Okja is not the only new (or new-ish) Bong Joon-ho project you can stream today, and maybe not even the best. Grasshopper Film are hosting the U.S. premiere of Influenza, which Bong composed for South Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival in 2004, and it turns out this super-rare 30-minute short is among his most startling works. Praised by David Bordwell for walking “the border between commercial fiction and avant-garde experimentation” and shot entirely from the fixed perspective of closed-circuit camera systems, it charts a man’s financial and moral downfall to a degree that’s both characteristic of Bong in its violent incidents and a deviation in just how little humor alleviates these scenarios. (Some harmony is found in a laugh-out-loud-funny bit involving a car door.) By film’s end I didn’t exactly know what to make of the transpired events, but I was greatly affected all the same.
Among the multiple shorts work being hosted by Grasshopper, another favorite is Bertrand Bonello’s (Nocturama) inscrutable and perhaps unprecedented Sarah Winchester, Ghost Opera, and thus is also included below.
Rent both: