When a bus of thirteen children on their way to summer camp is found empty on the side of the road with only the body of their teacher, the city at-large fears the worst. Even so, it proves no less devastating once the police finally do find the kidnapper dead by suicide alongside five of the missing kids. There was no more denying the truth of what occurred and many of the victims’ parents attempted to end their lives, too. Enter AI company Trans Human®.
In a bid to comfort those unable to come to terms with their grief, this tech firm takes it upon itself to create VR facsimiles of the children for their moms and dads to interact with through specially formatted glasses. It’s meant to be therapeutic, insofar as providing a stopgap towards acceptance. And it works for some. Others, however, become attached to this fantasy in ways that make letting go impossible. Ryu So-young (Kim Hyun-joo) is one such soul.
Based on the novel Black Inferno by Oh Sung-eun, filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho’s Paradise Lost proves another familial thriller full of dark secrets like his last zombie-less drama The Ugly. He fast-forwards nine years after the prologue’s expository explanation of the tragedy and its aftermath to find So-young still signing into the Children of Paradise software to say good morning to her “son.” This hologram has become her reality.
We are at that stage of generative AI wherein cinema’s interpretations of its risks and rewards start to overlap. Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die used a similar conceit from a satirical angle, poking fun at the capitalistic gold mine this technology would hold. While Yeon’s approach is earnest in its healing potential, the consequences are no less damaging for the psychology of those who find themselves drawn into its addictive allure.
It’s not just that So-young keeps connecting when so many other parents have stopped (a fact she learns directly from her digitized Sun-woo, his time away from her being spent with the other “children” who share their sadness at no longer being “visited”) or that her co-workers fear she might be lost to this fiction forever (her boss suggests she go to the murder site and properly say goodbye). It’s that Sun-woo miraculously returns.
While this development would generally be met with celebration, anyone familiar with Yeon’s genre work knows that joyous occasions are often met with grim results. It’s one thing to live these past nine years without a son before a twenty-something stranger (Bae Hyun-sung) is suddenly sleeping in the next room, but So-young has been closely attached to her young son’s memory the entire time. And “he’s” still just one button-click away.
The question of which Sun-woo is real thus becomes a lot more complicated. She doesn’t know this man but is intimately aware of the wants and desires of the “boy” in her glasses. Does the former’s existence necessitate the erasure of the latter? On a purely intellectual level, the answer is yes. This scenario, however, is possessed by the sort of emotional entanglement that gives non-living objects value in the minds of those who’ve forged that attachment.
Rather than simply delve deeper into this fascinating dynamic, Paradise Lost decides to ratchet up the suspense by adding a devastating wrinkle I won’t ruin here. All I’ll say is that So-young will be forced to choose between these two Sun-woos. Given the stakes in play, it’s an objectively simple one, but her confused state demands she take time to fully grasp what’s happening. Just because her son came back doesn’t mean he’s the son she wants.
I wish Yeon gave himself more room to mine this internal conflict without leaning so hard into the narrative’s surface-level theatrics, but he does enough with the final choice to ensure it captivates for different, darker reasons. Paradise Lost‘s second half is rushing through its progressions so fast due to the added ticking clock of a new missing child that you almost forget the whole thing is supposed to be about innocent Sun-woo versus broken Sun-woo.
In many ways, Bae’s version of So-young’s son becomes as artificially one-dimensional as his electronic counterpart. His presence in the plot is solely a reason for her to finally confront a truth she’s refused to accept instead of being about his own trauma. It’s definitely a misstep when considering the human element of this shared violent nightmare, but I get why it’s been done this way—it allows both Sun-woos to be read as products of their “code.”
Not quite a nature-versus-nurture commentary, Paradise Lost is actually asking us to confront just how thin the line between real and imaginary is when it comes to today’s penchant for detached interactions. Does So-young love “Sun-woo” because of the memory of who he was or because that memory is who she wanted him to be? Is Sun-woo even her son if everything he’s done since the kidnapping was a result of living outside her sphere of influence?
Do we thus love the person our child is or the idea that they are ours? Can we love the person they become, no matter how monstrous, simply because we love that idea? These are the sorts of questions that Yeon uses to turn this sci-fi thought experiment into something very sinister. It makes for some captivating entertainment (thanks in large part to Kim and Bae’s performances) but only scratches the surface of what I assume the novel stretches further to attain.
Paradise Lost premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
