how personally connected she is to Shinta’s family, her full frustration at being unable to live in peace and away from the violence comes out. It is thanks to Ayase’s outstanding performance that her complex emotions shine through in spite of Yuri’s toughness and strength. It becomes apparent immediately how good Yuri is at causing harm. Her abilities outweigh her opponents even when they are armed with weapons superior to hers, her movements so precise and fast that in the blink of an eye, she leaves only devastation behind. The fight scenes are beautifully choreographed, especially when she is fighting a worthy opponent who challenges her. It’s difficult not to be in awe.

The true accomplishment of the film is the inherent dissonance at its heart: Revolver Lily is a film opposing militarisation and warmongering, but to achieve these goals, its main character has to resort to – practised, precise, devastating – violence. The film pits the individual but reluctant heroism of Yuri against both the individual ambitions of powerful men and the institutional violence of a military apparatus that is seeking future glory, with the actual history of Japan throughout the 1930s and 1940s looming over the narrative as the known outcome that nothing Yuri accomplishes here can ultimately prevent, only delay.

Visually, Revolver Lily is stunning. The sets and costuming are beautiful. The film captures a period of transition in Japan, expressed through the presence of Western dress alongside traditional clothing. It juxtaposes the modern army – uniformed, armed with rifles and guns, not swords – against older styles of one-on-one battle. Nothing expresses the confusion and chaos of this period in-between better than a small moment between Yuri’s attorney and adviser Iwami (Hiroki Hasegawa), who seeks the help of an old friend who is working on his Cubist painting in the middle of his traditional living room. This is a society undergoing radical change, a moment of flux, and Yuri alongside her friends and companions is attempting to steer it towards a less violent outcome – ultimately a doomed effort, but Revolver Lily makes the attempt look spectacular. 

2023, directed by Isao Yukisada, starring Haruka Ayase, Hiroki Hasegawa, Jinsei Hamura, Kavka Shisodo.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Dry Cleaning - The Cute Things (on Secret Love)

 

I'm willing
To change roles
For you

Beolsae (House of Hummingbird)

In Kim Bo-ra’s House of Hummingbird, teenager Eun-hee (Park Ji-huk, giving a stunning performance) goes unrecognised and isolated in most of the spheres she operates in. As the youngest daughter in her family, her parents pay avid attention to the success and failure of her older brother, but mostly ignore her. This brother, pressured to achieve academic success, lets out his frustrations violently at his younger sister, and is only cautioned for it once when he does it in a way that shows disrespect to his father. At school, she is ostracised – her family isn’t rich, and her talents don’t lend themselves to success in a conventional learning environment. Her blossoming relationship to a boyfriend seems tender and close, but he doesn’t seem to take it as seriously as she does. Her relationship with her best friend becomes strained over time when Eun-hee’s problems become so overwhelming that she stops being able to support or even see her friend’s problems. 
It’s hard to discover your own identity in an environment so unsupportive, where you might as well be a ghost haunting the halls. Without any clear pathways into the future or a sense of who she might want to be, and nobody believing there is anything she could do at all, Eun-hee seems stuck, and in a film where she is in every scene, this lack of genuine connection to others or to herself plays into the sense of loneliness.

There is a shift when a new Chinese teacher begins working at Eun-hee’s cram school. Young-ji (Kim Sae-byeok) takes an interest in Eun-hee, inviting her to stay and have tea with her, and share what she is actually passionate about. She gives Eun-hee a sense that there are ways to exist in the world that she might not have previously considered, ways that are more unconventional than were thinkable to her within the confines of her family. Young-ji has taken a break from University to teach at the cram school, and she seems invested in giving herself time to grow and change. She functions like a window into a world that was previously closed to Eun-hee, a world that might allow her to use her talent for drawing, a world that might actually see her, where she does not have to exist in the background anymore. At the same time, the need for surgery removes Eun-hee from her family and into a hospital environment, where the other patients dote on her – an experience so foreign and new to her that she seems to prefer staying at the hospital to going home to her parents. A girl named Yuri (Hye-in Seol) shows interest in her and it’s the first time someone appears to do so with genuine care and effort. 

