People who are all by themselves. How empty and precarious are the lives of those who are hoovering without knowing each other behind the name of daily life? Director Jung Bum-shik’s new feature film New Normal, released four years later Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018) which is notoriously known as opening the new chapter of Korean horror films, tells an eerie and lonely story of those who carry their own loneliness and exhaustion in this lonesome era that ‘Hon-Bab’(eating alone) became as natural. If his debut film, Epitaph (2007) was about the record of 4 days in old Seoul, 1942 during the turbulent era of Japanese colonial, New Normal is another captured record of 4 days in Seoul, 2022, which is a time of chaos that all the mankind never have been experienced before in entire human history. It depicts the unexpected risks and identity of fears that are hidden in everyday life and common space. And eventually, it provides the essence of ‘a quite different suspense’ making it difficult to expect the ending. In addition, the combination of prominent actors such as Choi Ji Woo, Lee Yoo Mi, Choi Min Ho, Pyo Ji Hoon, Jung Dong Won, and Ha Da In, who played common beings in our everyday life, and their role amplifies the suspense of the film. This prophecy is about the era of ‘New Normal’ that we are living in now and requires new definitions in all aspects and relationships, and full of insight into the new present and daily life with cleverly weaved suspense. (MO Eun-young)