Make Sure You Watch This Whip-Smart Time Travel Gem on Netflix

In 2019, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite made historical past as the primary non English-language movie to win the finest image Oscar. That wasn’t the top of its feats: It catapulted viewers over the 1-inch subtitle barrier right into a treasure trove of South Korean movies.

On that very same glowing pile sits one other impeccable South Korean flick: 2020’s The Name. Launched on Netflix, The Name shares the identical Oscar-nominated editor as Parasite: Yang Jin-mo. In the event you like your storytelling environment friendly, distinctive and wrought with suspense, The Name will generously present.

The Name is ready in rural Korea, the place 28-year-old Kim Web optimization-yeon makes the journey residence to go to her estranged, sick mom. Crucially, she loses her telephone on the practice journey over. This deadly error sees her pressured to make use of a cordless telephone. After one fateful telephone name, a real nightmare unfurls.

Web optimization-yeon interacts with one other 28-year-old girl — Oh Younger-sook — who cries for assist from her personal “loopy” mom. The trailer-advertised reveal: Each ladies are in the identical home, however from totally different instances. One is in 2019, the opposite in 1999. Cue superior ’90s Korean grunge music.

With this unusual connection, Web optimization-yeon within the current timeline is enticed to tinker with the unlucky occasions in her previous. The one catch is that this depends on her friendship with the opposite girl on the road, whose circumstances is perhaps way more hellish than her personal.

The actual fact these ladies work together with out assembly head to head reveals the profound talent of actresses Park Shin-hye and Jeon Jong-seo. They embark on a cat-and-mouse tug of conflict, tiptoeing throughout a minefield of unknowns and potential threats. The stress is unrelenting.

The ensemble is rounded out by the ladies’s moms, performed by the equally extraordinary Kim Sung-ryung and Lee El. Lee El specifically produces the sort of unhinged guardian efficiency that haunted children like Carrie, Coraline and Norman Bates.

Each side of the filmmaking course of has clearly been siphoned by means of a fragile sieve. The eye to element is immaculate. In addition to editor Yang Jin-mo, the filmmaking group consists of Avengers: The Age of Ultron and The Nice Gatsby colorist Vanessa Taylor. You will discover a purple hue sheathing the scenes with Web optimization-yeon within the current timeline, representing her unhappiness and despair. Previously, Younger-sook’s scenes glint with crimson, refracting anger, hazard and violence.

The stress you are feeling as the sport performs out is testomony to how deeply The Name attracts you in. Sure, it presents a high-concept time journey mind-melder, nevertheless it’s all propped up by the pillars of the mother-daughter relationships. Oh, and there is a lesson in there someplace in regards to the value of fixing your destiny, however fortunately this is not thrown with a splat in your face.

Like a Bong Joon-ho movie, right here director and author Lee Chung-hyun drops a stunning halfway twist that adjustments every part you recognize in regards to the enjoying discipline. All of it wraps up in an emotionally satisfying ending earlier than squeezing out one final heart-clunking shock.

The Name is verdant, ingenious, refined storytelling that leaves you buzzing for the sort of top-notch movies that do not typically discover their method onto Netflix. Dislodge it from the again of Netflix’s streaming cabinets ASAP.