Paradise Lost: Yeon Sang-ho’s AI thriller reaches 118 countries

Paradise Lost sold to 118 countries, and Well Go USA released it in North America on Nov. 6, according to Variety. The psychological thriller cost KRW500 million ($374,000) and was shot over 14 sessions.

In the setup Variety describes, Yeon Sang-ho, director of Train to Busan and the series Hellbound, places the film in Musan City, a decaying town that exists only on screen. Kim Hyun-joo plays the grieving mother, Ryu So-young, who puts on augmented-reality glasses to spend time with her 10-year-old son.

The boy vanished nine years earlier among children on a camp bus. Bae Hyeon-seong, the Hospital Playlist actor making his first big-screen lead, returns as the adult Sun-woo, now a stranger to her. The glasses’ comfort turns frightening when the real son comes home.

Artificial intelligence as a test of identity

On the surface, Yeon tells Variety that artificial intelligence (AI) is mechanical or technological. Beneath it, he places shared human knowledge and collective intelligence (knowledge pooled across people), which he says now threatens individuality and the qualities that make people human.

Humanity’s shared patterns can feed AI, but it can also behave unpredictably, beyond our ability to control or comprehend. “In that sense, I think AI itself represents an uncharted territory. Something as mysterious and unknowable to us as a black hole,” he said.

Yeon makes that uncertainty personal through the mother-son bond. “The relationship between a mother and her son is perhaps one of the most deeply personal and intimate relationships we can have. We can never truly know what lies in the depth of another person’s psyche,” he said.

The film borrows its title from Milton’s epic poem. In the production notes, Yeon linked humanity’s expulsion from paradise with the start of identity, saying that loss of paradise marks where human identity begins.

Yeon previously used AI as a storytelling device in 2023’s Jung_E. Variety reports that an AI recreation allowed a daughter to free her mother from an idealized, self-sacrificing image, something Yeon says could not happen in the real world. For Paradise Lost, he chose a more grounded approach, using AI as a contrast to explore what remains uniquely human.

His shift also changes the family’s position. The Ugly followed a son digging into his father’s buried past; Paradise Lost substitutes a mother and son. Yeon calls family the first form of society people encounter and says it fundamentally shapes their sense of self and personal identity.

A festival journey and lean production

Variety described Paradise Lost as the opposite end of the scale from Colony, which Yeon premiered in the Cannes Midnight Screenings section earlier in the year. Paradise Lost moved to Toronto’s Special Presentations, where Yeon had shown The Ugly the previous year.

It then screened as a Gala Presentation in Busan. Variety said the screenings sold out at both festivals.

Variety reports that Kim had worked with Yeon on both seasons of Hellbound and on Jung_E. Yeon wrote the screenplay with Ryu Yong-jae from an original idea of theirs that author Oh Seong-eun turned into the novel Black Inferno. Wowpoint produced the film; CJ ENM presents it with Wowpoint and handles distribution.

Variety reports that The Ugly was shot for KRW200 million ($150,000). Paradise Lost remained lean at KRW500 million ($374,000), with 14 shooting sessions. Yeon leaned on Kim, whom he knew understood his directing style after several projects together; the schedule allowed few takes and limited locations.

He compared the production conditions with those behind many legendary films in Asian cinema. In his view, the constraints encouraged creative exploration and demanded extraordinary focus and concentration from everyone involved.

Yeon told Variety that Korea’s theatrical industry is undergoing major transformation and that some observers see a much smaller market. He does not treat contraction as an obstacle to good films, arguing that a smaller industry does not automatically produce fewer great ones.

Making Colony and Paradise Lost in the same year gave him direct experience of radically different production scales. He hopes that experience will give him greater confidence when leading productions of any size.

What does global reach change for smaller Korean films?

International sales covered Paradise Lost’s net production budget before release, according to Variety. For Yeon, that gives his smaller-scale model one concrete advantage: worldwide sales can cover the net budget before theatrical release, even when audience discovery remains unresolved.

Yeon called CJ ENM one of the most active Korean distributors in working with overseas partners. Whether a Korean film is commercial, niche or successful at the box office, he believes audiences exist somewhere for it.

He also cautions that availability does not guarantee discovery. Global streaming platforms release films simultaneously across multiple territories and use algorithms to recommend content from individual preferences, but he doubts the industry has established how effective that approach is.

Two projects in post-production

Variety reports that Yeon has two projects in post-production:

• A Japanese-language Netflix series based on the manga Parasyte: Tamiya. Yeon serves as screenwriter and showrunner (the person overseeing the series), and the story moves one of the original’s villains, Tamiya Ryoko, to the center. Yeon is fascinated by a parasite rather than a human being gradually trying to understand humanity.
• Devotion, a horror feature due next year. It grew from the way people now display versions of their identities and hide behind the personas they construct. Its Korean title, Yeto, is a Buddhist term for an imperfect world marked by suffering, the opposite of the realm of ultimate bliss.

Both projects place identity under pressure: one through a nonhuman parasite, the other through personas and suffering. The test ahead is whether Parasyte: Tamiya and Devotion can retain Yeon’s concentrated approach while finding audiences in a global recommendation system whose effectiveness he says remains unproven.