2 out of 5

Directed by: Kim Jee-woon

Cobweb, a film about making a film, perhaps loses something in translation to English – there’s a sense that the film’s title is better buried in a pun in the original language somewhere – but even with that grace, a final shot of filmmaker Kim-yeol (Song Kang-ho), staring out at the audience with a flat, unemotive look, seems to suggest how we’re intended to feel about the preceding two hours. And even with that grace – that there’s a meta all-for-nothing commentary about filmmaking; or a purposeful juxtaposition of the relative hijinx Kim goes through and his ultimately flat affectation – this final shot lacks punch; it lacks commitment. Director Kim Jee-woon was definitely going for something here, it just didn’t translate to screen, and I doubt that was part of the meta-commentary.

Kim-yeol dreams in black and white: of a better ending to the film he just wrapped with his studio. Once a premiere director, Kim is now seen as turning out cheapies-for-hire of a sort, while believing / hoping in his ability to produce art. So it is with true passion that he returns to his studio and states he can make a masterpiece of their recent pic by reshooting the ending. But… no. The cost; the sets and equipment are needed elsewhere; the actors’ schedules can’t work out; and most importantly, we’re set in the 70s studio system and the censors are likely to turn down this new, genre-pushing ending – something we end up in seeing in bits and pieces, but is also somewhat surrealist chopped up and / or not shown / explained to us.

While Kim’s studio chairman flat out turns him down, junior exec Shin Mi-do (Jeon Yeo-been) is on Kim’s side, believing in his vision. Let’s shoot the movie anyway, she encourages. And off they go.

A piece of this setup that establishes the off-foot on which the movie keeps stumbling is that Kim is essentially pitched as a ne’er-do-well – we’re on his side as an underdog, but not wholly convinced of his skills – but most of the crew seems to side with him, like Mi-do. She might be on the more extreme end, but he has the ear and dedication of cameramen and other producers on set, and though the actors badmouth the sudden scheduling of the reshoot, there are established relationships there. So it’s not a very clear perspective on our lead; a wishy-washiness that feels a bit odder if we start to consider how Kim Jee-woon may be inserting himself into the narrative.

Structurally, Cobweb is intended to be a series of escalations: things that keep going wrong, and preventing Kim from getting this film finished before the chairman or the censors realize what’s what and shut things down. The escalations are in the script (Shin Yeon-shick), but my guess is that was written more as comedy, and Jee-woon is after something with more layers. Unfortunately, some artistic aspirations impose style over substance: we volley back and forth between black and white film footage and the “behind the scenes” in color, as our real world narrative continues. On screen, what I interpret to be various tributes to films / filmmakers which or who have inspired Jee-woon are lovely, but as they are, as mentioned, rather purposefully chopped and screwed up so we get only extreme highlights of the movie-within-the-movie, you can’t really get into any of these sequences beyond the visuals, and because they are so stylized, there seems to have been the decision to lock down the “reality” shots. In short – they are surprisingly bland. And as a potential Jee-woon proxy, in order to drive home either that all-for-naught point, or to forcefully remove any overt commentary, Kim-yeol gives us a few mantras on the importance of film, but is otherwise, as played by Kang-ho, pretty mute throughout. That final shot is not an anomaly.

From afar, I get it. Similarly, when I think of the escalations from the story, it’s pretty funny and clever, but there’s absolutely potential for it to have been more so. Pushing Cobweb as farce would have better assisted its juxtapositions, and perhaps made some of its final contemplations more affecting.

We do get to see the uninterrupted, reshot ending towards the film’s conclusion, and there’s magic in knowing / having seen how the shots were stitched together. And much of the additional cast are fantastic, with especially Yeo-been a hoot, and actress Yu-rim (Krystal Jung) a really entertaining stand-in for on-set dramatics.

All the bones of a whip-smart, really funny movie are there in Cobweb, but I hope I’ve sufficiently outlined the irony: a movie about the difficulty of producing “art” overworks itself into a compromised vision of that better film.