This is your life, and it’s ending one frame at a time.
You’re sitting in the dark, clutching a lukewarm soda, waiting for the ghost of Kim Ki-duk to speak to you from beyond the grave. The film is Kone Taevast—or Call of God (2022) if you prefer the English title. It’s the final transmission from a man who spent his life mapping the jagged, bloody edges of the human soul before COVID-19 snatched him away in a cold Latvian winter.
The Setup
Imagine a young woman. She’s staring into a mirror, doing her morning routine, fixing her face for a world that doesn’t care if she exists. Then, she steps out onto the streets of Kyrgyzstan—because why not?—and meets a man who wants to find a “Dream Café”.
He’s a writer. A man of words, which is just a fancy way of saying he’s a professional liar. A thief steals her bag, he plays the hero, and just like that, they’re locked in a dance of obsession.
The Twist
Here’s the thing: None of it is real. Or maybe all of it is.
The movie tells you that their first meeting was just a dream. Then the phone rings. An omniscient voice offers her a choice: sleep and live out the dream in the waking world, or stay awake and watch the dream decay into reality.
It’s the kind of high-concept existential headache that Kim Ki-duk loved to build. It’s not just a love story; it’s a manual for how we tear each other apart just to feel something.
Why You’ll Watch (Even If You Shouldn’t)
You know about the scandals. The lawsuits. The #MeToo wreckage that turned a legendary director into a pariah in his own country. You’re supposed to separate the art from the artist, but how do you do that when the art is this obsessed with the very violence the man was accused of?
Call of God wasn’t even finished by him. It was assembled from his notes and footage by his collaborator, Artur Veeber. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a film—a “dirty gem” born from a tragedy, edited by survivors, and delivered to a Venice Film Festival audience that didn’t quite know whether to applaud or walk out.
The Verdict
Is it his best? No. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring this is not. It’s a hazy, dream-logic fever dream that feels like it’s drifting away from you the moment you try to pin it down.
But in a world of sanitized, focus-grouped cinema, there is something honest about this train wreck. It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. It’s a man looking at his own mortality and deciding to turn it into a puzzle box.
Go see it if you want to remember that even when a creator is gone, their obsessions linger—looping, repeating, forever asking for directions to a cafe that doesn’t exist.
Rating: 3 out of 5 cigarette burns.
