'Train to Busan' filmmaker blends genre potboiler with meditation on faith, streamed straight into age of curated reality
"I'm a total product of the '90s—back when I was binging films like crazy and had this whole dream of becoming a director one day," Yeon Sang-ho tells a group of reporters Monday at a hotel in Yeouido, Seoul. "I'm still big on that whole auteur thing, the director's intent and all that."
The filmmaker, 46, speaks with the calm certainty of someone who knows exactly what every frame means. He dissects scenes with surgical precision, diving into technical choices with the kind of seriousness that makes it clear nothing was left to chance.
His latest film, "Revelations," which dropped on Netflix Friday, wears its symbolism loudly and proudly — from angel-shaped clouds to a lightning-scorched rock that reveals the face of Jesus. And yet, the director hopes it doesn’t hit viewers too fast. “I wanted all those details to be hiding in plain sight — obvious, but only if you're really looking.”
"Revelations" follows Pastor Sung Min-chan (Ryu Jun-yeol), who believes he’s been divinely chosen to punish the culprit behind a churchgoer’s disappearance. Alongside him is Yeon-hui (Shin Hyun-been), a detective investigating the same case while grappling with visions of her dead sister. Kwon Yang-rae, played by Shin Min-jae, is an ex-con whose possible guilt is the film’s central pivot.
The film attempts to juggle, at times rather heavy-handedly, the social critique seen in Yeon’s earlier works like "The Fake" and "Hellbound," with the slow-burn suspense of a mystery thriller. Ryu brings feverish conviction to Sung, who delivers sermons beneath a glowing red neon crucifix in a crumbling suburban church.
When a young girl vanishes and his pursuit of a suspect spirals into violence, Sung starts to interpret every wild twist as divine will — reshaping any number of sins to satisfy his deranged sense of justice and truth.
"We're stuck in this era where people only tune into what they want to see and buy into whatever they feel like believing," Yeon explains. "This whole thing is only picking up steam in our society. It's baked into human nature, sure, but now it's getting more extreme.
"Back in the day, you'd turn on the TV and just roll with whatever was playing, even if you were not really into it. But now, with everything getting more high-tech, this human instinct to cherry-pick only what we want to see is just getting stronger and stronger."
There's a certain irony in hearing this critique from the poster child of Netflix, a platform that practically turbocharges that very bias with its never-ending buffet of like-minded content. But far removed from such algorithm-driven ecosystems, Yeon began his career with independent animated features like "The King of Pigs" (2011) and "The Fake" (2013), before shifting to live-action with the zombie breakout "Train to Busan" (2016).
Only in recent years has he built a close creative partnership with the streaming juggernaut, helming series like "Hellbound" and "Parasyte: The Grey."
"The distribution model (of Netflix) is entirely different," he says. "This subscription approach operates on completely different principles than the theater system. And the fact that content releases worldwide simultaneously opens up possibilities that weren't available before."
When asked about "Revelations," Yeon suggests it swims against the current of typical Netflix fare — at times deliberately slower, more ambiguous, and less eager to hand the audience easy answers. "Looking at what's happening internally in this film, it's not entertainment in the way audiences typically expect.
"Paradoxically, I think that's why a service like Netflix can be useful — it can connect with viewers who might never encounter this type of work otherwise."
The film serves up visual flourishes that occasionally fall flat. Yeon-hui’s ghostly encounters with her sister are portrayed through shaky, disorienting camerawork that leans into B-grade horror territory — stylistically out-of-place in a film that otherwise strives for a gritty, grounded tone. When asked about the choice, Yeon offers a defense.
"Ghost scenes are particularly challenging to nail down," he says. "Since Pastor Sung Min-chan gets hit with these in-your-face visual hallucinations, I figured Yeon-hui's guilt should also jump off the screen somehow. When you have an actor fleshing that out, I thought viewers could really get inside Yeon-hui's head and feel what she's going through."
Critics have often pegged Yeon's works as taking shots at organized religion, but the director pushes back against that label. "Religion makes an excellent subject matter because, at its core, it's all about faith. From a cultural angle, it serves up exactly the kind of rich material I'm after. But if you're asking if this film is some kind of hit piece on Protestantism, I'd say not at all."
He points to a scene near the film's denouement where Yeon-hui rescues a kidnapped girl, cradling her in a composition that immediately invokes sacred art. “That whole setup is a straight-up nod to Michelangelo’s 'Pieta'— I was actually worried it might come off as too religious,” he says. “If you really follow Yeon-hui’s arc, those are the honest-to-God revelations and redemption moments. Her storyline is full of these divine signals, even if they’re easy to miss. In that sense, it’s actually a pretty Christian film.”
With "Revelations," Yeon hopes to provide a distillation of his artistic vision — a sort of Reader's Digest to his filmography. "I've imagined someone that wants to explore my work but has no clue where to begin. Something like 'Hellbound' might come off as too heavy a lift for some viewers, so I wanted to put together something more compact — like a self-contained short story that captures the vibe of my earlier works."
"Revelations" is available on Netflix.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
