I've said a few times in recent months that it appears Korea may be on the verge of finally shaking off the prolonged slump the film industry there has been enduring and I believe this is true for one simple reason. Put aside the emergence of directors like Park Chan-Wook, Bong Joon-Ho and Kim Ji-Woon for a moment - after all, every major film producing country has at least a handful of exciting directors - what really drove the buzz at the beginning of the Korean Wave was the sense that Korea was where people were experimenting, that this was the country where just about anything could - and frequently did - happen. But as the successes and failure began to fall along predictable lines and producers figured out the genres where the most money was to be made that sense of free creativity and inventiveness was replaced by a sort of cookie cutter industriousness, with everybody rushing to capitalize on whatever the trend of the moment was. It failed. Miserably. But it seems as though, finally, that sense of creativity is starting to creep back in.

Take, for example, the surreal upcoming thriller Written:

A wakes up in a tub, realizing one of his kidneys is gone. While A is trying to retrieve his missing kidney, he meets a writer and learns that he is just a character of an unfinished film and he will meet an actor who will play A in the film. In the meantime, staff working on this film also realize the fact that this script is unfinished and start searching the writer’s house for the ending. A, too, busies himself to resolve the issue even though he is an incomplete being from a story. This film is a metaphor painted with intense scenes, describing how to complete a story while a director, a writer, and even a character in the story help each other, even amongst serious tension.

The first trailer for this one has just hit and while I've seen a few people out there comparing it to David Lynch I personally would put it more in the Kurt Vonnegut / Charlie Kauffman camp - Lynch is almost solely concerned with the subconscious and interior landscapes while this shares a fascination with literary form and the relationship a creation has with its creator that marks both Vonnegut and Kauffman's work - though this is more slick and noir oriented by far than what you'd expect from either of them. But regardless of where the influences may come from this looks like one striking, original piece of work and you can check the trailer below the break.