Ashfall (2019, South Korea) London Korean Film Festival 2020 Review
The South Korean film industry is known for crafting quiet, poignant dramas about family and society, but give the Koreans any genre and they’re usually guaranteed to step it up a notch. In the case of Ashfall the genre is the ‘disaster movie’. The South Korean film industry has had several previous disaster flicks – 2009’s Haeundae saw a tsunami destroy Busan, 2016’s Pandora imagined a Fukushima-like nuclear catastrophe and 2019’s Exit depicted a toxic gas cloud engulfing Seoul. However, none of these movies were on such an epic scale as Ashfall (aka Baekdusan).
