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Korea Herald
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Interview: Yeon Sang-ho reckons with divine delusions in 'Revelations'
'Train to Busan' filmmaker blends genre potboiler with meditation on faith, streamed straight into age of curated reality "I'm a total product of the '90s—back when I was binging films like crazy and had this whole dream of becoming a director one day," Yeon Sang-ho tells a group of reporters Monday at a hotel in Yeouido, Seoul. "I'm still big on that whole auteur thing, the director's intent and all that." The filmmaker, 46, speaks with the calm certainty of someone who knows exactly what every frame means. He dissects scenes with surgical precision, diving into technical choices with the kind of seriousness that makes it clear nothing was left to chance. His latest film, "Revelations," which dropped on Netflix Friday, wears its symbolism loudly and proudly — from angel-shaped clouds to a lightning-scorched rock that reveals the face of Jesus. And yet, the director hopes it doesn't hit viewers too fast. 'I wanted all those details to be hiding in plain sight — obvious, but only if you're really looking.' "Revelations" follows Pastor Sung Min-chan (Ryu Jun-yeol), who believes he's been divinely chosen to punish the culprit behind a churchgoer's disappearance. Alongside him is Yeon-hui (Shin Hyun-been), a detective investigating the same case while grappling with visions of her dead sister. Kwon Yang-rae, played by Shin Min-jae, is an ex-con whose possible guilt is the film's central pivot. The film attempts to juggle, at times rather heavy-handedly, the social critique seen in Yeon's earlier works like "The Fake" and "Hellbound," with the slow-burn suspense of a mystery thriller. Ryu brings feverish conviction to Sung, who delivers sermons beneath a glowing red neon crucifix in a crumbling suburban church. When a young girl vanishes and his pursuit of a suspect spirals into violence, Sung starts to interpret every wild twist as divine will — reshaping any number of sins to satisfy his deranged sense of justice and truth. "We're stuck in this era where people only tune into what they want to see and buy into whatever they feel like believing," Yeon explains. "This whole thing is only picking up steam in our society. It's baked into human nature, sure, but now it's getting more extreme. "Back in the day, you'd turn on the TV and just roll with whatever was playing, even if you were not really into it. But now, with everything getting more high-tech, this human instinct to cherry-pick only what we want to see is just getting stronger and stronger." There's a certain irony in hearing this critique from the poster child of Netflix, a platform that practically turbocharges that very bias with its never-ending buffet of like-minded content. But far removed from such algorithm-driven ecosystems, Yeon began his career with independent animated features like "The King of Pigs" (2011) and "The Fake" (2013), before shifting to live-action with the zombie breakout "Train to Busan" (2016). Only in recent years has he built a close creative partnership with the streaming juggernaut, helming series like "Hellbound" and "Parasyte: The Grey." "The distribution model (of Netflix) is entirely different," he says. "This subscription approach operates on completely different principles than the theater system. And the fact that content releases worldwide simultaneously opens up possibilities that weren't available before." When asked about "Revelations," Yeon suggests it swims against the current of typical Netflix fare — at times deliberately slower, more ambiguous, and less eager to hand the audience easy answers. "Looking at what's happening internally in this film, it's not entertainment in the way audiences typically expect. "Paradoxically, I think that's why a service like Netflix can be useful — it can connect with viewers who might never encounter this type of work otherwise." The film serves up visual flourishes that occasionally fall flat. Yeon-hui's ghostly encounters with her sister are portrayed through shaky, disorienting camerawork that leans into B-grade horror territory — stylistically out-of-place in a film that otherwise strives for a gritty, grounded tone. When asked about the choice, Yeon offers a defense. "Ghost scenes are particularly challenging to nail down," he says. "Since Pastor Sung Min-chan gets hit with these in-your-face visual hallucinations, I figured Yeon-hui's guilt should also jump off the screen somehow. When you have an actor fleshing that out, I thought viewers could really get inside Yeon-hui's head and feel what she's going through." Critics have often pegged Yeon's works as taking shots at organized religion, but the director pushes back against that label. "Religion makes an excellent subject matter because, at its core, it's all about faith. From a cultural angle, it serves up exactly the kind of rich material I'm after. But if you're asking if this film is some kind of hit piece on Protestantism, I'd say not at all." He points to a scene near the film's denouement where Yeon-hui rescues a kidnapped girl, cradling her in a composition that immediately invokes sacred art. 'That whole setup is a straight-up nod to Michelangelo's 'Pieta'— I was actually worried it might come off as too religious,' he says. 'If you really follow Yeon-hui's arc, those are the honest-to-God revelations and redemption moments. Her storyline is full of these divine signals, even if they're easy to miss. In that sense, it's actually a pretty Christian film.' With "Revelations," Yeon hopes to provide a distillation of his artistic vision — a sort of Reader's Digest to his filmography. "I've imagined someone that wants to explore my work but has no clue where to begin. Something like 'Hellbound' might come off as too heavy a lift for some viewers, so I wanted to put together something more compact — like a self-contained short story that captures the vibe of my earlier works."
