An Interview with Syeyoung Park

South Korean writer/director Syeyoung Park’s sophomore feature film, The Fin (2025), establishes him as a director to watch. His beguiling dystopian thriller is incredibly atmospheric, with distinctive visuals – both the ocean and the sky are disarmingly red, not blue. The ecological differences are a result of the toxicity of the air and water; one character even describes tasting bitter black raindrops. 

In this hazardous environment, every drop of water must be conserved for a cleaner future, but dirt is visible on everyone’s visage. Omegas, mutant outcasts, who have fins on their back and distorted feet and toes, are kept beyond a wall and tasked with cleaning up toxic waste. However, if Omegas get over the wall, they are also hunted – there is a 10 million won bounty for their capture – because they are dangerous; their screams above water can kill. 

The Fin depicts the efforts of Su-jin (Pureum Kim), a government employee, to track Mia (Yeji Yeon), an Omega in hiding, who works in a fish store. Customers are prompted to recall their past fishing memories or catch “the fish of the day” in a tank filled with artificial water. Mia has been contacted by an Omega (Goh-woo) who delivers a message to her about her recently deceased father, which causes her conflict. As Mia tries to survive in this post-apocalyptic society, Su-jin becomes increasingly critical of her role and the state’s anti-Omega stance. 

The Fin offers an interesting allegory about politics, immigrants, and the environment. Park’s strength as a filmmaker is his worldbuilding. This is a highly textured film that showcases a unified Korea where characters are all grimy because “patriotism wears a dirty face.” 

Park spoke with Senses of Cinema about his impressive film just after its world premiere screening at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.

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The Fin is based on a short you made in 2017. Can you talk about developing the project and expanding it to a feature? 

I made a short with the same title and some of the same storyline in film school. It was my first time acting as my own cinematographer and editor. As you can imagine, it didn’t turn out so well. I didn’t know how to operate the camera, or converse with the actors. My professor looked at the film and said, “This is not a film. I’m not going to let you screen this”. But I liked the source material, and I kept it close to my heart. After I shot many shorts and my first feature, I felt I was ready to make this feature. 

The Fin © Syeyoung Park

I found your world-building fascinating. What decisions did you make about this dystopian society? 

I tried to imagine a future where South and North Korea were unified. I didn’t want South Korea to “win”. It may feel like North Korea won the unification war. It may feel that South Korea won. I wanted there to be a balance between both sides, and it was very tricky to find the right political context, or environment, or atmosphere. It was important to show characters living their lives, but we don’t show the actual rules they abide by – as opposed to showing how they interact with their parents, or their environment. I wanted their gestures and mannerisms to manifest the political climate as opposed to it being very evident.

Thinking about the world-building and what came before that, was the limitations of the budget. I was working off an initial production fee of under 20,000 Euros. I wanted to make a dystopian film set in a future that feels like the past. I wasn’t sure how I would achieve this visually. I focused on minute details. All the storytelling was done through subjective shots of the characters. I could make the perspective more “narrow,” and not show spectacular views or action. I tried to use the low budget to my advantage. Most of the locations were abandoned buildings. No one knows who owned them. We shot there very quickly. The fishing store is an actual fishing store. The owner lent it to us for three days for free. We wanted to shoot another day and when we went back, we found out he had torn it down already. We shot parts of scenes in a basement with nets and closeups.

I also want to discuss your ideas about the mutant Omegas and imbuing them with certain qualities, such as the deathly scream (reminiscent of The Shout) and how the fins turn radioactive after death. There are ideas of racism and difference. 

One of the initial ideas for the Omegas came from my feet. My pinky toe grows not linearly, but diagonally. When I put on my shoes, my pinky toes are pushed together, so I will end up with a diamond-shaped foot in a couple of years. This was genetically passed down from my grandparents. 

