Last Mankind

In a dystopian future where air pollution has forced humanity to live in bunkers, scientist Dae-seung conducts endless experiments on his daughter, Sin-a. Can a new kind of human capable of surviving the contaminated world outside truly be born? Into this closed world comes Tae-o, an outsider boy who tells Sin-a new stories about the world beyond. Heo Gun’s Last Mankind is a film with a distinctive visual texture. Though a low-budget genre film, it offers spaces and production design of surprising scale, creating an original world of images through a form of science fiction with an analogue sensibility. Narratively, the film unfolds around the conflict between parent and child. Living within the “law of the father” constructed by Dae-seung, Sin-a slowly begins to doubt, defy, and resist it, and this process forms the central motif of her coming of age. The film offers an experimental approach to science fiction, a genre still rarely attempted in Korea. It was selected for this year’s Fantastic 7 at Cannes.(KIM Hyung-seok)