Cobweb is dramatic, hilarious, scary and campy. It’s the story of a director who feels the need to change the ending of his film. Consumed by criticism of his lack of originality, he decides that this last film has to be his masterpiece. The crew is forced to return, including the actors, and the attempt to save the film is made with time constraints, back-and-forth with the censors and all sorts of shenanigans.
With fluid but masterful movements, Jee-woon Kim creates a particularly metatextual film that is also a tribute to Korean films from the 1970s. He constructs a film-within-a-film, using the transitions from black and white to colour as aesthetic demarcations. Song Kang-ho (actor in Parasite, and many other films) is director Kim, who needs two extra days to remake his movie. Apart from the more normal setbacks, Kim also has to deal with interference from the censorship authorities — paralleling the reality in South Korea, where the censorship carried out by the military regime (of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan) between 1973 and 1992 had strong repercussions on the cinema of the time. (Ana Cabral Martins)
