Addicted

B

Directed by Park Yeon-Hoon

I frankly have no idea how the National Library got their paws on this obscure piece of Korean film but I decided to give "Addicted" a watch despite the fact that the cover appeared to be advertising a Korean Soap.

"Addicted" tells the sordid tale of two brothers, Dae-jin and Ho-jin, who live together in the same house along with Ho-jin's wife Eun-su. Ho-jin and Eun-su's marriage seems to be the stuff of legend but is tragically cut short when Ho-jin, on the way to Dae-jin's amateur car race, gets T-Boned by a truck, putting him in a coma. Unbelievably, Dae-jin also falls victim to a horrible crash down at the track and he too ends up in a coma. Not a very good day for the brothers...Dae-jin miraculously awakes from his coma to find Ho-jin in a vegetative state and
his wife understandably crestfallen. When Eun-su takes Dae-jin back home, he isn't quite the same, however. Rather, Dae-jin begins to show a startling resemblence to Ho-jin...

Films focusing on mistaken or alterered identities are a genre into themselves are most are not very good. Although "Addicted" doesn't really break any new ground in the genre, suffering not only from a rather weak premise for Dae-jin's new identity asd well as a very predictable outcome to the film, there is nonetheless a lot of value in "Addicted," mostly in the way Park Yeon-Hoon chooses to move away from the sensational and embrace the understated in his handling of the story. The film also offers an interesting perspective on the age old philosphical question of the difference between soul and body and if the value fo a person resides in one or the other or both together.