I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK

Review by Leo Robson | 18 Aug 2007
Chan-wook Park's film has a great title, but that's all it has. It is a daft, digressional farce set in a sanitarium, exhaustingly winsome and impossible to follow. The initial information we are given about the characters is soon revealed to be the imaginings of the resident mythomaniac - not an appealing device - but at length, it emerges that the central male is a petty thief who thinks he can steal souls and his companion is a cyborg, given to murderous daydreams, who proceeds under the illusion that Sympathy and Hesitation are among the Seven Deadly Sins. The film, which concerns their impenetrable travails, possesses a light-headed imaginative hyperactivity that has been compared to Amélie, but in truth it's closer to Ally McBeal.

Park received a lot of attention for his last film, Old Boy, but I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK feels like the work of a madman with a bad case of hubris. On only one occasion does the director show signs of his wonted ingenuity - when the cyborg transforms herself into a killing machine and turns on her fellow inmates. Mainly composed of a rooftop shot over the garden in which the carnage is occurring, it is a bracingly strange sequence - like a Pokemon reworking of something from If. But as with almost everything in the film, it transpires never to have happened, and as soon as it's over, the viewer is restored to his previous state of dislocation and despair.

I'm A Cyborg leaves you with a long list of grievances, but right at the top is its hedonistic style. Directors like Bertrand Blier and Pedro Almodovar have repeatedly shown that the assets to have when handling off-kilter material are a straight face and a level head. Park, by contrast, piles mania upon mania, employing ADD editing to go with the MTV camerawork and LSD set design - as if the lunatics have taken over the production.