I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)

Young-goon (Su-jeong Lim) and Il-sun (pop-star Rain) meet and fall in love in the mental hospital. She is a cyborg; he can steal anything, and does so to keep from shrinking into a dot.

It's a film that defies easy categorization, but it's undeniably beautiful, with the same slick visuals we've come to expect from Chan-Wook Park (Oldboy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) and his usual cinematographer Jeong-hun Jeong. The hospital is colourful to the point of disbelief, and the patients are prone to lushly-visualized flights of fancy, such as Young-goon's machine-gun-finger killing sprees and another's Sound of Music-influenced obsession with yodelling on grassy mountainsides. Yeong-wook Jo's original score, redolent of Danny Elfman, lends a fantasy air to the proceedings.

In one sense, Cyborg is almost as unpleasant as Park's vengeance trilogy, despite his stated intention to take a break with something lighter. Each patient deals with the outside world in their own grotesque way: the one who can't stop eating, the one who lies, the one who apologizes. Young-goon seems innocent enough, if self-destructive, until it comes to light that she wants to shed her human frailties, such as sympathy and thankfulness, in order to become a better cyborg -- by which she means that she will feel no guilt when she murders the hospital staff. Food will gum up her robotic inner workings, so she refuses to eat: much of the film is devoted to her slow starvation.

But it's also life-affirming in its own way. Young-goon and Il-sun find healing and reassurance in each other, though the film's conclusion leaves no doubt that neither is "cured". If anything, they heal through their delusions, not in spite of them; their strategies for dealing with alienation are ultimately no worse than any others. It doesn't matter how you're mad, but who you're doing it with.

In the end, the title says it all: I'm a cyborg, and that's okay. What are you?