SILVER SCREEN

NO LONGER USEFUL: ON PARK RI-WOONG’S THE LAND OF MORNING CALM

LEE BYEOL

August 12, 2026

Cinema has become one of the South Korea’s most successful exports, offering the world images of speed, wealth, technology, beauty, and spectacular inequality. Park Ri-woong’s “The Land of Morning Calm” looks somewhere else: toward a small fishing village, an aging population, and people whose work no longer seems capable of securing the future they were promised. Through the disappearance of a young fisherman, an elderly captain, a Vietnamese wife, and a mother who refuses to believe her son is dead, Park arrives at a question darker than poverty itself: What happens when an economy does not merely leave people behind, but decides that it no longer needs them?

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South Korean cinema has spent the better part of the twenty-first century accomplishing something that once seemed nearly impossible: becoming simultaneously national and universal. Films unmistakably rooted in the country’s history, class structure, architecture, food, language, and peculiar social pressures have found audiences almost everywhere. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020 now seems less like an isolated triumph than the symbolic culmination of a much longer development. Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong, Hong Sang-soo, Kim Jee-woon, and others had already established South Korea as home to the most consistently inventive national cinema in the world. Television followed, then music. Korea no longer simply exports culture; it has become one of the places from which global popular culture is imagined.

Success, however, has a way of narrowing our vision. International audiences have become familiar with a particular Korea: Seoul at night, immaculate apartments, corporate towers, violent class divisions, technological hypermodernity, beautiful young people, revenge, money, sex, food, fashion. Even when Korean films criticize this world, they often reproduce its extraordinary visual seductiveness. Meanwhile, the domestic film industry itself has struggled badly since the pandemic. In 2024, Korean cinemas were still attracting only a little more than half the admissions they had in 2019. The culture may be triumphant abroad while the infrastructure producing it remains surprisingly fragile.

It is against this strange combination of visibility and vulnerability that Park Ri-woong’s The Land of Morning Calm feels so unusual.

Still employed, for the moment.

Released in South Korea in November 2024, the film received recognition at the Busan International Film Festival and subsequently circulated through Asian and Korean film festivals, but it has remained largely outside the international conversation surrounding contemporary Korean cinema. There are no gleaming towers here, no chaebol dynasties, no fashionable Seoul neighborhoods. Park takes us instead to a small fishing village and to people who seem to inhabit not the future for which South Korea has become famous, but the remains of its past.

This is only Park’s second feature. His first, The Girl on a Bulldozer (2022), follows a nineteen-year-old woman, Hye-young, whose father is suddenly incapacitated after a mysterious accident. Left responsible for her younger brother and confronted by institutions that provide little help, she begins investigating what happened. The film’s memorable image—its furious young protagonist eventually commandeering a bulldozer—could easily have become an empty metaphor for rebellion. Park makes it more complicated. Hye-young’s aggression is presented not as heroic resistance so much as the increasingly logical behavior of someone for whom the ordinary mechanisms of society have ceased to function.

Something similar happens in The Land of Morning Calm, although the register is quieter, and the characters older. Once again, Park is interested in people whose apparently unreasonable actions begin to make sense when one understands the circumstances from which they arose.

A young fisherman named Yong-su has disappeared at sea. The elderly captain of his fishing boat, Yeong-guk, reports that Yong-su fell overboard. There is no body. Yong-su’s mother refuses to accept that her son is dead and returns obsessively to the harbor, waiting for him. His Vietnamese wife is left in an equally uncertain position. Then the village learns about an insurance policy. If Yong-su is declared dead, his wife stands to receive the money. Immediately, absence becomes suspicious.

The villagers begin looking differently at the Vietnamese wife. What had been a tragedy acquires the shape of a possible transaction. Grief and money occupy the same space. The missing man becomes simultaneously husband, son, employee, corpse, and insurance claim.

But Yeong-guk knows something the others do not. Yong-su is alive. His disappearance was planned. Unable to see a viable future in the life he was living, he arranged his own presumed death. The insurance payment is supposed to provide the means for his wife, his mother, and eventually himself to leave. He has not committed suicide. He has done something conceptually stranger: He has attempted to become dead without dying.

The scheme depends upon everyone accepting the fiction of his death. Yet his mother cannot. She continues searching, and her refusal to abandon hope prevents the bureaucratic transaction upon which the plan depends. Before an insurance company can pay out for a dead man, the living must agree that he is dead. The mother’s love, which should be beyond economics, becomes an economic obstruction. This is where Park’s modest film begins to open into something considerably larger. At first, The Land of Morning Calm appears to be about disappearance. In fact, it may be about usefulness.

