The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra director Syeyoung Park is back with a new genre flick, The Fin, a Korean dystopian sci-fi movie centered around mutated mermen.
Variety reports this morning that Kani Releasing has acquired North American rights to The Fin, with plans for both theatrical and home video release in 2026.
The Fin is set in the Korean peninsula, which has been reunified following a war but is environmentally ravaged, and features a subspecies of mutated mermen ostracized from a water-starved society, known as Omegas.
The story is “set in motion when a dying Omega asks a companion to seek out his daughter Mia, who has concealed her identity among the human population, so she can inherit his fin through a sacred rite. Running parallel is the arc of Sujin, a government worker portrayed by Kim Pureum, whose certainty in the ruling order begins to fracture as she hunts the Omega for reasons of her own.”
“Set in a near-future Korea, ‘The Fin’ explores the contagion of fear and the making of myths,” Syeyoung Park said in a statement.
“I hope that people get the feeling that maybe what they see around them is not true. So they actively, not passively, reconsider what actually constitutes an Omega or not, which leads to how do we decide who is an Omega and who is not? How do we decide who is a human or not? And if anybody in the audience reaches that point of questioning what divides Omega and humans, I think that the film has succeeded. It’s about stating two things and then showing that the statements are very volatile,” the filmmaker told Variety.
Considering the director’s previous feature centered around a creature who emerged from a discarded mattress and eschewed narrative conventions, it’s safe to expect a very different type of dystopian sci-fi feature ahead.