Vertigo (2019)

Vertigo: Directed by Jeon Gye-soo. With Woo-hee Chun, Jeong Jae-Kwang, Teo Yoo. Seo Young, a graphic designer in her early 30s, works in an office in Seoul that is high up in a skyscraper, despite the fact that she suffers from vertigo. The story follows her as she enters into a romance with a man who works on the face of the building as he fixes it, moving up and down by rope. The pair meets through a window.

“Chun Woo-hee, whom I remember from the excellent 2013 social drama Han Gong-ju, stars in this melancholy urban romance as a young corporate office worker, hopelessly in love her unit boss. The cinematography is very crafty and coupled with slow-paced editing. A somber, whimsical mood persists throughout the film. I personally find Woo-hee a terrific actor and here also she is very adequate as a depressed, vulnerable young professional with a minor disability. The rest of the cast is, unsurprisingly, very decent. However, considering all this, the storyline is very unremarkable, cliched and ultimately, rather silly. I mean, all the themes that the writers wanted to touch upon here – namely the cutthroat corporate professional insecurity, the office politics, the social differences of class, urban existential loneliness, the millennial indecisiveness – all of these do not really culminate into anything remotely close to profound. Hence, all of that moody, heavy handed melancholic beauty of its photography, soundtrack and slow editing seem superfluous.”