Jung-E movie review: Train to Busan director’s new Netflix action film is a slick and sentimental surprise

Like an anime with Isaac Asimov’s hands all over it, the new Korean action film Jung_E finds director Yeon Sang-ho playing to his strengths. Best known for the excellent breakout hit Train to Busan, which has only found new admirers on Netflix in the years since its 2016 release, director Yeon is an expert at combining slick genre thrills with earnest sentimentality.

But he isn’t particularly skilled at exposition, at least in Jung_E, his third project for the streamer. Yeon handles it like a child presented with a serving of boiled vegetables before the pizza that he’d been promised. He gets it out of the way as soon as possible, before slowing down and savouring the flavours that he enjoys more.

In the first minute alone, we’re told that the movie is set in a not-so-distant future, where climate change has ravaged Earth and large sections of humanity have been evacuated to space ‘shelters’. Over the years, three of these shelters have factionalised and separated from the larger group, posing a challenge to the others as well as what remains of humanity back on Earth. Acutely aware that I wasn’t keeping up with the spools of set-up that Yeon had just unravelled, I was forced to rewind the opening twice. It’s an inelegant start to an otherwise streamlined experience.

At the centre of the resistance against these rebel shelters is a terminally ill scientist named Seohyun, whose mother was an elite soldier who died in a war when Seohyun was just a little girl. Now an emotionally closed-off adult, Seohyun’s only mission is to clone her dead mother using AI, and to create an army from her consciousness. The hope is that if her mother could lead the charge once, she could do it again. And this time, she’d have clones of herself fighting by her side.

Again, it’s quite a dense premise, made more complicated because of the manner in which it is set up. But the movie improves considerably when Yeon, who also wrote it, settles into the family drama at its centre. Like Train to Busan and his superhero movie Psychokinesis — we shall ignore the existence of Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula — Jung_E, at its core, is also a story about parenthood. But not only does this movie have a female protagonist, it’s also presented from the perspective of the child.

Seohyun’s attempts to clone her mother, by repeatedly making her participate in a simulation of the skirmish that killed her, could cynically be read as her way of lashing out at her mom for the feeling of abandonment that she left her with. Seohyun puts her ‘mother’ through the ringer over and over again, as if she’s in a video game, on the pretext of perfecting her fighting skills. Alternatively, these experiments, which are actually filmed like video game-inspired action scenes that might remind you of Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow, could also be interpreted as Seohyun’s way of connecting with her dead mom by creating sentient replicas of her. Either way, it works, even if the movie’s feeble attempts at critiquing capitalism don’t.

And a large part of the reason why the mother-daughter story is so effective is because Seohyun doesn’t have all the time in the world; she’s dying. Even though the movie is set against the backdrop of an intergalactic battle, director Yeon makes the wise decision to focus on the human stakes. The drama is further heightened when you consider that star Kang Soo-yeon, who plays Seohyun, died of a cerebral haemorrhage prior to the film’s release. Jung_E is dedicated to her memory, and her decision to play Seohyun like a dead woman walking is almost too cruelly prescient to behold.