cinema

If you need to know one thing about Flu (2013), know that it tries very, very hard to convey to its audience the importance of treating people with dignity and humanity — and that within the first five minutes, it fails in the most hamfisted of ways. It might seem like a strange choice to review a disaster film for a SFF column, but when you think about it, disaster films also take a premise based on scientific facts — in this case, an epidemic — and extrapolate it to an extreme level. Directed by Kim Sung Soo and written by Kim and Lee Young Jong, Flu imagines what would happen if a mutated version of the avian flu virus were to hit Bundang, South Korea. Infected patients die within 36 hours, sporting large rashes and vomiting blood, all of which results in mass panic and the inhumane detainment of Bundang’s citizens, who are all condemned to extermination by a political elite more concerned with saving their own skins than valuing the lives of the ordinary people. At the center of Flu is Kim In Hae (Soo Ae), a doctor involved in the effort to find a cure for the virus; Kang Ji Goo (Jang Hyuk), an everyman rescue worker who crosses paths with In Hae after saving her from a car crash; and Mi Reu (Park Min Ha), In Hae’s daughter. And that’s where the movie really falters, because even while trying to tell a story about the grotesqueries of a callous government wholly unconcerned about protecting its people, it chooses the most respectable characters as the heroes of the story.