Set in 1994, the film works within a historic framework of notable events that are mostly mediated through a television screen. Korea’s progress through the FIFA World Cup, the death of North Korea’s leader Kim Il-sung, the tragic and devastating collapse of the Seongsu Bridge in October that will have repercussions for Eun-hee all happen in the background of scenes until the last one fully draws her attention, the way that events that might have a personal impact, not a theoretical one, do. The disaster robs Eun-hee of who may just be the most important person in her life so far, and yet it can’t take from her the belief that there is a future for her out there that is waiting, in spite of all the obstacles ahead of her. 

2018, directed by Kim Bo-ra, starring Park Ji-hu, Kim Sae-byeok, Jeong In-gi, Son Sang-yeon, Lee Seung-yun, Park Soo-Yeon.

Reading List: January.

Fiction: 

 

Nat Cassidy: When the Wolf Comes Home. 

Sarah Gailey: Just Like Home. 

R.O. Kwon: Exhibit. 

R.O. Kwon: Incendiaries. 

Kevin Chen: Ghost Town. 

Han Kang: The Vegetarian. 

Han Kang: Human Acts. 

Hang Kang: We Do Not Part. 

Clarissa Goenawan: The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida. 

Elizabeth Jolley: The Well.

 

Films: 

 

Daedosiui sarangbeob (2024, Eon-hee Lee). 

Affeksjonsverdi (2025, Joachim Trier). 

Happyend (2024, Neo Sora). 

Chan hang rawang rao (2025, Jirassaya Wongsutin). 

Yunhui-ege (2019, Dae Hyung Lim). 

Yeon-ae-dam (2016, Hyun-ju Lee).  

Beolsae (2018, Kim Bo-ra).

Billie & Emma (2018, Samantha Lee).
Lü ye (2023, Shuai Han).

Peter Hujar's Day (2025, Ira Sachs).

 

Shows: 

 

Jabaekui Daega, Season One. 

Shards of Her, Season One. 

random mixtape - when you fall, you will fall the hardest.

yellow fang | i'm a feeder. lois | diopter. greentea peng | tardis (hardest). cyndi seui | unreal. blood cultures | emptylands. health | ordinary loss. shlohmo | eggtooth. dry cleaning | evil evil idiot. sleater-kinney | ironclad. the spells | the night has eyes. 

Yunhui-ege (Moonlit Winter)

The snow in the Hokkaido town of Otaru builds up in dunes, covering sidewalks and cars. One of the main character’s aunt describes what it means to live with it through winter: you shovel it, it builds up again, you shovel it again. Life is the constant process of excavating a pathway, again and again, until winter passes. It’s a powerful symbol in Dae Hyung Lim’s film about buried feelings, about two lives derailed early and tragically by societal pressure. 
Yoon-he (Kim Hee-ae) lives in Korea with her teenage daughter Sae-bom (Kim So-hye). She is recently divorced from her husband and her daughter is about to graduate high school and attend university in Seoul, so this is a turning point in her life, an expected emptiness that may hold the potential for change. Jun (Yûko Nakamura) has been living in Japan since her own parents divorced and is sharing her life with her aunt. They seem to have built a comfortable routine around her work as a veterinarian and the running of a cosy cafe in town. Both women have built a life away from each other but they are also living in an arrested state of suspense, as if their lives since their forced separation has evolved in ways that they didn’t get to choose. Jun writes a letter, it reaches Yoon-he’s daughter, who decides to take her mother for a holiday in Otaru to learn more about her. 

Moonlit Winter could have been a film about rekindled feelings, with flashbacks of what Jun and Yoon-he shared in the past: instead the profoundness of their connection is made clear in how it has left them adrift in their present, clear in Yoon-he’s loneliness and unhappiness, her isolation and inability to communicate her feelings to her daughter, who is desperate to know her, and in Jun’s unwillingness to consider a new relationship (reacting with almost violent frustration at the suggestion of marriage, turning down a potential suitor by insisting that she too keep her private feelings to herself, in case she is met with same societal condemnation she once was) with someone else after all these years. It’s more about how their interrupted love has affected their personal relationships with other people in the present, especially between Yoon-hee and her daughter, who perceives her mother’s loneliness and unhappiness but doesn’t know why they are so profound. Sae-bom, an aspiring photographer, is trying to get to know her mother through this trip into the past, and there is a beautiful symmetry to the idea that what originally caused her to be so remote, distant, unreachable could now be the reason for a new intimacy and closeness found in having a better understanding of one another. 

