Movie Review: I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

Chan-wook Park is South Korea's highest profile director – the man behind such gruesome crossover hits as Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is a big name in a country that clearly prefers men cutting out their own tongues to boy wizards and cockney gangsters.

But even his name wasn't enough to lure punters into his latest movie, the curious romantic comedy I'm A Cyborg. When I say romantic comedy, this is a film that opens with a woman cutting her own wrists open, and proceeds to tell the story of Young-goon, a mentally ill lass who is convinced she is a killer android and has violent fantasies about massacring a bunch of doctors. Richard Curtis this is not…

Cinema-goers in his homeland may have stayed away from I'm A Cyborg, but fans of Park's previous films over here should still find plenty of the same twisted delights in this film.

He's still one of the most visually inventive directors around, whizzing his camera down the hospital corridors and creating some arresting fantasy sequences. Unlike Oldboy, there's no octopus gobbling, but fans of Asian splatter will still lap up the scenes of robotic mayhem.

Unfortunately for a film that is at heart a comedic romance, Park isn't quite so hot on comedy or romance. Most of the laughs come from the patients that our heroine shares the mental institution with, who prove to be your typical bunch of wacky movie loonies. There are some funny moments, but it doesn't really take a lot of skill to laugh at a bunch of unstable freaks – look at the success of Big Brother and The Apprentice.

As for the budding romance between Young-goon and the antisocial kleptomaniac she falls for, star Soo Jung Lim and pop idol-turned-actor Rain try their best, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that Park would rather watch them mashing each others' brains in with claw-hammers than falling in love.