Yong-su has reached the most brutal conclusion available to someone who believes he has failed economically: His family might benefit more from his absence than from his presence. As a living fisherman, he possesses a body capable of work. He can go to sea, catch fish, earn money, care for his mother, and live with his wife. But all of this labor is insufficient to produce the life he wants for them. The problem is not that Yong-su cannot work. The problem is that his work is no longer valuable enough. The insurance policy reverses the equation. Alive, Yong-su is poor. Dead, he is worth a specific amount of money.

Every bureaucracy has a counter for the things that cannot be fixed.

There is something almost comic in the obscenity of this calculation, and Park wisely does not turn it into a speech. The mechanism of life insurance already contains the absurdity. We routinely accept the proposition that a human life is priceless while simultaneously maintaining an enormous financial industry dedicated to establishing exactly what certain lives are worth. The contradiction is made tolerable because the money is intended to protect those left behind.

Yong-su merely takes the proposition seriously. If his labor cannot adequately support the people he loves but his death can, then death has become his most productive act. He does not actually need to die; he needs the economic system to believe that he has died. He therefore removes the part of himself that has ceased to be useful—his visible presence—while hoping to preserve the biological person underneath it.

This might sound like a straightforward critique of capitalism, but The Land of Morning Calm is more interesting than that. Park surrounds Yong-su with people facing different versions of the same question. His wife is Vietnamese. Her nationality matters because she has crossed a geographic as well as an economic border. International marriage has become part of the social landscape of rural South Korea, particularly in communities where population decline and the departure of younger Koreans have altered the possibilities of family life. Park does not turn Yong-su’s wife into a sociological illustration, but neither does he pretend that her foreignness is invisible. Once money enters the story, the village knows immediately how to (re)interpret her. The grieving wife becomes the foreign wife; the foreign wife becomes the beneficiary; the beneficiary becomes a possible suspect. Her identity is reorganized according to function. This is one of the film’s quiet cruelties. People who have known one another can suddenly become categories. Wife. Foreigner. Mother. Captain. Fisherman. Beneficiary. Dependent. Dead man.

And perhaps no character embodies this more movingly than Yeong-guk. The old captain belongs to a generation for whom work and identity have been almost impossible to separate. He knows the sea. He knows the rhythms of the village and possesses practical knowledge accumulated through decades of repetition. In another kind of film this would make him a repository of wisdom, the familiar elder whose traditional knowledge corrects the arrogance of modernity. Park is not particularly interested in that sentimental figure. Yeong-guk is simply old. His world is becoming old with him.

Waiting, too, is a form of work.

This is what makes the fishing village such an important setting. South Korea’s transformation over the past seventy years has been so extraordinarily rapid that a single lifetime can encompass what elsewhere might appear to be several historical periods. A country devastated by war became an industrial economy, then a technological powerhouse, and finally a cultural superpower. Seoul is one of the great physical expressions of this acceleration. Buildings disappear and reappear. Neighborhoods are reconstructed. Technologies become obsolete almost as soon as they are introduced. A fishing village operates according to another rhythm. The sea does not become faster because the economy does. Fish are caught, boats return, nets are repaired, bodies grow old. Park places his characters inside a landscape that seems almost embarrassingly resistant to the national story of acceleration.

Seen this way, the title The Land of Morning Calm begins to acquire an irony. The phrase is an old poetic designation for Korea, one that evokes mountains, mist, still water, and an almost timeless tranquility. Park gives us that storied Korea at precisely the moment when the country’s international identity could hardly be further from calm. Contemporary South Korea is associated with speed, competition, production, and export. Park returns to the supposedly timeless landscape and finds that time has been moving there too. It has simply left people behind.

The film is therefore not really about people excluded from prosperity. That formulation is too easy. Its characters are not standing outside modern South Korea looking in. They are products of the same transformation. They have simply ceased to be necessary to it. There is a difference between being poor and being superfluous. Poverty still implies a position within an economic order; one has too little of what others possess. Superfluity is more frightening. It suggests that the system can continue perfectly well without you. This fear extends far beyond Park’s fishing village.

