‘Funky Freaky Freaks’ review: South Korean debut is frantic tale of high school jealousy and revenge

Dir/scr: Han Chang-lok. South Korea. 2025. 87mins

Three teenage friends spiral into an escalating, but not unexpected, cycle of jealousy, betrayal and violence when an entrancing new kid transfers into their high school in debut feature filmmaker Han Chang-lok’s Funky Freaky Freaks. Loading his film with flashy images and a pounding soundtrack, Han is on to something about the fragility of youth, the distancing effects of social media and radicalisation, but lets himself get distracted by camera tricks and aggressive edginess. He’s saved by a pair of strong performances from relative newcomer Joo Min-hyeong and under the radar actor Baek Ji-hye.

Camera tricks and aggressive edginess

The film is a product of the Korea National University Of Arts (KNUA), of which filmmakers Jeong Jae-eun (Take Care of My Cat), Lee Jeong-beom (The Man from Nowhere) and Na Hong-jin (The Wailing) are also graduates. Unlike those films, Freaks is a KNUA project – and it shows. Writer/director Han never dives fully into his ideas, prioritizing the film’s visuals over its more engaging narrative. Nevertheless, the film could generate interest from specialized festivals following its Busan Competition premiere, and possibly a limited theatrical release. The excessive visuals and propulsive score from Seoul-based electronic musician Livigesh would be well-served by a big screen.

Joining in the recent trend for chapter-based storytelling (Weapons, fellow Busan Competition title Baka’s Identity), Funky Freaky Freaks unfolds across three segments titled ‘Impulse’, ‘Collision’ and ‘Shock’. High school student Yong-gi (Joo) is an awkward loser who aims to please, whose mother spends all of her time with her new husband in another home. His best friends are Ji-sook (Baek), who lives with an eating disorder, and Dum-bo (Shin Jun-hang), a so-called netkama who spends his spare time pretending to be a woman and catfishing men online for easy cash.

The trio are bored out of their collective minds when Woo-joo (Jeong Soo-hyun) transfers in. He’s good looking, has thousands of Instagram followers and a place on the national judo team – and Ji-sook is immediately taken with him. Of course, Woo-joo has a dark past which, when revealed, destroys Ji-sook. Seeing himself as a superhero, Yong-gi starts down a dangerous and violent path to saving her and knocking Woo-joo off his pedestal.

Composed almost entirely of Dutch angles, saturated colour, a constantly moving handheld camera, rapid and frequent cuts (by Han and editor Kim Ji-hyun) and a multitude of other distracting stylistic flourishes, Funky Freaky Freaks looks like a pastiche of the 1980s – as imagined by someone born after that decade and based purely on MTV music video impressions. When Han and his cinematographer Kim Jong-soo let the camera rest for a few minutes, it allows for some strong moments of reflection in which Joo and Baek are given the space to fully realise their characters’ nuances and contradictions. (As Woo-joo, Jeong is suitably arrogant and predatory in a role as underwritten as Shin’s).

Yet, for the most part, Han shoots the action as if the story were heading in an unpredictable direction – which it doesn’t. Ji-sook and Woo-joo’s romance collapses in act two, leaving the rest of the film to build on the inevitable betrayal, revenge and misplaced rage and explosion we are expecting for the last chapter which is, after all, called Shock.