Seobok (2021)

Seobok has the rare sci-fi spark where the big idea—immortality at a human cost—lands with both spectacle and soul, turning a chase thriller into something quietly haunting. Lee Yong-ju stages sleek, nerve-rattling action with a polished visual sheen, but the real hook is the evolving bond between Gong Yoo’s worn-down agent and Park Bo-gum’s eerily innocent “new kind of human,” a pairing that gives the film its heartbeat. The vibe is tense and melancholy, with bursts of kinetic, almost anime-scale mayhem, all while it keeps asking unsettling questions about what we owe our creations and what it means to live knowing you’ll die. If you want pure, nonstop action you may find the philosophical pauses deliberate, but if you like your thrills laced with thought and feeling, this one sticks with you.

Seobok is clearly aiming for a sleek Korean sci-fi thriller with big ethical questions about cloning and immortality, wrapped in a chase movie and a growing bond between two damaged people. The problem is it can’t decide whether it wants to be a thoughtful, eerie mystery or a sentimental melodrama, so the tone lurches and the themes end up feeling more stated than earned. The plotting is fairly predictable and the pacing drags in stretches, which makes the “deep” moments land softer than the film seems to think they do. Still, Gong Yoo and Park Bo-gum give it some heart and the action has flashes of style, but if you’re hoping for tight writing, consistent mood, or genuinely mind-bending sci-fi, this may test your patience.