Tedious chores moonlight as signifiers for a young adult’s coming of age. Paying taxes, doing your own laundry, learning how to cook. During my college days, I often winced and skimped as much as I could on the “essentials,” hoarding weeks of dirty clothes to save on trips to the dormitory wash-and-dry machines. So goes […]
Right at the beginning of South Korean director Syeyoung Park’s The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, a young woman tells her narcoleptic boyfriend about a shocking discovery she made in a nearby river. She and her team, she recalls, found an unusually high number of dead “dolphins” there, which bewildered the group. But when they conducted further […]