While most K-pop groups present themselves as fashionable role models, the girl group tripleS and their song Girls Never Die focus instead on the inner darkness of Korean youth. The music video carries a few images that evoke death and joint suicide, and although the title and the lyric repeat “girls never die,” what it shows is closer to figures who are physically dead yet continue to exist somewhere else in the imaginary. This atmosphere has brought the group a fandom fascinated by their experimentation rather than mainstream popularity.

Much as tripleS does in the K-pop scene, Han Chang-lok’s Funky Freaky Freaks stands in a distinctive position within Korean cinema. In contrast to most Korean youth films, which deal with the competitive environment for the college entrance exam and the politics of bullying in high school, Funky Freaky Freaks turns to a darker side of adolescence driven by impulsive energy, which leads to the death of the main character, Yong-gi.

Funky Freaky Freaks follows Yong-gi and his two friends, Ji-sook and Dumbo. Yong-gi makes his feelings for Ji-sook obvious, but Ji-sook pays them no attention. What drives Ji-sook is the pursuit of a body as thin as she can make it, and for that purpose she trades worn underwear with men for illegal diet pills. Dumbo spends his time with Yong-gi and Ji-sook, and he sometimes pretends to be a girl on calls with men he meets online, receiving chicken delivery vouchers in return.

The characters’ personalities become distinct when Woo-joo, a new transfer student, arrives. Ji-sook craves Woo-joo’s attention to the point of treating herself harshly, mentally and physically. Yong-gi, jealous of the newcomer, sees an opening when Woo-joo abandons her, and he casts himself as Ji-sook’s protector, projecting onto her the care he wanted and never received at home. Ji-sook asks Yong-gi to support what she is doing, and he agrees without hesitation. These scenes are layered with Yong-gi alone at home, where he holds imagined conversations with his mother, and this deficiency of love ultimately leads him to visit her new family, where he finds no place. Ji-sook, meanwhile, remains attached to Woo-joo even after he plays around with other girls and treats her badly, and this distorted attachment turns out to stem from her family background, where her father beats his family and affection arrives in the same shape as violence.

The distorted shape of love becomes obvious when they plot to destroy Woo-joo. Yong-gi checks up on Woo-joo’s background and finds out that Woo-joo was something of a womanizer before transferring to their school. While Yong-gi cannot legally take revenge on Woo-joo for what he did to Ji-sook, he creates a deepfake video of Woo-joo to defame him. In the meantime, Ji-sook tries to hold on to Woo-joo, but he does not so much as look at her, and she tells Yong-gi that she wants to kill him. They set the trap in an abandoned building and manage to lure him there, but the plan falls apart. When Ji-sook turns on Yong-gi and pushes him hard, he follows Woo-joo as far as the school classroom, but at the decisive moment he turns the violence on himself instead.

None of the young characters know how to deal with the gap between what their lives have become and what they wish to be, and each fills that absence in the wrong way. Instead of looking at what their lives actually are, they obsess over others, and that does not resolve the problem they are facing. As mentioned above, the deficiency of love leads these teenagers astray: Yong-gi wants to be a guardian of Ji-sook, who longs for a radically thin body and for Woo-joo’s love. Woo-joo releases the stress of his family by going from one girl to the next. Dumbo, slightly apart from this pattern, seems to be working out a confusion about his own sexual identity, pretending to be a girl to men he has never met and extorting what he can get from them.

This dark atmosphere is introduced in the first sequence of the film, which shows the larvae hatching, hinting at the immaturity of the characters. It also resonates with the sharp pastel inserts that flicker in and out of the scenes. Unstable camera angles and close-ups of the characters’ faces heighten the impulse these teenagers cannot control, and the film shows it through collision to shock, as the three chapter titles indicate.

Before concluding the essay, I would like to look at the scene in which Yong-gi watches a girl livestreaming her death. The ending, in which Yong-gi chooses his own death over the killing, is clearly connected to the impulse he cannot control, but impulsiveness alone does not account for it. From Yong-gi’s point of view, to kill Woo-joo is to bring down the world he has built as Ji-sook’s protector (or superman), the world through which he has sought to be repaid for his deficiency. Once the killing is done, the adults would engage in taking the imagined world apart, and nothing he built there survives their arrival. In other words, even in his most shocking act, Yong-gi is paradoxically choosing to leave reality and keep the imagined world going. Like the girl who fixes her death inside the screen of a livestream and makes the unreal real, and like Girls Never Die, in which a symbolic death opens onto a new identity, adolescence swings to its extremes across the instability between reality and fantasy. Yong-gi’s death is where that instability is pushed as far as it can go, and what is left at the end is a boy who chose the imagined side over staying alive.