Eumbok Restaurant: MSG

Eumbok Restaurant is not an AI film.
It is a story about people who are judged every day, fall apart every day, and still return the next morning to set the table.
Through the arrival of the dead, the film asks how the living survive another day.

In an era where people can die from ratings and reviews,
a chef who rejects evaluation searches for a world without stars, only to find himself trapped for 365 nights in the far crueler judgment of the dead.

This film is not simply a horror story about food or death.
It is about the violence of living in an age where evaluation has become routine.
On the vertical screen of a smartphone, food is reduced to star ratings, and even human dignity is consumed as numbers and reviews.
A notification sound that once seemed harmless gradually transforms into a siren of pressure.

I wanted to visualize this invisible violence through three overlapping vertical frames:
the smartphone screen, the ritual table, and the doorway.
Each of these frames shares the same structure: they receive, display, observe, and judge.
Moving between them, the protagonist finds that he cannot truly escape any frame at all.

This work was not conceived as social-media-style content.
It was planned and edited from the beginning around the vertical frame as a thematic device.
Through its suffocating aspect ratio, escalating notification sounds, and the relentless arrival of judgment, the film compresses a complete emotional arc into just ten minutes—
from anxiety to grotesque absurdity, from black comedy to a quiet sense of futility.

In the end, this is a complete short film about a man who runs away from human ratings, only to confront a far greater form of evaluation—
the judgment of the dead.
And in the final blackout, the audience is left to experience the claustrophobic feeling of being judged themselves.