Look, sometimes even the snootiest of cinephiles, with the most obscurantist of cinematic palates (generally well served by the Locarno Film Festival selection), just needs a movie about a massive sinkhole. And when that mood strikes, now there’s Kim Ji-hoon‘s “Sinkhole,” aka “Sing-keu-hol” (pronounced: “Sinkhole”), a modest little social issues drama about a boy from a rural farming community who haha just kidding it’s about a sinkhole. Actually, to be strictly truthful, it’s less about the sinkhole itself – we never truly get a sense of the sinkhole’s motivation, nor the existential conundra it must provoke to actually be a sinkhole, as in how far to sink and what does it mean to be a hole, can absence have presence etc. – than about the people in the sinkhole. But dodge that minor quibble as one might a slab of concrete falling down a sinkhole, and here to meet all your sinkhole movie needs is “Sinkhole,” a film that from here on out is really going to test my abilities to make up new terms that mean sinkhole.
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The sudden concavity, like all great villains, makes a delayed entrance. First off, establishing the film’s breezy, comic throwaway tone in images of tremendous forgettability and blandness, we’re introduced to the endearingly daffy Park family moving to Seoul in a downpour, having just bought their first apartment. “We’re homeowners!” crows enthusiastic dork Park Dong-wan (Kim Sung-kyun) delightedly to his wife, who has a charming habit of high-fiving him for the slightest success. They’re excited about their new apartment, which will mean Dong-wan’s daily commute to his middle-management office job will be much shorter, although they are a little concerned when their cute little boy, who has the distressingly adorable habit of bowing deeply and formally in greeting to everyone he meets, discovers to his delight, that a marble set on the floor will roll toward the window of its own accord.
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Dong-wan also immediately has a run-in with his shambling, insolent neighbor Man-su (Cha Seung-wan), who turns out to be the local jack-of-all-trades so Dong-wan sees him everywhere he turns – at the gym, at the photographer’s studio, when ordering a driver and of course when he calls a building meeting to look into the tilted floor and the mysterious cracks that are appearing all over the place. What could possibly make these two nemeses end up working together? Why, nothing on earth. On the face of the earth, that is.
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Speaking of relationships that need the jumpstart that only a massive, life-threatening subterranean anomaly can provide (a phenomenon known to psychologists as “sinkhole therapy”), Man-su is raising a surly teenage son, Seung-Tae (Nam Dae-reum), who despises his loser Dad right until he proves his latent heroism through the medium of sinkhole. And among Dong-wan’s co-workers, whom he has over for a soju-sozzled housewarming party on the eve of the unexpected underfoot collapse, are Seung-hyeon (Lee Kwang-soo), who is mooning over a co-worker without noticing that the office intern Eun-ju (Kim Hye-ju) is kind of into him. It will take the spontaneous appearance of the unexpected geological dimple, and for the entire five-story building to plummet hundreds of meters into a perfectly round, chronically unstable abyss, and for Eun-ju to superhumanly pronk (which I swear is a real word applied to quadrupeds who jump off all four feet at the same time) over hurtling masonry to grab a coil of hose by which she can save Seung-hyeon from falling off the edge of the wildly listing building, in order for him to notice her pretty eyes.
The CG around the surprise cave-in isn’t bad but also doesn’t necessarily strike one as good – it’s a bit like playing an old version of a video game whose graphics blew your mind at the time but which has since had a couple of spiffier updates. Still, where it matters – 400m underground, with surface instability and worsening weather making rescue impossible – Kim’s staging of the more intimate mini-disasters that naturally occur due to an entire structure plummeting half a k into a hitherto unknown crevasse, is tense and fluid and comprehensible. Falling taxicabs, cascading hunks of concrete, downed rescue drones, mud that acts like quicksand, collapsing walls, quaking platforms, treacherous lift shafts, rising flood levels and, oh yeah, the sudden arrival of the building next door, all do their bit to further imperil the survivors, including some others trapped throughout the building that the core group doesn’t even find out about until later. Not everyone survives. (In fact, you might not want to parse who lives and who does not for social commentary, as to do so might make you like “Sinkhole” a little less. And that would be a shame because all “Sinkhole” wants is to be liked.)
While the film is likely to do gangbusters business at home, it is genuinely hard to tell if it will get an international release. Although the appetite for Korean genre movies has never been higher, it’s far from the most distinctive or distinguished commercial export from a country that has produced more than its fair share of genuine genre auteurs. On this evidence, Kim, who was also behind the more straight-faced 2012 disaster movie “The Tower,” is not one of those as yet. But if “Sinkhole” is very far from the apotheosis of gonzo Korean actioners (that title is still held, imho, by Kim Seong-hun‘s “A Hard Day” from 2014), nor has it any of the visual filmmaking flair that we’ve come to expect of Korean exports, it is terribly good-humored, has a corker of a “Yellow Submarine” sequence as a climax, and is not afraid to paint its relationship arcs in the most shamelessly broad of strokes. Which is actually just fine – this is a film about a hole into which stuff gets sunk, yes, but it is also a film about a hole out of which new, unsinkable bonds of comradeship emerge. Meaning that as you leave, the only profundity left for your significantly smoother brain to ponder is: what if the real sinkhole was the friends we made along the way? [B-]