REVIEW: Imagine this for a second: If ‘Stranger Things’—another crowd puller by Netflix—was made with Korean creative sensibilities in mind, and the entire cast and crew be stationed in Korea, and had M. Night Shyamalan as its director… That’s ‘All of Us are Dead’ in a nutshell.
This Lee Jae-kyoo project regurgitates—and sort of cements its position in world cinema, yet again—as to why all of us should pay close attention to artists from Korea: the K-everything rage is NOT over nothing, guys! What starts off as a harmless in- between-classes shiz at Hyosan High School soon takes the shape of a full-blown state crisis, with kids biting chunks of flesh off of each other, twisting their bodies in abnormal poses and positions, and gurgling out blood… human blood. This ‘turn’ of events can directly be credited to a certain group of bullies—not entirely though—and the gravity of this emergency is amplified by a lab-made virus (umm, rings a bell?). While the rest of the school is off to drain and drink human bodies, a sizable gang of classmates fight it out to stay afloat and make it to the other side of this epidemic: if that’s a possibility at all.
Fewer things can qualify as ‘far-fetched’ and/or ‘unbelievable’ since the pandemic blindsided us with its presence in 2020. And, this story just transports one back to those initial days of confusion: scary PPE kits, fights among peers over who brought the virus home, and the like.