Modern societies have become remarkably good at describing human beings according to their productivity. Children are prepared to become productive. Adults are expected to remain productive. Governments worry about the ratio between productive workers and aging populations. Immigration is discussed in terms of labor shortages. Education becomes an investment in future earning capacity. Even leisure is increasingly expected to produce something: health, knowledge, experiences, photographs, self-improvement. Old age presents an obvious problem to this logic. So does care. So does love. None of these produces value in a measurable way.

The body keeps its own employment record.

South Korea makes the contradiction especially visible because its astonishing economic ascent was built upon an equally astonishing culture of work. Productivity was not merely an economic necessity, but part of the country’s modern identity. To participate in the transformation of Korea was to work. The reward was the future. But eventually the future arrives. What happens then to the people whose work helped produce a world that no longer needs their work?

Yeong-guk stands somewhere inside that question. So does Yong-su’s mother. So, in a different way, does Yong-su himself. He is young enough to work but trapped in an occupation and a place that no longer seem capable of delivering the promised future. His solution is not to work harder. It is to disappear.

This is what makes his insurance fraud so much more unsettling than an ordinary crime. Yong-su does not want luxury. He is not attempting some glamorous escape. His scheme emerges from care. He wants to provide for his wife and mother. He commits an antisocial act in order to fulfill one of society’s most conventional expectations of a man: that he take care of his family. The responsible thing and the criminal thing have become the same thing.

Park repeatedly creates these uncomfortable overlaps. The mother’s devotion to her son is beautiful, but it threatens the plan designed to save her. Yeong-guk’s participation in the deception is dishonest, but it originates in compassion. The villagers’ suspicion is ugly, yet the circumstances genuinely are suspicious. Yong-su’s disappearance is fraudulent, but its purpose is not simply selfish. Nobody occupies the morally correct position because morality itself has become entangled with necessity.

A lifetime of useful knowledge, with nowhere in particular to put it.

This may be why the film feels so different from the more spectacular forms of social criticism for which contemporary Korean cinema has become internationally celebrated. Parasite, for instance, constructs an almost architectural image of inequality: upstairs and downstairs, rich and poor, sunlight and basement. Park Ri-woong is working on a deliberately smaller canvas. There is no mansion to infiltrate, no corporation to expose, no villain whose defeat would restore justice. There are only people who need one another. And that, finally, is where The Land of Morning Calm escapes the bleakness of its own argument.

If the film asks what happens when human beings cease to be useful, Yeong-guk gradually suggests another way of thinking about value. He becomes involved in other people’s lives not because doing so benefits him but because they have become his responsibility. The distinction is crucial. Usefulness is conditional. Care is not. To find someone useful is to value what that person can do for us. To care for someone is to accept, at least momentarily, the possibility that they may do nothing for us at all.

Family history, available behind the counter.

A child is cared for before becoming useful. An elderly parent may be cared for after ceasing to be useful. We care for the sick precisely when their ability to participate productively has been interrupted. Friendship repeatedly requires us to give time to people when they are least entertaining, least successful, and least capable of returning the favor. Love, at its most serious, is an agreement to remain after usefulness has ended.

Park never needs to formulate this as a philosophy. He places it in bodies: an old captain, an aging mother, a young fisherman hiding from his own life, a woman who has crossed a continent and discovers that the community around her can reduce her almost instantly to the fact that she is foreign. These are small lives by the standards through which contemporary culture measures importance. None of them controls a corporation or changes the course of Korean history. Their disappearance would not register very far beyond the village. Which is precisely the point.

Care: the least efficient system humans have devised, and perhaps the most necessary.

At a moment when South Korea has become more visible than perhaps at any other time in its modern history, Park Ri-woong has made a film about people becoming invisible. The contradiction gives The Land of Morning Calm its peculiar force. The Korea usually presented to the world is young, technologically sophisticated, productive, stylish, and endlessly renewable. Park looks toward a harbor and asks what happens to everything that cannot be renewed. Boats become old. Villages become old. Mothers become old. Captains become old. Forms of labor disappear. People migrate. Children leave. Economies reorganize themselves around whatever comes next. Eventually almost everyone becomes, by one measure or another, no longer useful. Perhaps civilization begins with what we then decide to do with them.

Lee Byeol was born in Seoul in 1975 and grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. He studied film and history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and has written on Korean cinema, migration, and the increasingly complicated relationship between work and usefulness. He returned in 2019 to Edmonton, where he lives with his mother and has been trying, with limited success, to convince her that watching three films a day constitutes employment.

Cover image: The future is apparently somewhere further down the road.