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[HanCinema's Film Review] "Oh! My God Returns"

The first scene of "Oh! My God Returns" is a documentarian clip establishing how in 1998, South Korea had to agree to austerity terms dictated by the International Monetary Fund in the wake of the East Asian Financial Crisis. Then, it's on to Ah-rong (played by Byun Joo-eun), a woman on the street desperately looking for a bathroom. She finds succor at home, where she barges in on Sang-hoon (played by Choi Sung-kook) who is still in the process of using it. That's all there is to the joke, really, and it gets repeated a lot.

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The other most common form of low-brow humor we find here is the sex joke. Which is to say, we are frequently treated to leery creepy male gaze shots of perverts spying on the sexy parts of the female body, usually that of Da-rong (played by Han Bo-min). We are then told that these perverts are bad, naughty people for treating women as sex objects in this way. Evidently writer/director Song Chang-yong does not see the irony in how he is engaging in the exact same behavior, just behind the camera.

The only time this sex joke is funny is with Sang-hoon's wife Ji-won (played by Kim Sung-kyung), who dresses like an unremarkable housewife yet is somehow constantly turning him on by just making natural sounds or movements in her daily routine. I mean, in retrospect even those scenes have some pretty disturbingly rapey undertones, but still. There's something almost wholesome about a man lusting after his long suffering wife, when all the other crude sex humor is about women putting up with this behavior in an employment context.

Oh yeah, the plot. The crux of it is that Sang-hoon and Ji-won are managing the household and trying to make ends meet. Who the other characters are was not entirely clear to me. Sometimes they're treated like extended family members, and other times they're just treated as boarders who pay rent. I am, at least, pretty sure that Han-ah (played by Kim Chae-yeon-I) is Sang-hoon and Ji-won's daughter. She's always interrupting her father's attempts to sexually assault her mother.

There isn't really a plot at play in "Oh! My God Returns" so much as there is endlessly repetitive situation comedy. These jokes are not funny. They're just sexual humiliation for the women and physical humiliation for the men. The practically magical solution that fixes up the whole teetering on the edge of bankruptcy storyline is wholly unearned, both in the narrative sense and also because I wasn't sure why we were supposed to want the characters to succeed in the first place.

But even on just a technical level the movie is horribly subpar. One weird scene confused me for a moment because Ah-rong appeared to have grown a moustache. This was because her bangs had inched out slightly ahead of her profile, accidentally creating the illusion of facial hair. Such errors do not normally appear in movies since they are easily fixed with additional takes. When a movie can't even solve a problem that basic...well, that's when you know you aren't in for a good time.

Review by William Schwartz

"Oh! My God Returns" is directed by Song Chang-yon and features Choi Sung-kook, Song Jae-ha, Kim Sung-kyung and Byun Joo-eun.

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