Sinkhole is a sentimental comedic disaster movie that has its own share of satisfaction and absurdity. Based in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, the movie shows a handful of people who get stuck in a residential block, which falls into a sinkhole due to heavy rainfall, and how they survive.
For a movie that deals with a disaster, not the San Andreas kind, but lesser in magnitude where one single building drops more than 500 meters down a sinkhole, Sinkhole does a binge-job. It is not chaos, so you know that something other than destruction will take place. It involves comedy. It has sentiments. So it manages to hold you, if not in attention, then at least makes you wait to see what will happen next.
As the main characters, we have Park Dong-won (Kim Sung-kyun) as the husband, Yeong-I (Kwon So-hyun) as the wife, Jung Man-soo (Cha Seung-won) as the resident cum driver cum gym-owner, Kim Seung-hyun (Lee Kwang-soo) as Park’s office junior, Hong Eun-joo (Kim Hye-jun), Kim’s love interest and Jung Seung-tae (Nam Da-reum), Jung’s son.
‘Sinkhole’ Ending Review
The ending of Sinkhole is uplifting (you can take the word literally, too), but one can’t deny its absurdity. As many sentiments we come across towards the end of the movie, they are compensated by the amount of absurdity that is thrown our way. Be it the people being able to breathe easily despite being so deep under the earth’s surface (500 meters approximately) to the whole building retaining its structure to the yellow water tank. How the people inside were able to stay sealed while being submerged in water for so long to a single man being able to figuratively push that tank all the way to the top, absurdity attains surrealism. Well, this might sound over-the-top for some people, but this is solely due to the way these scenes were portrayed. The absurdity only comes to mind when one thinks about it. During other times, a viewer is engrossed in what’s happening and waiting to see what’s going to happen.
Symbolically speaking, the ending of Sinkhole talks about staying together even amidst chaos. 5 people who barely know each other outside their professional world at the beginning of the movie become essential parts of each other’s lives by the end. A father and son realize each other’s importance, two of them recognize their liking towards each other, and a father can save his son. So saving lives is portrayed not just literally but symbolically too. Yet, it doesn’t overlook loss. This is evident when Park Dong-won (Kim Sung-kyun) brings back a few strands of the boy who died along with his grandma.
Overall, you may or may not like the ending. But it does serve the purpose of uplifting the whole movie into more than just a disaster movie. Although at a surface level, Sinkhole captures different facets of relationships and maintains its genre, i.e., destruction. We are reminded time and again that the characters are in a “sinkhole” until the very end when they emerge out of it. Them being lifted up and out of the hole symbolically represents them coming out of a dark place into light with a better understanding of life, love, and family.
Sinkhole is a 2021 South Korean Action Drama film directed by Ji-hoon Kim.
