Paradise Lost
What exactly Yeon wants to say is muffled by nonsense.
Contrary to the quick-take meta-narrative, the quality of Yeon Sang-ho’s filmography cannot and should not be limited to his four zombie films (Seoul Station, Train to Busan, Peninsula, and Colony). Psychokinesis is a smart superhero film from the tail end of the genre’s heyday in 2018 and, though marginal when compared the IP of Marvel and DC, climbs close to the genre’s summit. Elsewhere, in JUNG_E, Hellbound, and Parasyte: The Grey, Yeon wrestles with non-zombie sci-fi concepts to varying degrees of merit and success. Furthermore, the first half of Hellbound — which is about supernatural beings that (randomly) condemn humans to hell — offers the most conceptually enticing material in the director’s entire filmography, along with his earlier animated short on the same subject, The Hell (Two Kinds of Life). More recently, in 2025’s The Ugly, he relates ugliness to human monstrosity and murder. We are, to Yeon, how we treat the Other. Regardless of the genre, there are always monsters in his films. In his latest, Paradise Lost, the Other turns out to be a mother’s own offspring.
A bus full of children vanishes in Musan on the way to a camp and only the teacher’s body is found. The bus driver is the primary suspect and several of the children’s bodies appear later before he kills himself. The remaining parents are left to presume their children are dead. Veteran Yeon collaborator Kim Hyun-joo plays Ryu So-young, the mom of one of the still missing children, Ryu Sun-woo. Enter: AI. A tech company uses existing imagery and videos to create verisimilar simulations of the children, only accessible to the parents through glasses that look distinctly like Meta’s real-life product. The omnipresent subject of the moment has clearly worried Yeon recently; the zombies of Colony, also a 2026 film, operate with a hive mind and are the result of a corporate-driven “second cognitive revolution.” Not for nothing, he also managed the subject better in the zombie film.
Nine years pass and So-young has gone full ChatGPT-mom — addicted to spending time with the unaging AI-generated replica of her child — when Sun-woo, played with steely resolve by Bae Hyeon-seong, shows up as a full-grown adult with skeletons of his own to hide.
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