Here we have one of the most uncompelling movies in recent memory, wrapped up in a visual style that's needlessly confusing and weighted down with performances that have all the flavor of a loaf of unbaked bread. Yesterday is not the worst of many recent Korean SF flop-busters—the all-time loser in that regard is the lamentable Resurrection of the Little Match Girl—but it's quite a tiresome mess unto itself. It’s so excruciatingly uninvolving that it took three separate sittings for me to watch the whole thing, making a two-hour movie feel like four.

Yesterday is like one of those Movie-By-Numbers jobs, where the ingredients are all there but the flair of the chef is missing. It contains a great many things—serial killers, genetic experiments, futuristic police work—but they all just sort of sit there. They never gel into a reason to keep watching. Plus, there's a fight or chase every ten minutes just to keep the audience awake—the sort of thing that in a better movie would work as punctuation but here is more like stammering.

If someone like me, a fairly seasoned veteran of moviegoing and -reviewing, can’t make head or tail of Dogura Magura, what does that bode for everyone else? I ask this question not because I’m hostile to difficult movies; in fact, I actively seek them out. But Dogura Magura has a narrator that can’t be trusted telling a story that may have no substance in a plot that may never have existed to begin with. It’s a pretentious version of one of those thrillers where every piece of evidence can be read one of two ways, and the identity of the killer can be changed in the very last shot to appease the test marketers.