Alive (2020), directed by Cho Il-hyung
Review of Alive / 살아있다 (2020), directed by Cho Il-hyung
To be honest, I am so surprised I’d never heard of this film until I watched it. The only reason I found it is because it randomly popped up in my suggestions on Netflix (which is also confusing considering I rarely watch zombie movies, if any at all) and I was so confused at the fact that Yoo Ah-in and Park Shin-hye had starred in this random movie. And, naturally, despite having better things to do, I pressed play and was pleasantly surprised.
Outside of the zombie part of the movie, I imagine this film was quite interesting to create setting-wise. I’ll go into this in the actual review part of this post, but there’s pretty much one setting the entire film. I also tend not to like zombie films, but because this film was all about the characters and their isolation and interactions with each other, I was game for it.
Alright, I’ve said a lot, so let’s dive into this review.
Content
Our main character in this film is Oh Joon-woo, who is an unidentified age (although I get twenties or early thirties vibes, it’s not exactly clear). He’s a big gamer, his family is out, and he’s casually playing his video games when the people he’s playing with say to turn on the news.
Joon-woo goes to investigate, sees the television screen cut out, and goes to his balcony, where he discovers the zombie outbreak is happening before his eyes.
People are screaming and being attacked—where we see what I think is the best scene of attacking, where a normal-looking girl shouts for her mother, reunites with her, and then eats her. I cackled—and there are like fire trucks crashing into cars. Joon-woo makes a big mistakes of letting a guy come into his apartment who has been attacked by his feral brother, which is a big mistake because the guy then turns into a zombie.
Joon-woo should’ve listened to his mother, because he didn’t get enough groceries to be holed up in his apartment indefinitely.
His last meal is appropriately labeled as the Jin ramen, which he cracks down and eats after seeing a luscious commercial for it. He then also loses his food supply after a zombie comes in and smashes his fridge, destroying all the food in it. This then leads Joon-woo to becoming suicidal as he’s slowly starving to death and is dehydrated.
But then comes Park Shin-hye’s character, a wild woman wielding a strange small axe that can easily chop off a zombie’s arm. She’s the perfect survival partner for Joon-woo because he’s pretty incapable of anything besides running.
What makes this film unique is it’s setting, which I mentioned before. Almost the entirety of the film is literally in Joon-woo’s apartment, as we’re kind of watching him go crazy. He games when he can by himself, because there is no longer bluetooth and whatnot, and he keeps creating video logs explaining random events. With his cell service out, he doesn’t know what happened to his family the majority of the film, leading him to have his sole purpose of survival be them.
When they’re out of the equation, Kim Yoo-bin, axe-woman, becomes his reason to live. Thankfully we have no romance, but it’s nice to see some human faces in the sea of zombies. It’s a miracle Yoo-bin is still alive though, because her apartment door is broken and her only defense is a door with sharpened edges to literally impale a zombie. It’s a miracle she hasn’t been swarmed and slightly questionable with this plot.
When the film isn’t in his apartment, it’s contained to the apartment complex across (aka Yoo-bin’s apartment), the hallways, and the parking lot. Anything outside of Joon-woo’s apartment holds this sense of danger, because somehow his apartment is the only refuge.
It was fitting that this came out during the COVID-19 pandemic, because the sense of isolation that Joon-woo feels is something most can relate to, outside of the zombie outbreak going on. A lot of us were holed up into our apartments and homes, feeling disconnected to the outside world. And when he finds that outside source of light in another living human being, it’s a magical moment for all of us.
While there isn’t anything innovative about the zombie genre—the zombies themselves are generic, something we’ve all seen before—this provided a pretty comedic and relatable take compared to other zombie movies I’ve seen. I can appreciate that at the end of the day.
Overall Thoughts
It’s an interesting film worth checking out if you even have a tiny bit of interest in the topic. I feel like a lot of people can relate to the main character, who was just a normal guy with a family that loved video games, and then suddenly the world outside drastically shifted.
While we probably can’t relate to the mass violence and despair going on outside in his world, we can relate to it in different ways.
Sure it’s not a monumental film that changes the genre, but it manages to have its funny moments and serious ones. Give it a chance, really. You might not regret it.
