Sea Fog

The captain of a fishing boat is in debt; there is no catch and he is about to lose the vessel. An offer comes: to carry people illegally from China to Korea. He takes it. The crew do not object because they have no money either. At night on open water they take on thirty people. Then a coastguard vessel approaches and the captain has to hide them. Where he hides them is the fish hold. Shim Sung-bo directs. He wrote the screenplay with Bong Joon-ho, who also produced. The narrative rests on a real case. In 2001 an incident on a Korean fishing boat ended in the deaths of people being carried illegally, and the trial was widely covered; the film comes out of that. The structure is in two parts: first the poverty and the decision, then what happens on the boat. The second part takes place entirely in a closed space and the narrative comes near to horror. The subject is not migration but what people become capable of past a certain point. The crew are not bad men; at every step they have to cover the step before. The fog is used both as a real danger and as a visual cover. Shim Sung-bo had written Memories of Murder with Bong Joon-ho; this is his first film as director. Who it is for: viewers who follow Korean thrillers and hard drama drawn from real events. Who it is not for: the second half is very heavy, the violence is direct, and the ending is without hope.