The Freaking Family

Families? Who needs them? Certainly not this lot.

They live together in Seoul. Granny is senile and mad. Mummy rushes about like a wasp on stilts. Daddy is playing away with the neighbour upstairs. The teenage daughter is planning on doing a bunk with her drippy biker boyfriend. The son is digging a bomb shelter in the garden and won’t stop.

Coping with dysfunction at this level is exhausting and Mummy looks like she should put her feet up and let chaos reign for 40 winks. The decision has already been taken because chaos is on its way in the form of nuclear armed rockets from the North. There is 30 minutes before annihilation. They don’t need that long. This is a DIY self-destruct situation, people. Wipe the blood off the walls.

Park Soo-young and Park Jae-young have made an almost perfectly skewed short film, as funny and dark as anything Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson might cook up. An Jin-soo, as the harassed wife/mother, brings honour to those who try and fail to stay calm in the face of anarchic disobedience. For those who don’t believe an ordered state is possible in a world governed by insecure tyrants, this will make your socks rock.