The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra

About the various people who come into contract with an odd fungus-based creature that slowly develops in a mattress, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra has an intriguing premise that never particularly connects. The film gives you little snippets of the lives of the various people in proximity to the mattress, a conceit that, in theory, should be compelling. But first-time writer/director Park Syeyoung isn’t quite able to get us to care about any of these characters, which makes even the brief 62 minute running time feel plodding and overlong. The film really needed to either lean into the slice-of-life anthology format or embrace its avant-garde weirdness more thoroughly, because as it is, neither side particularly works.

*1/2 out of ****