Socio-politically, I travel around Korea on my motorcycle and when I go along the seaside I see a lot of immigrants, or non-Korean people, and most of them are living and working in let’s say “hostile” environments. What is interesting is that these immigrants were not all inland but spread out along the seaside. This is a natural occurrence in many Asian countries, where many non-traditional ethnic people are living near the ocean shores. This geographical push to the outskirts of the country was interesting to me, and I wanted to develop that. That lead me to the Omegas. What is the relationship that immigrants have to the ocean was one of the starting questions I had. The fin is a MacGuffin to propel the story forward. The reference was Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The head is the main character in that film, and you see it deteriorate as the film progresses. Near the end of the film, the head is in a cloth bag, with flies circling around it, and there is a pungent smell. I wanted to explore this idea of a human body part decaying throughout the film. It is a metaphor for whatever you want.

The Fin © Syeyoung Park

I really appreciated the visual design of the film. Can you talk about using colours and texture to tell the story? I could feel the grime and practically smell the sulphur. What were you going for in the film’s palette and tone? It is very atmospheric. The film plays out almost like a fever dream.

The post-production for The Fin was 3 years. The normal procedure for post-production is that you get the picture lock first, and then you do the edit, and the colour design and then the sound design after. I did my own colour for the first two years, so I was colouring simultaneously as I worked with my editors. I was able to add smoke layers while doing the rough cuts. I was able to spend two years experimenting with textures, grains, and colour. The texture and feeling of the atmospheres of the film was one of the most important parts of the visual storytelling. It was crucial to toy around with it while shaping the narrative aspects of the film.

This started as a reaction to Korean cinema that was being shown on Netflix or OTT platforms around the world, where Korea was depicted as a very clean, cyber futuristic, technologically advanced country. The colour palettes for them were very neon blue, futuristic green, and purplish. I did not feel it was a good reflection of the surroundings I was living in where there was a lot of pollution in the air. It wasn’t as red as in the film. I wanted to diverge from the mainstream colour palettes seen on those streaming platforms. You see in American films where they depict Mexico in a very yellowish colour palette although they shot in Vancouver or somewhere else. I found it fascinating that you can sloppily slap on a colour palette and say it is another place. The colour red was the most important colour and hardest to get right in the grading because red has the least amount of digital information in the grading process. We experimented with all sorts of textures in the colour grade. I wanted to get red right. We have a lot of blown out colour information in the film where it is not colouring, but the nonexistence of colour data. This results in a very different red which leads to the last shot of the film where you feel the wave forms.

Likewise, can you talk about using space? You establish a sense of claustrophobia in some scenes – Su-jin trying to get through a crowd – and in others, isolation, which convey ideas of oppression.

To be honest, most of this was the result of us having no budget. We were shooting on the street and right next to us there’s a convenience store, or a group of people we couldn’t chase off. We had to adopt to that environment, and we used a lot of telephoto lenses. First day of shooting I had a completely different storyboard with a lot of elaborate movements and none of that could work, so I used a lot of zoom lenses and quick pans which developed into the language of the film. I edited all the footage on the day we shot it. I discovered that the film would look like this on the first day and then I adapted the [visual] language more. I understood it was claustrophobic after shooting it. A lot of realisations came on set.

The crowd scene was one of the last scenes we shot. We only had around 15 extras and most of them were featured as Omegas and the government workers, so they were portraying a lot of different characters! I grouped them together and made them push each other as close as possible and I put the camera as far away as possible to contract the space and we shot like this for a lot of takes. We tried to make 15 people look like 100 people, so we had to get close.

The sound design is also really interesting, from the blare of an alarm to the noises of the city and in the fish shop, to the scream of the Omegas. It is often disturbing. What can you say about developing the disorienting soundscape? 

