‘a Wild Roomer’: Busan Review

Dir/scr: Lee Jeong-hong. South Korea. 2022. 136mins

A goatee-sporting, 30-something woodworker experiences mildly offbeat goings-on in a Wild Roomer (Goein), the moderately promising feature-length debut from writer-director-editor Lee Jeong-hong. Premiering in Busan’s New Currents competition a decade after his 47-minute mid-lengther No Cave bowed there to award-winning acclaim, this is a good-looking but indulgently overextended affair which only partially rewards the patience it demands from audiences. Given the ongoing vogue for all things Korean, further festival play nevertheless seems possible – despite the film’s punning title.

Park is never quite sufficiently compelling as a protagonist to sustain our attention and sympathy 

For much of the running-time the title seems to be a mockingly sarcastic reference to protagonist Gi-hong (Park Gi-hong shares his character’s name), a schlubby fellow who rents a room in the spacious dwelling of Kyoung-jun (Choi Kyoung-jun) and the latter’s girlfriend Hyung-jun (Kim Jeon-gil). A self-taught carpenter who works on apartment renovations, Gi-hong can be a bit of a show-off — he self-aggrandisingly describes himself as a “field manager,” and one of “the elites in this line of work” — but is essentially quite maladroit in terms of social interactions. Especially clumsy in the presence of the opposite sex and romantically luckless as a result, the boozy Gi-hong mainly hangs out with the similarly lone-wolfish Kyong-jun— whose relationship with the more dynamic Hyung-jun isn’t much of a love-match.

This pair of quietly unfufilled, youngish-but-ageing men are hungry for any kind of adventure to break the comfortable tedium. So when the roof of Gi-hong’s van is dented overnight, the pair enthusiastically become amateur sleuths. Identified via blurry dash-cam footage, the culprit turns out to be waif-like Hana (Lee Gi-ppeum). This 20-something girl-woman of no fixed abode enters both the lives of our heroes and the film itself from left-field as a welcome wild-card, adding intrigue to the latter stages with her ethereal presence.

Shot with steely precision and compositional aplomb by the relatively seasoned cinematographer Kim Jongsun (a regular collaborator of international festival favourite Park Jung-bum), a Wild Roomer is a consistently handsome affair — credit also due to digital colorist Sunhyuk Kim. These low-key visual strengths crucially counterbalance the flimsiness of the screenplay.  “You have strange encounters as you live your life, that are hard to explain logically,” muses Hyung-jun at one point; this sounds like the underpinning ethos of Lee’s quietly quirky, observationally character-based script.

“Separation and connection,” meanwhile, is cited as the inspiration for the architecture of Kyoung-jun’s house; the film likewise attempts to explore the hidden dynamics of social interaction in modern-day Korea — but with only partially successful results. The main problem here is that Park is never quite sufficiently compelling as a protagonist to sustain our attention and sympathy for such a lengthy run.

In terms of value for screen-time Kim’s Hyung-jun makes more impact, but she remains a peripheral presence. The real scene-stealer is Sung Nak-sam who nails his single-scene role as a philosophical car-mechanic. Musing on the spate of vehicle-roof damage associated with South Korea’s co-hosting of the World Cup back in 2002, this savvy working-class fellow goes on to briskly analyse the foibles and deficiencies of the country’s current younger generations — typified by Gi-hong and Kyoung-jun — who have found comfortable, moneymaking niches but essentially plod along in states of arrested development. For a brief spell, a Wild Roomer clicks into proper gear; this scene alone is enough to encourage hopes that Lee may yet go on to better (and perhaps shorter) things.