The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra is about mould, not backbones. So why the weird title? Because, I’m guessing, debut writer/director Park Sye-young thought it had the right effect. This is a film that’s all about effect, mood, and Park conjures like a master right from the opening seconds, where a removal guy is talking on the phone to the woman whose stuff he’s meant to be moving. The woman isn’t there and he’s haranguing her. Meanwhile the guy next to him is talking right over the top of him in a separate conversation. It doesn’t overlap, as traditionally “realistic” dialogue in movies does (see Robert Altman), it attempts to overwhelm.
After the removal guy’s conversation, the woman whose stuff he’s moving turns up, hauling a big case. Later she’s heaving a big mattress across the room of her new apartment. Park shoots the mattress massively large and its progress as painfully slow, as if it were the ship being hauled over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo.
Then, plonk, down the mattress goes and onto it flops the floppy boyfriend who’s suddenly materialised now all the hard work is over.
A fetid, bed-based relationship. Close-ups. Intense colours. Sharp edits. You can almost catch the moisture on the breath of these two. And the litter they leave behind, bits of food, old underwear, gamy bedsheets and so on, has soon led to its logical outcome – fungus. The boyfriend, a slug-a-bed on an epic scale, does what needs to be done. He flips the mattress over and the two of them go back to doing what they were doing before.
But the mattress is now squeaking, gurgling, rustling. The mould has become a sentient fungal weft, as if this were a film by Quentin Dupieux (he of the sentient truck tyre in the movie Rubber).
The sound design runs the visuals close in this short (just over an hour) but remarkably dense movie that’s rich, ripe and decadent, as if a symbolist poem had taken cinematic form. If Park has a serious intent beneath the lush visuals and enveloping soundscapes, it would appear that The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra is some kind of riposte to or critique of the frivolity of the whole hallyu thing – the cultural phenomenon of the so-called Korean Wave responsible for everything from Psy’s Gangnam Style and K-pop band bands like BTS to the Netflix show Squid Game.
Mattress-hogging him and her (we don’t learn their names) live in a fetidally warm place hung with fairy lights. Candyfloss colours and sparkles are the order of the day. And when Park shifts the action suddenly from Couple A, whose relationship is in its early days, to Couple B, who are in the death throes of theirs, the sparkles and pinks and oranges are there too, along with yet more mould, now also signifying something that’s gradually gone bad.
The sentient mould, or thinking fungus, starts to get feisty. It starts to attack, whipping out a long tentacle to strike at the upper back of its victim – around about where the fifth thoracic vertebra is to be found (which does explain the title). And eventually the mattress is thrown onto the street, where it heads off on an adventure of its own, much as Dupieux’s tyre did.
Here’s a movie that’s entirely its own beast but would fit snugly alongside the odd sub-genre of myco-horror movies including Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. Amusing, sinister, atmospheric, it’s also a hellishly good looking film, especially considering the subject matter, as if a dark pop video had somehow escaped its confines. It’s a horror movie, at bottom, but with so much style slathered on top that the horror element often disappears. More than that it’s a mood board and reference source. Even if you don’t ever see The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, you will definitely see movies that have seen it. It’s going to get about – like mould.
The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
