Gill (2024)
Posted on 25 August 2025 By AntBit
Gill had its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Monday 25 August
“It’s not like I wanted to commit suicide.” This is the opening line of Ahn Jae-huun’s Gill, uttered in voiceover by an unnamed woman whom we see plummeting backwards in slow motion off a bridge into the waters below. While her fall was genuinely an accident, as she sinks into the depths her voiceover reveals that she has in fact previously contemplated killing herself. For this woman is in a liminal space, not just in the river but in her life, where her dissatisfaction with her career and her concern for who, in her absence, would take care of her ailing mother, are tearing her between the will to sink or to swim.
With thoughts and memories rushing through the head of the woman as she falls from the bridge and starts to drown in the waters below – in a scenario reminiscent of the beginnings of Ambrose Bierce’s influential short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1980) or Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) – something miraculous, indeed impossible, happens. For a man whose given name we will later learn is Gon dives down and restores her to the river shore – and as he leaves her there and himself heads back into the water, the woman is sure that she sees “scar-like gills” behind his ears, iridescent scales on his back, and a huge fish-lake tail where his legs had been.
It is quite the story, although it will be a full year after the event before the woman is willing to go online and tell it, which will lead to an invitation from a stranger named Kang Ha to hear his own equally improbable yet intersecting story. Kang Ha resides and works in Venice, a city that is defined as much by its waters as by solid ground – but as a child he lived with his grandfather near a lake where they would illegally salvage parts from whatever washed ashore. One night they chanced upon a car half-submerged in the lake, and a young boy, floating face-down in the water but still alive thanks to gills behind his ears that they first mistake for wounds.
In a way, they are scars – for little Gon, though a survivor, is marked by trauma, as indeed is Kang Ha, who has never fully recovered from being abandoned by his actress mother and her husband. Where Kang Ha’s trauma has him flipping on a dime from tender compassion to resentful bullying, Gon’s leaves him in a grey zone between human and fish – and as these two boys grow up together, Kang Ha, who is determined to protect his adopted brother from exploitation by others even as he is all too happy to exploit Gon’s subaquatic powers for his own gain, is simultaneously Gon’s best friend and worst enemy.
Gill
“Those sorts of mixed emotions can’t be explained logically,” the woman will eventually tell Gon himself of his estranged brother’s contradictory feelings – but she might just as well be describing her own ambivalence towards her (now) late mother, or the uneasy addiction of Kang Ha’s mother Julia Kim to both celebrity and drugs, or Gon’s own conflicting allegiances to land and sea. This exquisitely animated film captures what the woman calls “a piece of an emotion” through interlocking stories whose “holes… that didn’t make any sense” are supplemented with mythic elements to arrive at little truths about life, death, and everything in the littoral zone between these two states.
For if you can accept the fiction, familiar from Jack Arnold’s Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954), Kevin Reynolds’ Waterworld (1995) and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), of a hybridised Gill-man, then you can certainly comprehend an altogether more grounded figure like Kang Ha who is paradoxically caring and cruel in equal measure, and who in his own way also, at least in the eyes of the woman who understands and briefly loves him, wades from “harsh reality” into the miracle of legend, leaving Gon, himself a construct of story, to go in search of his all-human half brother’s fragmentary pieces. The result is something rich and strange, offsetting its own deep melancholy with an ultimate, unequivocal affirmation of life.
strap: Sink or swim?: Ahn Jae-huun’s rich and strange animated feature fills the contradictory spaces in mixed emotions with myth and miracle
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