Lucid Dream had a relatively massive budget for a Korean film at $5 million but failed to capture the attention of the Korean audience and was a massive failure at the box office. It is now on Netflix and now that I am back on a Korean film run I decided to watch it despite the fact that I have never heard of director Kim Joon-sung.
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It is considered to be a sci-fi / thriller film despite the fact that most of the elements of the movie take place in modern times. The sci-fi aspects of it come from the fact that the major premise behind the movie is that it is possible to enter your own dreams (and later other people's dreams) in order to better recall events that happened in your life. This is somewhat similar to aspects of The Cell and also Inception.
Go Soo plays the role of the main character Choi Dae-ho, a reporter who one day has his son kidnapped right in front of him and is powerless to stop the act because he has been drugged. Through the magic of the "dream machine" he is able to recall aspects of the crime to police in order to find his kidnapped son as the police investigation has produced no results and the kidnapping occurred many years prior.
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I don't want to spoil too much of the movie but the above statement is not a spoiler since it is described in both the trailer and the first few minutes of the movie.
The problems
One of them only applies to non-Korean people: There are so many characters in this film that it becomes pretty difficult for any non-Korean to really remember who anyone is referring to during dialogue in the film - Korean names just don't "stick" if that makes any sense. Of course this is not the fault of the Korean filmmaker because they make a film for Koreans to watch and not necessarily the rest of the world.
One major problem i had with this film is that unlike other Korean thrillers, this one is almost completely predictable. There are certain moments that were meant to be "shocking revelations" but mostly they are totally obvious long before the big reveal.
Also, the ending of the movie is completely implausible given the technology that exists in the world and also how much publicity and manpower is put into any investigation involving the abduction of children. Basically, there is no chance that the ending could have possibly taken place (i'm being intentionally vague here.)
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The pacing of the movie stays consistent and there are very few moments that it seems to drag on. The acting quite good by all people involved but I really feel that if they had just tweaked the story a little bit, it could have been significantly better.
Ultimately I feel as though they kind of dropped the ball on this one but the visual effects are pretty darn good considering the quite low budget of the film and I found the performance of Go Soo (yep, that is really his name) to be compelling enough to warrant giving this movie a chance.