End of Animal

Strange things are happening to pregnant teenager Soon-young (Lee Min-Ji): first there's a blinding flash in the sky, her cab breaks down in the Korean swamp and all electric equipment fails. Then there's this lost boy with a baseball bat, an angry woman in bad shoes, a psychopath on a bicycle and some Thing prowling the landscape, hungry for meat... Jo Sung-Hee's dizzying debut utilises a familiar end-of-the-world scenario to tell a bizarre, pseudo-religious parable in icy art-movie style: there are scenes of unprecedented intensity here, and the climax is a stunner. But the film takes far too long to get going, and its obliqueness can prove trying.