It was only recently that Yeon Sang-ho released Colony. Now the director is back with a new feature film, Paradise Lost, which is screening as part of this year’s TIFF programming. Sang-ho is best known for creating seminal zombie movie Train to Busan, and Colony continued in that film’s footsteps, but Paradise Lost goes in a very different direction.
Paradise Lost opens as mother Ryu So-Young readies her young son Ryu Sun-Woo for an overnight school trip. Tragically, the trip ends in disaster after Sun-Woo and his classmates vanish. The bodies of some of the children are found along with the body of their kidnapper, but Sun-Woo and several others are missing. In the wake of the tragedy, a tech company, Transhuman, reaches out to the distraught parents, offering them a virtual way to keep hold of their children. The story then picks up nine years later. So-Young has become reliant on the VR device, having fully bonded with the forever young digital Sun-Woo. Then a young man claiming to be the real Sun-Woo arrives and causes her all kinds of problems.
Sang-ho’s latest film is a departure from his safe space of zombie movies, but is no less engaging. One of his biggest achievements in Train to Busan was his ability to infuse emotion into the survival horror. He replicates this emotional core in Paradise Lost with the opening sequence alone making for heavy viewing. As the story progresses the emotional heft deepens and this is a story that the viewer experiences to their very core. Any parent watching will find Paradise Lost especially hard viewing, but this is a film that has more than missing children to cause anguish.
The inclusion of the AI component raises some interesting ideas and forces the audience to consider what they would do in So-Young’s situation. She has spent nine years bonding with the computer program rather than processing her grief and the reappearance of Sun-Woo forces her to confront those feelings. Her struggle to connect to this virtual stranger is understandable, but a further revelation about Sun-Woo places her in an impossible situation. It raises questions for the viewer and the complexities hiding within Paradise Lost are unexpectedly dense.
Paradise Lost presents an interesting blend of science-fiction, drama, and horror, filled with many moral quandaries for the audience to endure. Featuring some great performances and a genuinely harrowing and occasionally haunting story, Paradise Lost is proof that Sang-ho has more to offer than inventive zombies.
Paradise Lost
Summary
Yeon Sang-ho weaponises grief, parenthood, and technology to ask some deeply uncomfortable questions in the harrowing and unexpectedly complex, Paradise Lost.
Paradise Lost was reviewed at TIFF 2026.