CBC
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
5 'transformative' books that shaped Zoe Whittall's life and work
The power of a book is immense — it can entertain, comfort and help guide the course of a person's life. For Canadian author, poet and screenwriter Zoe Whittall, the books she has read have done just that. She spoke to The Next Chapter' s Antonio Michael Downing about the literary works that first inspired her to become a writer, pushed her to explore different forms of writing and informed her sense of self as a queer femme. Whittall is the author of several books, including the memoir No Credit River, novels The Fake, The Best Kind of People and Bottle Rocket Hearts, short story collection Wild Failure and poetry collections The Emily Valentine Poems and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life. She has received the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, a Lambda Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Whittall is also a juror for the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize alongside Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott. Here are the books that have shaped Zoe Whittall's personal and professional life. The Passion by Jeannette Winterson The Passion follows Henri, a humble French soldier who leaves his quiet rural life to fight for Napoleon, and his fateful encounter with the enigmatic Villanelle, who was born web-footed and disguises herself as a man to work in the casino. There, she pursues an affair with a married woman. When Henri and Villanelle's paths cross, they become entangled in tremendous love and loss. Jeannette Winterson is a writer from Manchester, England. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Why be happy when you could be normal? She has won several awards for her fiction and film adaptations, including the Whitbread Prize, UK and the Prix d'argent, Cannes Film Festival. Zoe Whittall says:"The reason that I think the book spoke to me, at the time, was because it was very butch femme coded, like the woman who is dressed as a man for work ends up falling for a married woman. When they finally get together, she confesses that she's just been dressing as a man, and the woman somehow intuitively knows. "This kind of romance was really hard to find in literature at that time." Heroine by Gail Scott Set in the 1980s, Heroine follows a woman as she seeks to create a new life after being in an affair with a man while also falling in love with another woman. Amidst the turmoil of Quebec's seventies, she finds a sense of purpose through her deep involvement in far-left politics. Gail Scott is a Montreal-based writer and translator. Her previous works include The Obituary, which was a 2011 finalist for Le Grand Prix du Livre de la Ville de Montréal and My Paris. Scott's translation of Michael Delisle's Le Déasarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General's award. She is also co-founder of the French-language journal Spirale. Zoe Whittall says: "I was a poet at the time. I had never considered writing a novel. When I was introduced to her experimental — it was like a long poem — 200 pages of a crazy, weird poem, and I could not understand it, it was very challenging. But it made me rethink how narrative works. "It also made me think about, 'How do we write as feminists?' Like 'How do we write about politics?' 'How do we write about love in a certain political context?'" Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman Rat Bohemia is written from the epicenter of the AIDS crisis, telling the story of Rita Mae Weems and her friends who gather in a part of New York City known as the "rat bohemia." In this space, gay men and lesbians forge deep bonds as they cope with the profound loss of their friends and the enduring pain caused by their parents' lack of acceptance. Sarah Schulman is a writer living in New York City. She is the author of 20 books, including the novels Maggie Terry and The Cosmopolitans and nonfiction works A Political History of ACT UP New York 1987-1993 and Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. She has won many awards, including the 2009 Kessler Award for "Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies" from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. Zoe Whittall says: "It sort of felt like a primer for what queer life had been. For my peers who came out five, ten years before I did — I came out in 1995 — it was right as all the new drugs for HIV were starting to work, and were coming on the market. "But everybody just a few years older than me, who were teaching me what it was to be queer, had all just lost dozens of their friends, and they were living in this reality of grief. They were in this 'live for today' moment." The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson In her memoir The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson reflects on her love for the gender fluid artist Harry Dodge and shares the story of their relationship as they navigate the complexities and joys of creating a queer family. Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic and nonfiction author living in Los Angeles. Her previous works include The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets and Jane: A Murder. She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. Zoe Whittall says: "I happened to come across it as I was falling in love with a trans guy and I was also utterly obsessed with trying to have a baby in my late 30s. "There were thematic links to the memoir, but I was also transformed by the fearlessness of her writing and her lack of concern for form, while also being formal in a scholarly sense, like having footnotes and such." Two eyes are you sleeping by Heather O'Neill Packed with personal and political lyrics, Two Eyes Are You Sleeping is a collection of poems that capture the rawness of urban life. From poems of drug addicts to con-men, they reflect the journey of growing up human amid the gritty beauty of the city. Heather O'Neill is a Montreal-based author. She won Canada Reads 2024, championing The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads 2007. Her other books include The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, Daydreams of Angels, When We Lost our Heads and The Lonely Hearts Hotel.
