The Fin Review: Delightfully Dirty Dystopia

The Fin beautifully imagines a dystopia of segregated, mutated fish people and reminds us that the monstrous is what makes us whole.

But Mia lives among the humans, and entering the city as an Omega is asking for trouble. Still, he can’t deny his brethren his dying wish and tries to find a way.

While the Omegas can pass as humans as long as their fins aren’t visible, the threat of being discovered is too much for most of them to risk entering the city. Most of the people there carry a mix of disdain and fear towards the Omegas and won’t hesitate to call the special police force dedicated to capturing them. For as dangerous as it is, it’s understandable why Mia would hide among the humans as long as she can get away with it. While it comes with having to preserve a level of secrecy, she can live with a level of relative luxury other Omegas could never even dream of. That isn’t to say life in the city is great; even as a human, the world is on its last leg in its entirety.

The opening voice over reminisces about a time when the ocean was still blue, the rays of the sun still felt pleasant on your skin, and before they would die in masses. Now a red sky looms over the city that plunges the cement buildings into a garish orange light, which makes for an incredibly striking image. The humans in the city walk around with mud on their faces and wearing scrappy clothes, while the Omegas are covered in oil from their work in the ocean. Despite that, The Fin is a fantastic-looking film. While every frame feels dirty and run-down, the resulting images are stunning in how they use splashes of color to break the otherwise almost monochrome gray images.

In some ways The Fin feels quite reminiscent of a Bong Joon-ho film: the dirty dystopia with an elevated genre twist that comments on capitalism and the class system with no regard to subtlety rings quite familiar. And yet, The Fin is a movie where director Syeyoung Park can be felt in every second, not in small part due to his involvement in pretty much every part of the filmmaking process: Park is the writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and editor of this film. While The Fin and his previous feature, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, might not fit exactly into the horror genre, it seems there’s an enthusiasm in Syeyoung Park’s voice as a filmmaker for one of horror’s most classic tropes.

There’s a love for the monstrous and how it completes us as humans at the center here. For all of the oil-covered fish people, burnt skylines, and dystopian enslavement, The Fin is a film that feels deeply human. There are real emotional stakes that cut through any of the dirty visuals and off-putting (complimentary) genre elements. It’s a familiar story in many ways, partially because we have seen it in other films but also because of how true it rings to our current world. Either way, Syeyoung Park has done enough to make it his own.

The Fin (지느러미) will have its World Premiere at the Locarno Film Festival on August 9, 2025, and will be screened again on August 10-11.