The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra
Written and Directed by Park Sye-young
Runtime: 64 minutes
Starring Moon Hye-in, Ham Seok-young, On Jeong-yeon, Park Ji-hyeon
Not rated
Available on Indiepix Unlimited October 20

by Jo Rempel, Contributor

Now, it’s no Human Centipede, but The Third Thoracic Vertebra is a true-blue nasty picture, made all the nastier by basing itself on a mundane encounter, one between humans and mold. First-time feature director Park Sye-young also wrote, edited, photographed, and attended to the sound mixing; he’s spread his spores far and wide across a strange and gruesome world that still hits close to home.

If you aren’t a cheese connoisseur, the multi-coloured fungus exists solely as an indeterminate telos: leave something moist enough out for long enough and the spores are bound to show themselves. What happens next is up to you.

Before we see Gyeol (Moon Hye-in) and Yoon (Ham Seok-young) living together in their apartment, we see the mattress that’s moving in with them—the mattress that will house a sentient colony of mold. Every leap in space or time is accompanied with text providing the date and locale in a small font, above larger reading “days before/since birth”, so we know from the start that it’s 538 days until Yoon notices and promptly ignores a dark patch in bed. Well, isn’t that the human condition, to let sleeping dogs lie? It’ll be the death of Yoon.

Last week I had a chance encounter with mold—it was unseasonably humid, and I had taken my sweet time in going through a loaf of caramelized onion sourdough. Dusty blue circles were beginning to distinguish themselves amongst the flour. I went through a stage of denial before doing what needed to be done: fungus goes through loaves from the inside out, the science tells you.

This is to say that the fungus had a private existence of its own long before it made itself visible; in the same way that mushrooms bloom unseen in a tree stump, or how we let yeast feast on carbs before we bake bread. The role of fungi in everyday life has become a bit of a fad science; numerous non-fiction bestsellers have mushroomed from mushrooms, not to mention sourdough starter being an early-pandemic staple for so many.

Pithily speaking, fungi are “comfy”. The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra indulges in our newfound fascination, though the relationship between it and us isn’t shown to be so pretty.

The mattress has a habit of harvesting people’s vertebrae—one for every victim. When there’s a death, it’s evicted, but never thrown out. Everyone has a use for it, and everyone is willing to ignore the unhygienic side of things.

As Yoon is about to leave the apartment, Gyeol repeats his own words from long ago, that he’d rather die than leave her. So shouldn’t he just die? “Die”—that is the first word that the mold learns, an inverse of Karloff’s Frankenstein being taken in by a kind old man. In this case, the “monster” isn’t even “created”—born from neglect, it absorbs our neglected desire.

For a brief period, it serves a residency in a love hotel. Park works in an array of desaturated tones, and the overly-constructed setting serves his aesthetic well: the room is washed in red, with lights that can turn it blue, then green. Ironically enough, the room is the site of a breakup. Handled at first in shimmering individual close-ups that muddy detail in favour of ambiance, the couple end up getting back together. Things get even more sensual. And then each has their vertebra torn out. Each gruesome death has this twisted poetic justice, that love and death need be forever entangled.

In voiceover we hear the hotel owner bemoan having to offload the mattress from the scene of the crime. Why does he have to make a liability out of this innocent piece of furniture? “Aren’t we supposed to live together in the capitalist world?” Soon after, the mattress lies upright, slumped under a 7-11 sign. Rejected, but never thrown away; for it will always have a use “in the capitalist world”.

Now, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra doesn’t revel in its political commentary, nor its creature feature credentials, for that matter. The film is tense—seeing two people occupy a bedroom gives a new twist on Hitchcock’s adage about telling the audience a bomb’s about to go off—but its emotional arc is closer to ensemble films like Magnolia, or Cloud Atlas. It sees human experience, flesh and all, in a continual struggle to transcend its material conditions. Maybe that isn’t possible, but the grime, which will outlive us, takes mementos.

The synth score, composed by Han Min-hee, evokes nature documentaries and soap operas before eventually sliding closer towards the tradition of John Carpenter or Wendy Carlos’s contributions to horror. It’s placid, even upbeat, before it’s frightening.

Don’t be so afraid of that week-old loaf or the neglected corner of the bathroom, we are told. Yes, those spores could kill you—but this is a life form we are talking about! While The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra certainly indulges in anthropomorphizing its monster, watching it kill is like watching a lion hunt a gazelle. Bones cracking, flesh tearing; Park directs dreadful with a detached, contemplative gaze. It won’t be changing my diet any time soon, but he’s certainly given me a new holistic outlook on the inedible.