Lost in Starlight (2025) is the first Korean animated feature film from Netflix, set in a future Seoul in 2050. Visually stunning and stylistically slow-paced to the point of being meditative, the film opens a new horizon for Korean animation—particularly in its science fiction strand. Bong Joon-ho, director of the Oscar-winning Parasite, praised the film as “a delicate visual perfection, embracing the universe and everyday life.” Yet the film’s aesthetic achievement may owe much to its engagement with broader global cultural currents.
Han Ji-won, director of Lost in Starlight, first drew critical attention with her short film The Sea on the Day When the Magic Returns, which screened at Sundance in 2023. In her artistic vision, memory, emotion, dreams, and desire are expressed through everyday spaces—spaces that are often warped, rearranged, and made to collide in a strange, sensorial logic. Han’s distinctive manipulation of space and time, unbound by the rules of linearity, makes her a perfect match for the meditative tempo and speculative setting of Lost in Starlight.
The story follows Nan-young, a scientist determined to join an American-led mission to Mars with her prototype device for detecting microbial life. As she waits for the mission headquarters’ final decision, she remains in Seoul to complete her research, where she meets Jay, a musician who suffers from stage fright. Their relationship blossoms in a futuristic Seoul, where familiar districts of central Seoul blend with ultra-high-rises, holographic billboards, autonomous vehicles, and monorails. This dazzling cityscape, especially at night, explodes with color and sensory cues that evoke both wonder and nostalgia—a place where the present becomes the past of a future yet to come.
The couple’s connection is tested when Nan-young is selected for the mission. Jay discovers that Nan-young’s mother had died in a Mars expedition two decades earlier, during an attempt to cultivate Amur Adonis, a flower known for its resilience in harsh climates. His suspicions grow that Nan-young’s true motive is to trace her mother’s last steps and uncover remnants of the ill-fated plantation. When an earthquake struck the Mars base, her mother vanished along with the flower planters—opening a narrative terrain that entangles memory, loss, family, ecological themes, and the cultural and geopolitical stakes of space technology.
Ethical Science Fiction and Literary Precedents
Science fiction that engages ecological concerns and the implications of advanced technologies has already begun to take root in Korean literature, with writers such as Chung Bo-ra, Kim Cho-yeop, and Cho Seo-wol leading the charge. Chung’s Cursed Bunny (2017), one of her most well-known short stories, may not be science fiction in the strict sense, but it probes the uncanny intersections between fantasy, horror, and social critique. The story follows a family of brewery owners plagued by a cursed bunny—a grotesque object of vengeance that unleashes illness and misfortune upon them. Here, fantasy bleeds into reality, forming an acerbic satire of Korea’s recent history. Cursed Bunny blends horror with magical realism, and its subversive narrative confronts the disquieting undercurrents of Korea’s rapid modernization.
More firmly situated in the realm of science fiction is If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light (2019) by Kim Cho-yeop. The story centers on Anna, a scientist specializing in cryogenic technology—once essential for intergalactic travel by placing passengers in hibernation for extended journeys. Her husband and son have already travelled to a distant planet using this now-outdated method. In the meantime, wormhole technology has emerged, allowing instant travel between many points in the galaxy—except to the planet where Anna’s family resides. With no wormhole connection available, Anna is effectively stranded on Earth. The story raises questions about the human cost of scientific progress and the values worth preserving in the face of transformative technologies. Rather than portraying a dystopian future in which humanity is crushed by innovation, or a triumphalist narrative of technological conquest, Kim offers a reflective and emotionally grounded exploration of how humans might evolve alongside scientific advancement—and what core principles should guide that evolution.
Scientific Romancer
Lost in Starlight is, at its core, a romance between Nan-young and Jay, whose relationship weathers highs and lows as their diverging career paths pull them apart and compromise proves difficult. Their realization of love culminates in a spectacular moment of connection: Jay, using a rudimentary radio transceiver on Earth, reaches Nan-young on Mars, where she faces a life-threatening situation reminiscent of her mother’s fate. There, she discovers a subterranean colony of Amur Adonis—possibly the legacy left behind by her mother. Across the vast emptiness of space, they connect not only through radio signals but also emotionally. In this moment, space technology fulfills its most life-affirming and ecological promise. Through Nan-young and Jay, Lost in Starlight imagines a future where the ethical uncertainties of technology are not erased, but gently dispersed in the light of connection, care, and possibility.
The optimism in Lost in Starlight is reminiscent of The Martian (2015), in which an astronaut is stranded on Mars and must survive until the rescue team arrives. First, he establishes communication with mission control in Houston, Texas. Then, using what remains in the Mars base and his ingenuity, he manages to grow potatoes to sustain himself. His actions not only demonstrate resilience but also suggest the possibility of cultivating life forms on Mars. In doing so, he reinforces an image of the red planet as a frontier to be explored, claimed, and eventually settled—a thematic variant of the American Western, where the frontier represents opportunity and the expansion of human habitation. Inadvertently, perhaps, Lost in Starlight echoes the thematic arc of The Martian—exploration, cultivation, and settlement—thereby engaging with a narrative tradition strongly associated with American space imaginaries.
Despite its narrative arc resembling The Martian, Nan-young’s journey to Mars is deeply personal and emotional—rooted in loss, memory, and ecological continuity. Her discovery of the Amur Adonis colony, potentially left behind by her mother, gestures toward a quiet lineage of care and persistence rather than conquest. The film thereby opens a speculative space in which exploration is no longer framed primarily through expansion or dominion, but through remembrance, healing, and reconnection across generational and planetary boundaries.
Some may suggest that Lost in Starlight bears a striking resemblance to Suzume (2022), as both films center on mother-daughter relationships that drive their narrative arcs. Suzume, the titular character, lost her mother during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Her fragmented memories and efforts to prevent another catastrophe form the film’s emotional engine, in which a supernatural force breaks through weak spots in the physical world to unleash natural disasters.
The film merges the natural and the supernatural, creating visually stunning cosmic backdrops—skylight, rain, fire, thunder, and rainbows—against which Suzume honors her mother’s memory by restoring natural balance. Both films prioritize female perspectives, making the recovery of self from past wounds a central theme. Yet Lost in Starlight, despite its shared emphasis on striking visual amalgamations of cityscape, space, and technology, diverges from Suzume by directly engaging with the ethical stakes of future technologies. Whereas Suzume turns toward mythology and historical memory, Lost in Starlight looks ahead—toward the uncertainties and promises of the space age.
