Park Chan-wook’s forgotten masterpiece: A film about mental health and K-pop idols before the world was listening

A scene from "I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK" (2006) / Courtesy of IMDb

In 2025, South Korea has developed a strange fetish for performative vulnerability. Anxiety is the new luxury handbag: everyone has one, everyone’s flaunting theirs, and if you don’t, you’re either lying or dangerously maladjusted. Pop stars weep into LED-lit ring lights. Influencers livestream their therapy sessions, sandwiched between collagen mask unboxings and affiliate codes for supplements. Mental health, once taboo, has been monetized, merchandised, and algorithmically optimized for engagement.

And yet, there’s something deeply valuable about this shift. Because people, real people, are finally able to speak about the things that were once buried in silence. Trauma, anxiety, and depression aren’t just trendy terms. For many, they are lived realities. And what’s changed is that now, those experiences can be spoken aloud without immediate shame or dismissal. There’s help available. Conversations happen. People are walking into clinics, talking to professionals, and seeking treatment, not because they’re weak, but because they want to live. They want to understand themselves. They want to heal. And for a society that for so long taught people to endure in silence, that is no small thing. It’s a quiet kind of revolution.

But let’s wind the tape back nearly two decades. Back to when Park Chan-wook, the king of Korean cinema, decided to cast the country’s biggest popstar, Rain (Jung Ji-hoon), not in some glossy romcom or tortured idol drama, but in a film about malfunctioning humanity.

Love in the key of strange

Park Chan-wook’s "I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK" is a film that many didn’t know what to do with in 2006. Coming off the brutal elegance of "Oldboy" and his other earlier work, audiences were expecting violence and vengeance. What they got instead was pastel-coloured psychosis, yodeling, drinks machines that talk back, and a girl who believes she’s a cyborg. It was too weird. Too soft. Too honest.

But perhaps that was the point.

This was a film ahead of its time. Park gave us a female protagonist, Cha Young-goon (Im Soo-jung), who couldn’t eat because she thought she was a robot. A girl institutionalized for licking batteries and whispering to fluorescent lights. And opposite her, pop idol Rain, still known then more for his abs than for acting, gave a surprisingly vulnerable performance as Park Il-sun, a kleptomaniac who steals people’s traits and is heavily traumatized by his mother leaving him at the age of 15. He thinks this and constantly brushing his teeth will save him from disappearing. Young-goon thinks eating will destroy her circuits. Together, they begin to see each other for who they are, not who they’re told to be.

Mental institutions, schools, and even families often teach us to suppress our quirks. To act “normal.” To eat in the right order. To sit still. To smile. To conform. But Park’s film suggests that what makes us different is not only what makes us human, it’s what makes us beautiful. Some of us eat rice before soup. Some twist our hair when nervous. Some of us, like Young-goon, simply want to finish our dream before waking up.

What Park does so brilliantly, without being didactic or morose, is show that love isn’t about fixing people. It’s about accepting them. Not in spite of their strangeness, but because of it. The world of "I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK" is deliberately surreal. It’s stylized, musical, a modern fairy tale soaked in neon. But the feelings it captures, loneliness, alienation, yearning, are painfully real. It makes us reflect on our own family. Our own trauma. And our own quirks. It tells us that it’s okay not only to be a cyborg, but also to be you.

What the machines forgot to program

Thus the movie is also a quiet meditation on the meaning of life. Hidden among the surreal sequences is a hand-drawn picture book, listing the seven deadly sins for cyborgs: sympathy, sadness, restlessness, hesitation, useless daydreaming, guilt and thankfulness. Of all these, Young-goon insists, sympathy is the worst. But in truth, it’s these very "sins" that make us human.

To hesitate, to feel guilty, to sit in silent gratitude, to be overcome by a sudden burst of compassion are not bugs in our programming. They are the essence of who we are. In a world increasingly defined by conformity, precision, and neoliberal grind culture, Park's film dares to suggest that humanity lies not in efficiency or output, but in imperfection. We are not broken machines. We are restless, emotional, inconsistent creatures. And perhaps that's okay.

The question of life's purpose hovers throughout the film like a ghost. Young-goon's grandmother, who was taken away to a mental institution when Young-goon was still a child, is a guiding yet fragmented presence. She often tried to tell her granddaughter the meaning of existence, but every time, the words slipped away, the moment interrupted. It’s a powerful metaphor for how meaning is often just out of reach. We spend our lives searching for answers, but sometimes, meaning isn’t a message passed down. Sometimes it’s simply being seen, being loved, and knowing that your oddities don’t need fixing.

Thus the love story is not one of lust or grand declarations. But one of companionship. Of recognition. Of the quiet, terrifying joy of someone seeing who you really are…and staying. In a time when connection has become increasingly digital, transactional and filtered, this film reminds us of a more precious kind: the human kind. The kind built not on perfection, but on shared brokenness.

You don’t need fixing

Stephen Holden once said that great films often slip between genres because real emotion can’t be boxed in. That’s true here. Try to label "I’m a Cyborg" and it wriggles away like a dream slipping out of memory. One minute it’s a romance. Then a comedy. Then a philosophical parable about belief, trauma and the things we carry from our families. Young-goon isn’t just sick. She’s responding to a world that never accepted her. Her grandmother, dragged away by authorities, haunts every frame of her silence. Il-sun isn’t just deluded. He’s terrified of erasure.

For all its absurdity, "I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK" is deeply respectful in its portrayal of mental illness. It doesn’t turn suffering into spectacle. Nor does it romanticize madness. Instead, it humanizes difference. Each patient is vividly drawn. Each coping mechanism makes sense, once you know their story. Park lets us laugh with his characters, not at them.

Yes, "I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK" was too progressive for Korean society in 2006. But that doesn’t mean it failed. It just means it was early. Watching it now, in a country finally willing to talk about the things it once buried, it feels not just timely, but necessary.

Rather than conformity and cures, the film ends with companionship and with understanding. People aren’t fixed. They are just accepted as who they are. That’s its power. And that’s why, nearly 20 years on, it still matters.