Paradise Lost Review: Yeon Sang-ho’s Limp and Lurid Grief Drama

An uncharacteristically guileless thriller from Yeon Sang-ho, “Paradise Lost” sees the South Korean maestro behind “Train to Busan” and “Psychokinesis” turning in a dispiritingly flat film of too many ideas. Virtual Reality as a means to deal with grief collides with the tale of a child returning home after a decade, which in turn careens headfirst into a malformed saga of sociopathy and learned violence, resulting in a tri-pronged story where none of these themes has enough room to breathe.

Not unlike this year’s Japanese Cannes entry “Sheep In the Box” from Hirokazu Kore-eda, “Paradise Lost” pivots around an artificial copy of a child presumed dead. The key difference is that Yeon’s ghost-child can be accessed through V.R. glasses (Kore-eda’s was an android), but both movies suffer from the same lack of interest in confronting their own implications, or their most obvious drama.

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For about its first half hour, “Paradise Lost” adequately cements its “how” and “why.” When her adorable tween Sun-woo leaves for camp, single mother So-young (Kim Hyun-joo) waves goodbye as his bus departs, while something ominous hangs in the air. Her instincts prove correct. The bus goes missing, and when it’s recovered near an unstable mine, Sun-woo’s teacher and bus driver are found killed, along with the bodies of about half the students. The others are presumed dead, which paves the way for the aptly named tech conglomerate Transhuman to swoop in and create digital copies of the kids for their parents to cope — a project called “Children o Paradise.”

For the next 9 years, So-young lives on the edges of a dream state where Sun-woo is still alive, still running around her house, and still the age he was when he disappeared. Meanwhile, most of the other parents have begun stepping away from these avatars, something So-young is only forced to consider when she receives a message from the police asking her to come in. A DNA test has proven that a young drifter (Bae Hyun-sung) is, in fact, her missing child, setting the stage for complications surrounding her pristine memories and a less-than-perfect truth.

However, it isn’t long before “Paradise Lost” begins throwing more and more ideas at the wall to see what sticks. The teenage Sun-woo, it turns out, has a violent streak about him, and is even the suspect in a parallel investigation. Before So-young is ever challenged with the idea that her V.R. son is but a memory trapped in amber, the movie’s ultra-predictable twists and turns make each dilemma a whole lot easier to swallow — if only because each violent extreme makes parsing moral decisions a whole lot more convenient.

Kim is excellent in the role of a grieving mother — or rather, as excellent as she can be, in a film that yanks her away from visceral emotions at every turn, and thrusts her toward the next bit of exposition or plot. As the movie plods along, avoiding any and all questions of illusory emotions, Bae’s troubled young adult serves only to verbalize these underlying themes, rather than turning Sun-woo into a living embodiment of a wrenching emotional dilemma between sanitized fantasies and a thorny reality.

It’s a film in which every conversation — including an inordinate amount between So-young and a tech executive — gestures at emotional or ethical quandaries that exist beyond the screen. Unlike Yeon’s own “Jung_E,” about a gun-toting android copy, “Paradise Lost” can’t leave its futuristic musings to mere implication, because there’s no whizbang action to make room for. So-young’s predicament is all there is, and it’s deeply uninteresting, if only because its conclusions are both easy to reach, and foreshadowed in bright lights, leaving little room for doubt or possibility. Its technological perversions, unfortunately, end up quite mundane.

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.