This
freshly sentient AI surveillance satellite should monitor a screening of Gavin
Hood’s Eye in the Sky or perhaps
Johnnie To’s film of the same name. Both would give her a greater appreciation
of her purpose. Instead, the satellite of love crashes to earth and teams up
with a Korean father desperately looking for his long missing daughter. Short Circuit style hijinks gets a
massive dose of fatalism in Lee Ho-jae’s Sori:
Voice from the Heart (trailer
here),
which screened during the 2016 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Naturally,
Kim Hae-gwan had a terrible row with his college-aged daughter Yu-joo the last
time he saw her. Shortly thereafter, she presumably perished in a terrible
transit fire. Yet, without a body, Kim refuses to give up hope. Following up a
false lead on the Incheon Islands, Kim literally stumbles across the NSA
satellite he will later dub Sori. It too is on a mission. After intercepting a
cell phone call from a girl caught in the crossfire of an attack on the Taliban,
Sori is determined to find her and protect. She too is wracked with guilt for
facilitating the strike. However, as Alan Rickman’s Gen. Frank Benson would
point out, the drone strike might very well have prevented far worse horrors in
the form of a suicide bombing. (By the way, it is not too early to start
talking posthumous best supporting actor for Rickman.)
Thanks
to Sori’s skill set, Kim is finally able to track various cell phones
associated with his daughter. Of course, a narrative of this nature faces two
potential perils, a ridiculously phony happy ending or a massive downer. Instead,
Lee and co-screenwriter Lee So-young try to fake some symbolic redemption, but
the film just works better when it embraces the tragedy.
Lee
Sung-min (awesome as the cop in Broken and
the crooked prosecutor in A Violent Prosecutor)
is simply devastating as Kim. Chae Soo-bin is maybe even more heartrending as
Yu-joo. Their backstory will pretty much do you in. However, Sori herself
rather conspicuously looks like something kit-bashed together with parts
leftover from R2D2 and Number Nine. Granted, it is nice to see Lee Ha-nui play
a smart, forceful character like KARI (Korea’s space agency) scientist Ji-yeon,
but her dialogue is conspicuously loaded with exposition. Lee Hee-joon fares
even worse as the blandly arrogant NIS working with and against the Yanks to
recover Sori.