The keyword for the sound was to be as subjective as possible to the characters. One of the things I wanted to explore was what the sound of a mermaid would be like? The Omegas are mermaids in a sense. The mythology of mermaids and sirens is that they have beautiful sounds – the siren calls. I wanted to play around with this. We developed a lot of siren sounds based off of whale sounds or train horns. With the sound designer, we tried many different ways of permeating this sound on screen. Especially with Su-jin, the government worker, there are always sounds of sirens echoing throughout. It is sort of a ghost story. I wanted to permeate as much of the mermaid sounds as possible as reflections of Su-jin’s psyche and being hypnotised by Mia, the Omega character. In addition, when you have headphones on, you can’t hear properly except your heartbeat, your breathing, and the circulation of the blood system in your head. When Su-jin put headphones on, we could tell the emotion of the characters through their bpm and the rate of their heartbeat.

The Fin © Syeyoung Park

In The Fin, people are instructed to conserve water for a cleaner future. However, the world they live in is dirty and toxic. Can you discuss the film’s ideas about environmental harm? Is this an allegory about protecting against mutation?

The saving the water program came in post-production. We didn’t think of this during the shooting of the film or when I was writing the script. I wanted to make everyone’s face dirty because of the air pollution. I needed to give a reason for why they were so dirty. The producers and I came up with the “Save the Water” program and we shot exteriors to explain this. Korea is surrounded by water on three sides and at the top of the country, we are surrounded by a wall that separates North and South Korea. No one can drink the ocean water. There was news that Japan was leaking toxic waste in the water, and their water was seeping into the Korean coast and people were afraid of sushi imported from Japan. The fear led to hate towards things we do not know about, and this [felt like] a political agenda. It was interesting seeing how effectively and easily propaganda could control what we fear or not. Another optic was shooting during Covid. During the pandemic, everyone was wearing masks, and they were afraid to talk and communicate with each other. 

There are also moments featuring a unified Korea that are propagandistic, but also anti-government sentiments in the film. Can you talk about your political messaging and ideas of law and order vs. chaos?

What was important for me in the film was to show both sides – the government side and non-government side. There is conflict between these two people. Su-jin was indoctrinated with government ideology, and Mia was not; she was hiding and wanted to live a normal life. What I wanted to show was the attitude of not standing up to anything. Just being silent is the problem. Su-jin is only observing. I think she is a coward because all she does is watch and observe. For Su-jin, it is about government, political, and ideological rules that she was or was not abiding to. Her conflict was there. Mia was the result of not wanting to abide by traditional laws in Korea. In Korea, we honour the death of our parents and there are strict rules about burial and the funeral process we have to go through. Mia is given the dead remains of her father but did not want to follow the [traditional] process. 

There is very little backstory about the characters. We get a glimpse of Su-jin’s homelife and work; we see how Mia behaves at work and how she tries to hide her status as an Omega. What informed these characters? Su-jin is a novice, and a guide for viewers. We learn who they are mostly through their actions. 

I do not show the backstory of the characters; I show their day-to-day life. We are spending real time with them and going through what they are going through. There is as little exposition as possible, which is ironic, because the film is set in a completely different world to the one we are in right now. Seeing their point of view while being exposed to this very different world gives the audience a feeling of distance, but [viewers] are also overwhelmed by what is happening. I wanted the audience to have this feeling of being alien and being enticed by it, and the colours, and the atmosphere. It was hard to not give exposition and keep viewers glued to the screen.

One thing we did in terms of character development was in the use of music. Mia is always in a place where there is music. In the shoemaker’s store the radio is playing. She is making the music when she plays the piano in one scene. In the fishing store, she is blasting old Korean folk music. There is very Korean-ised music as well as Eric Satie, which is non-Korean music. I wanted to see her going through different cultural musical periods because music is transcendental. The world may be alien but the music is universal.

How do you want viewers to respond to your film? Is this a call to action? 

I don’t know how audiences should react to the film, but they should not react as Su-jin does. It is important to me that viewers invest in Su-jin, but by the end they should feel anger towards her, while also accepting that Su-jin’s actions were non-escapable. It’s a tragedy of sorts.