The actual reunion, bittersweet and tender, happens late in the film, and feels like a catalyst, like a circle closing so that the characters can finally live lives closer to what they were meant to have, without the outside pressure and the damage of non-acceptance. It’s not the ending you might expect from a film about two past lovers reconnecting but it resonates deeply regardless. 

2019, directed by Dae Hyung Lim, starring Kim Hee-ae, Yûko Nakamura, Kim So-hye, Sung Yoo-bin, Hana Kino.

Happyend

Neo Sora’s Happyend, about a friendship between a group of high schoolers and more intimately about two boys who have known each other for years but are now threatening to grow apart, is one of the most compelling portraits of individuals living through the ascent of fascism. It is set in what feels like a very near future: everything except some minor advancements in (surveillance) technology looks the same as it does now. Connected by a passion for music, especially EDM, these teenagers hunt for the exhilarating experience of sound wherever they can find it, even if it lands them right in the middle of a police raid on an underground concert. Their passion is palpable, the sheer joy of sharing these moments, but the overbearing forces of state control intrude on it already before the true horrors have even begun. Worse, the signs of what will ultimately divide them is already visible in how their stakes differ: Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) is Japanese, and the police pass over him after a quick face scan, but Kou (Yukito Hidaka) is only a resident, even though his family has lived in Japan for four generations, and falls under additional, terrorising scrutiny that will follow his throughout the film. 
It begins with a prank. The film establishes the stakes, the context, through videos of a Japanese Prime Minister thirsting to use the threat of a predicted big earthquake as a thin excuse to establish a totalitarian state, raising fears about migrants to justify an escalating surveillance regime, utilising fear for his political aim of gaining more power. These little snippets are like background noise: they happen on ever-present screens, but the reality for these teenagers is still the small world of their high school, where they get to follow their passion for music in the music lab, where the visible regime of control isn’t the greater political apparatus, but the small-minded little dictator of a principal who parks his ridiculous yellow sports car for all to see. The morning after the aborted concert, Yuto dares Kou to topple the car. The result looks like a piece of sculptural art, eagerly filmed by the students. It is a prank, but in the context of the world these kids now live in, the principal, furious, misconstrues it as an act of terrorism that justifies his institution of a surveillance system in the school that automatically deducts points for any infringement. Something as small as not wearing the correct uniform – one of their friends likes wearing a skirt instead of trousers – results in demerits, creating an atmosphere of fear that no longer allows for expression of individuality. 

While the surrounding world becomes increasingly erratic, dominated by pro- and anti-government protests that are met with violence from the security forces, the smaller world of the high school begins mirroring those wider conflicts. Kou, more affected by the open racism where whether or not he is required to carry his residency card on him has become irrelevant because there are no limits to the power police can exert, begins to think of the wider picture, spurred on by Fumi (Kilala Inori), a politically active student who is trying to find ways to push back against their principal, who insists on fighting back against the intolerable even if it comes at a personal cost. She advocates for her non-Japanese fellow students who are being increasingly marginalised, and the general apathy in the student body that stays quiet in the face of the escalation, or even accommodating. Yuto remains as he always has been, pursuing his passion for music, but otherwise politically naive. The gap between them widens up to a point where Kou wonders if they would even be friends if they met now, but the film never falls into the despair of an irretrievably broken friendship: instead, they come back to one another, even as their graduation puts them on separate courses in life and Yuto, realising that there is less at stake for him personally than for his friend, steps up to protect him. 

All of this makes Happyend an incredibly prescient film to watch in these first weeks of 2026, where the limits of tolerating the intolerable are becoming more and more clear. 

2024, directed by Neo Sora, starring Makiko Watanabe, Yukito Hidaka, Ayumu Nakajima, Arazi, Shina Peng, Kosuke Tanaka, Kilala Inori, Hayato Kurihara, Shirô Sano, Yûta Hayashi.