Breathing Underwater
and two other more mainstream South Korean films from 2016 you can watch for free right now
When I first started writing about South Korean film in 2012, I was motivated primarily by the sincere belief that discussing movies, even if my readers couldn’t actually watch them, had intrinsic value. It’s strange to look back at how the streaming market has evolved over the past twelve years, and see how…well, it’s the same basic situation. Most South Korean films simply don’t have any distribution in English, even though a lot more of them than you’d think have English subtitles. By and large, nobody bothers to purchase the rights for them.
All the same, I’ve officially been at this long enough that some of the more arcane film distribution companies do pick up these rights, through a process I frankly can’t describe as being anything more than sheer dumb luck. Breathing Underwater is a genuinely beautiful documentary about the women divers of Jeju. It was a pleasant surprise for me to look at my e-mail and learn that OVID acquired the rights to start streaming it on July 3rd, even if eight years later, you’d pretty much need another documentary entirely in order to get into what’s going on with the women divers of Jeju right now.
But looking at other movies I reviewed back in October of 2016, it’s strange to think that there’s still no official distributer in most of the world for The Net, an absurdist Kim Ki-duk drama about a North Korean fisherman who drifts into the wrong side of the Demilitarized Zone by accident and struggles to convince anyone that it was, in fact, an accident. As tempting as it is to blame this on Kim Ki-duk’s getting hit by #MeToo, The Net struggled for distribution well before anyone accused him of anything. The reasons for this aren’t surprising. Hardly a week after I saw The Net I reviewed the documentary Spy Nation, which discusses how real-life defectors were accused of being spies for purely jingoistic purposes by the South Korean government.
This is all highly socially conscious material, is a big reason why it can’t be watched legally in English. Mass market films are a little better. A Violent Prosecutor, a major South Korean release at the time, can be seen as of this writing on Roku, Tubi, and Freevee for free. Ironically, the sheer cynical comedy of this film (it’s about a corrupt prosecutor who turns on an equally corrupt politician) can only really be understood in terms of the political stuff that was going on at the time. In many ways A Violent Prosecutor is just a more family friendly version of the ideas presented in The Net, which is itself just a more family friendly version of the ideas presented in Spy Nation.
It’s all pretty bleak stuff. Luck-Key, though, the big box office hit of October 2016, was a fairly mainstream movie. And a good one, occasionally questionable gender politics notwithstanding, with a strong identity swap premise and zany amnesia that makes the most of its lead’s strong acting talents totally out of proportion with his homely appearance. That, you can watch on Roku, Tubi, or Plex for free.
All of this is quite momentary, though. Distribution rights for films like this can disappear at a moment’s notice. Oh, and if you were wondering how the South Korean box office was doing this particular week, June of 2024? The Roundup: Punishment has just about wrapped up its eleven million viewer plus run of being the fourth installment of a supercop franchise, an ominous development for reasons beyond the scope of this article. The moody sci-fi virtual reality film Wonderland has been doing quite poorly. This too, is about as ominous as it sounds- but not really within the scope of this article.
I know next-to-nothing about South Korean film, so this was interested to read. I didn't expect to learn that Korean films, even ones with subtitles, have weak distribution in the U.S. I incorrectly assumed, since K-POP and Kdrama's are quite popular, that Korean film would have a large fan base too. I'll definitely be looking up a couple of these. I love watching impactful films, and it's a cherry-on-top that they're free. Hopefully they don't expire before I get to them!