KUALA LUMPUR, April 27 — In Yoon Sung-hyun’s Time to Hunt, the futuristic city of Seoul is transformed into a bleak, crumbling dystopian world with empty streets with the Korean won severely devalued.

It could easily be the perfect setting for zombies to roam around but instead, the much-talked-about thriller that’s currently streaming on Netflix sheds light on a more realistic apocalypse – a capitalist one.

From the start, Yoon wanted his film to serve as a metaphor for the survival of young people in the modern world.

When he was in the early stages of making the film, the phrase “Hell Joseon” started becoming popular among younger Koreans.

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The term is often used to express the proverbial living hell of growing inequality, unemployment and working conditions in modern society.

“So I thought, ‘You want to see real hell? I need to show them what true hell looks like in a dystopian world’,” said Yoon in a recent interview.

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“Because I would use the phrase too, and even then, I knew it wasn’t really ‘hell’ but I related to what it meant.”

Time to Hunt tells the story of four friends (Lee Je-hoon, Ahn Jae-hong, Choi Woo-shik and Park Jeong-min) who turn to a life of crime but end up being hunted by a killer (Park Hae-soo).

The film premiered at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival on February 22 and was the first Korean film to be screened in the Berlinale Special section before its worldwide release on Netflix last week.

Yoon, who made the critically acclaimed film Bleak Night, thought it would be fun to create a film that visualised the term that resonated with so many in his country,

“The biggest keyword among young people of today was ‘survival’ and I wanted to unravel that in a simple storyline against a hellish background – I wanted to adequately convey those factors and emotions felt by today’s youth,” he said.

The director, who wanted to make the space an allegorical setting was left shocked after visiting a few countries in South America as part of the film’s research.

“The atmosphere of the slum areas and the air of spaces where the value of money has been destroyed, and the way such spaces are formed – I think these had a big impact.

“There are spaces like these in the US and Africa so I tried to find and reference a lot of the slum areas that I thought were most likely to be what Korea could be if such things happened here,” said Yoon.

He used those harsh living conditions as reference and brought that dystopian world to life on screen.

Actor Park Hae-soo who plays the killer Han says filming the hospital scene made his ‘heart race’. —Picture courtesy of Netflix
Actor Park Hae-soo who plays the killer Han says filming the hospital scene made his ‘heart race’. —Picture courtesy of Netflix

As the relentless killer Han, actor Hae-soo used one of the most chilling characters in cinemas as minor inspiration.

“I didn’t reference a particular film, but the director and I did talk about Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men for minor references in some aspects,” Hae-soo said.

The actor added that shooting the hospital scene was one of the most intense moments for him that lingered on long after Yoon yelled ‘cut’.

“Even after we were done with the shooting process, the sense of disconnection from the world stuck with me and I could feel my heart race for quite some time,” he said.

Anh, who described his character Jang-ho as a desperate young man driven into a corner, recalls reading the script for the first time when he was home.

“I got so excited that I screamed. I danced a little as well.

“I’ve been a huge fan of Yoon since Bleak Night and I loved the short films he made before that—so, I’ve always wanted to work with him and the fact that I could do that plus work with all the actors I admire in and of itself was a very exciting start for me,” said Anh.