Synopsis
Here is a young man about to commit suicide. His name is Kuhn Tak. He leads a vegetative life without any aim or specific set of values. One day Kuhn goes to a hospital to take a blood test, only to find out he is HIV positive. Agonizing over this personal disaster, he impulsively gets married to a girl named Orn, although, you could say the marrige is half forced on him. Orn, however, has other thoughts. She knows only that Kuhn Tak's fatally ill and plans to collect a large sum of insurance money after killing him and disguising his death as an accident. Thus begins the strange co-existence of a man trying to kill himself and a woman trying to kill him. Starting from this paradoxical situation, the film ultimately aims to reconcile the characters with their own lives. The main characters, Kuhn Tak and Orn, don't have any positive views on their own lives. Each of them has his/her own ways of solving their life problems: putting an end to it or chasing after some quick and easy money. They agree, however, on one thing. They strongly suspect that life might not be worth living at all. The strange agreement on death is to be settled between them, but that fact only emphasizes how unhappy they are in the present. The theme seems so profound that you might think it weighs down the film. But that's not the case at all. The tone is very light and funny. The film doesn't follow any established set of conventions and has a lot of humorous gimmicks and funny characters planted within. An especially interesting sequence shows Kuhn Tak taking the blood test at the hospital with a horror movie feel to it, but instead of makinga seriously scary film, it pulls a brilliant parodic comedy out of the genre conventions. The first half of the film creates a comedic atmosphere but the last half explicates the relationship between the characters and their lives with predominantly melodramatic elements. The ending, no less paradoxical than the beginning, effectively brings the theme to relief. (LIM Ji-soo)