Okja Review

Bong Joon-ho stages a chase through a Seoul underground shopping mall that ranks with anything he has filmed, a huge animal skidding across wet tile while activists move with the courtesy of people who apologise before breaking a window, scored to a Korean cover of a John Denver song. Ahn Seo-hyun anchors all of it. She plays Mija with a flat, stubborn refusal to perform emotion, which is why the slaughterhouse passage lands as evidence rather than sermon.

Tilda Swinton's twin executives are broad but carefully calibrated. Gyllenhaal is neither. His television zoologist is pitched several registers above everyone else, all shriek and flailing limb, and each scene he enters stalls while the film waits for him to finish. Darius Khondji lights the mountain sequences like a fable and the New Jersey plant like a deposition.

The English dialogue is noticeably clumsier than the Korean, and the liberation front subplot keeps stopping to explain its own ethics out loud. Still, the final transaction at the pen gate, one animal bought back with a lump of gold while the line behind it keeps moving, is colder than anything the marketing suggested.