Cobweb

Set in 1970s South Korea, Cobweb follows Director Kim (Song Kang-ho), a once-celebrated filmmaker now dismissed by critics as a purveyor of trashy melodramas. He has just wrapped a black-and-white melodrama also called "Cobweb", but after vivid dreams he becomes convinced that a new ending will turn it into a masterpiece. All he says he needs is two more days of shooting.

The obstacles pile up quickly. The sets are being dismantled, the actors are committed elsewhere, and the rewritten script is rejected by government censors. The cast cannot make sense of the new ending, and the studio producer opposes the whole scheme. Kim relies on antidepressants and drives ahead anyway, while the set fills with affairs, egos and improvisation.

Directed by Kim Jee-woon from a script by Shin Yeon-shick, the film is a comedy-drama about the madness of making movies. It premiered at Cannes in 2023 as a midnight screening, with Lim Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Jeon Yeo-been and Krystal Jung in the ensemble.

Kim Jee-woon uses the story as an allegory for the struggle to bring any creative project to completion against all odds. Critics read it as his own artistic self-portrait: the reshoot becomes a kind of artistic redemption that gives the director the energy to face every obstacle.

The film argues that art is born from compromise, chaos, collaboration and neurosis rather than from solitary genius. It also suggests that artists are ensnared by fear, censorship, critics and their own guilt. According to the Wikipedia summary, Kim's pursuit of a masterpiece is ultimately an attempt to prove himself and escape the guilt of having built his career on his mentor's stolen work.

One reading is that the film is Kim Jee-woon's self-portrait, an allegory of his own fights to complete his projects. Another sees it as a satire of auteur pretension in which the "masterpiece" is a comic illusion. A third focuses on its politics: art shaped, and made absurd, by state censorship. A further reading treats Kim's guilt over his mentor as the real subject, with the reshoot as an act of atonement.

The film recreates 1970s South Korea, when censorship governed film production and adultery was a criminal offence. It pays homage to the golden age of Korean cinema, including the pulpy melodramas of Kim Ki-young, and its release was shadowed by a dispute with his family. Kim Jee-woon, a genre-hopping auteur, returned to comedy after his earlier work. It reunited him with Song Kang-ho and several regulars of his films. Reviews were split: Screen Daily called it an entertainingly affectionate ode to filmmaking, Film Threat scored it 7/10, and Variety and the SCMP (2/5) found it frantic, flimsy and indulgent.

Praise focused on Song Kang-ho's performance, the ensemble cast, the affectionate and funny treatment of filmmaking, and the period detail. Critics were more divided about the plot: Variety called it loose, slapdash and exhausting, with too many endings, and the SCMP said the long runtime and scattershot farce outweighed the good moments. Some viewers on MyDramaList, however, rated it highly and praised its rewatch value. The overall verdict: a charming but indulgent meta-comedy that works best for cinephiles.