The review below has some spoilers, but it doesn’t spill the whole story. Proceed with caution if you don’t have the appetite for blood and gore.

Are you a fan of Alice in Wonderland? I always have been, ever since childhood. I grew up with the Disney version of her story until I discovered a shortened, translated version of Lewis Carroll’s original novel.

When I started watching films, I hunted for every Alice movie ever made and brought to the screen. In total, there are at least 80 film and TV adaptations so far. If you count the Broadway productions and stage plays, you’ll lose track.

Once, I settled on the Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, and Anne Hathaway version. It took me years to discover Alice in Earnestland, which finally outdid the Disney adaptation for me. The 2015 film, titled 성실한 나라의 앨리스 (Songsilhan Naraui Aliseu), walked straight into my list of top favorites from Korea. And she’s the best Alice I’ve seen on the silver screen so far.

Not a Direct Reinterpretation

Ahn Gooc-jin was barely 35 years old when he made his directorial debut with Alice in Earnestland, setting the story he wrote himself in contemporary South Korea. And he went on to win the New Talent Award at the 39th Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and the Grand Prize at the 16th Jeonju International Film Festival. Lee Jung-hyun, who played the titular character, also bagged her own awards.

Despite winning so many accolades, the film remains little known to fans of the fairy tale. Except, of course, Alice in Earnestland is not a fairy tale. It heavily draws on realism.

In the original story, Alice is a girl who falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself in Wonderland, surrounded by talking flowers, a Cheshire Cat who vanishes into thin air, leaving a wide grin behind that wanes like the moon, and soldiers who are a pack of cards guarding their Red Queen.

None of this happens in Gooc-jin’s Korean retelling. Here, the story unfolds in the real world, where a girl fights to survive amidst capitalism. The monsters surrounding her are her landlords, her sexually abusive teacher, a military sergeant, a lady who manipulates him to cook up a storm in her neighborhood, two cops, and the greatest danger of all – the monster-in-chief, capitalism. She survives one death trap after another until, one day, she finally makes it.

It’s fair to say the film only alludes to Alice in Wonderland, as the story is entirely different. But it’s also a reinterpretation that reincarnates Alice into the real world – where there is no fairy tale.

However, it’s not a direct reinterpretation. But you can barely tell that from the official poster, which makes her look like a Korean Alice dressed as a Korean Cinderella. And that’s exactly what dragged me into her universe.

A Spoof of The Korean Dream 

Very few Korean films don’t paint South Korea as a dreamlandish Eldorado. Alice in Earnestland is one of them. It rips the pink glasses off your eyes.

Under the sun, there’s hardly a subject Korean films haven’t explored. Since the Korean Wave began, no stone has been left unturned in the hunt for new ideas. Naturally, the poverty of downtrodden Koreans has been covered in films, too.

The real Alice in Wonderland was surrounded by magic. In contrast, Jeong Su-nam’s only magic is her hard work, which never pays off. She has one other talent: using her hands for anything requiring a deft touch. But it doesn’t serve her until late in the story, when she becomes an expert “card thrower”—flinging business cards that stick in the crevices of walls, buildings, and everything else around her as a job. Through one line of dialogue, the audience learns nine years have passed in her life. She can finally afford a house by taking out a mortgage, but her loan looms at a mind-numbing $140,000.

This is a full stop to the Korean dream. Instead, it morphs into a very real Korean nightmare. By now, the audience realizes Su-nam will have to slave away for the rest of her life to pay off her debt. It no longer looks as rosy as most Korean films or K-pop.

In Korea, too, there are buildings that look grim, far from a Disney movie. You see Su-nam and her husband dragging their tired feet up the stairs. Only when they reach the door does she discover she’s been carrying her husband’s severed fingers in her pocket, having forgotten to give them to the doctor. They’ve just returned from the hospital after his accident.

The film also lists the costs of healthcare in Korea. Surgery for her husband’s ears sets them back $20,000. Earlier in the film, this expense delays their plan to buy a house.

At one point, the South Korean flag appears in the frame. The local borough chief starts a speech with a fiercely patriotic stream of words. His sparse audience, scattered across a mostly empty auditorium with empty chairs all around them, remains unmoved.

The film doesn’t go further to criticize the country or its hollow talk of national glory. But everyone gets the point.

The Cinematography

The film’s greatest strength lies in its cinematography. It’s a cascade of close-ups, one after another, culminating in a wide shot in the final scene. There are very few mid or wide shots in the main story’s runtime. And the story is woven together with jump cuts.

This is what keeps it from turning into a depressing watch and transforms it into a comedy instead. Gooc-jin clearly did his homework when planning the film. Officially, Lee Sook-jun is credited as the cinematographer.

Their mastery in weaving the scenes together shines through. Without it, the film might have become just another tale of doom and gloom, risking a disenchanted version of a Disney picture.

But Alice in Earnestland is the exact opposite. It doesn’t lose its enchantment for a single second of its hour-and-a-half runtime. Instead, it captivates the audience and casts its own spell without relying on a magical plotline.

Making a debut like this is every director’s dream. And Gooc-jin absolutely nailed it.

A Feminist film

Alice in Earnestland is a feminist film disguised as a black comedy. Perhaps we can argue that Lewis Carroll’s original story was feminist too. After all, it’s a girl who stands at the center of the universe.

In the Disney version, she’s chosen as the White Queen’s champion, tasked with slaying the Jabberwocky. Our Korean Alice slays her own Jabberwockies. To put it simply, she kills to survive. She nearly becomes a serial killer because she has no other way out. Her Jabberwockies include Sergeant Major Choi; the psychologist Kyung-sook, who sparks a protest against redevelopment, nearly crushing Su-nam’s last hope of paying off her debt by selling her house; Kim Hyeong-seok, a laundry operator who abducts and nearly murders her; and two police detectives who keep chasing her to the very end, right when she’s finally on the brink of tasting happiness.

Early in the film, Su-nam narrates her story to Kyung-sook. Her first memories are from her school years. She dreamed of becoming an elite, not a factory worker, and aced exam after exam in courses requiring her deft hands, like typewriting. But one day, a male teacher tells her that her body is more “priceless” than all her certificates.

On the screen, this teacher is a ghoul. His face has no eyes or nose, only a mouth that moves and speaks those words.

Eventually, she finds a loving, caring husband. But he ends up in a coma. She tries desperately to bring him back to life, but never succeeds. In the meantime, she faces the horrors of the world all alone. In a nutshell, that’s what the story is about.

An ill-fated girl she may be, but Su-nam is one of the most down-to-earth feminist characters I’ve seen on screen, representing working-class women.

Trivia 

When Hyeong-Seok kidnaps Su-nam, she’s thrown into a washing machine in his laundromat. We’re never told how she survives being washed alive in there.

Can one survive being in the washer? It seems like Gooc-Jin wanted to pose that question to his young audience, who will soon grow old in the mad mess of the market economy.

He’s clearly influenced by his anti-capitalist predecessors, one of whom is the Soviet auteur Sergei Eisenstein. A scene from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) plays on the TV when Sergeant Choi and Hyeong-Seok first meet.

Eventually, Hyeong-Seok ends up in the washer after Su-nam kills him to stop him from killing her. Blood oozes from the machine.

The question is simple: Can you survive capitalism? Jeong Su-nam didn’t. But she managed to escape. Can you make it? It’s a question that feels timeless and borderless, resonating with the working-class youth of every country. Some will make it; some won’t.

And Su-nam, too, might not have. But she managed to at least hiss at it, leaving a few minor scratches on its throat with her knife.