Paradise Lost

It’s bleak, at times genuinely frightening, and anchored by a formidable performance from Kim Hyun-joo. This isn’t a film about what AI can do. It’s about what it can’t fix.

In a world where people increasingly turn to AI to meet emotional needs, Paradise Lost leaves us with a somber warning about what happens when something designed to help us process our emotions and get through life adaptively becomes the very we depend on and can no longer live without.

It makes for some captivating entertainment (thanks in large part to Kim and Bae’s performances) but only scratches the surface of what I assume the novel stretches further to attain.

Yeon is usually a master of nestling character drama between sci-fi concepts, but he falters here by refusing to engage with his story’s emotional Catch-22s. Instead, he presents his notions plainly, so much that even his tale of a mother’s grief ends up swept aside, in favor of a more lurid procedural that barely gels with the film at hand. Worse yet, it wraps up neatly before it truly has the chance to get going, leaving audiences with nothing to ponder, whether about loss, mortality, or our evolving digital world.

Yeon Sang-ho’s Paradise Lost is an awkward, frustratingly inert blend of underdeveloped ideas about AI and familiar thriller mechanics.