Cobweb review – tangled meta-yarn quickly wears out its welcome

A hectic ode to the chaos that is filmmaking, 70s-set Cobweb finds a manic director, played by Parasite's Song Kang-ho, obsessed with reshooting an ending to his latest film that he believes will push it into masterpiece territory. Helmed by great, genre-hopping Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon, who has tackled everything from serial killers to the Wild West to critical and commercial success, the lengthy two hour-plus runtime finds a place somewhere between a French farce and Japanese meta-movie One Cut of the Dead (itself remade into a French farce of sorts last year, retitled Final Cut), but with little of the fun.

It begins with a dream. Director Kim (Song Kang-ho) awakens in a cold sweat with an unshakeable conviction – if he shoots the last scene of his last motion picture, a film made following a freak accident that lead to the death of his mentor, it will be met as one of the greatest movies ever made. The film-within-a-film in question is a black-and-white Hitchcockian thriller about a group of people coming to blows in an old house, shot with the air of 1960 Korean classic The Housemaid. These sections, melodramatic and silly, are undoubtably the best parts of the movie, so it's a shame they're in such short supply.

Cobweb is a not-so-subtle meditation on that frequent artist's mentality that keeps them up at night: that with just a bit more time, a few more tweaks, that misunderstood work might have reached its full potential. Of course, it's a fool's game: can any artist ever be truly satisfied with what they create? Is there always a desire to go back? Clearly positioned as a chance for its playfully-minded director to cut loose, though, his antic film yields little reward for all the work we put in; it’s about an hour too long and eventually exhausting to sit with, like working a long shift that refuses to end because of other people’s screw-ups.

It doesn't help that Cobweb, shot by the acclaimed DP Kim Ji-yong, lacks the kinetic joy and visual variation of Kim's other works, as though this film, too, was made in a bit of a rush. In its exploration of (or is it an argument for?) spontaneity on set, the movie finds a few interesting notes, forcing us to wrestle with our own problematic favourites, many of which were made under questionable conditions by directors who refused to be reigned in. Are movies inherently better when the production is given the space to go wild? The fiery finale suggests that at least one of these director Kims thinks so.

But the big problem here is that the film never really gives us more than what we're directly witnessing, and we're witnessing it for what feels like a very long time; too fluffy to resonate on a deeper level, and yielding far too little in its convoluted payoff to justify a 135 minute investment. Cobweb is somehow erratic and fast-paced, while simultaneously always feeling like it's crawling along, in search of some clever meta notions it never quite finds. If only it had the legs.

Cobweb was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival 2023. A UK release date is yet to be announced.