The Prayer
New York Asian Film Festival 2021
August 6 - 22, 2021
This haunting exploration of AI sentience casts Lee Yoo-young as both a woman caring for her bedridden mother and the family’s devoted robot nurse.
The Prayer is available in the FLC Virtual Cinema beginning August 13. Get tickets here.
This timely, haunting exploration of AI sentience and the anxiety of choice is set in a near-future hospice, where the robot nurses have been crafted to resemble family members of the patients. A young woman (Lee Yoo-young), who has spent the past decade neglecting her own life to tend to her bedridden mother, gradually grows suicidal, alarming the family’s devoted nurse, TRS (also played, frightfully convincingly, by Lee). TRS searches for ways to help, even contacting a local nun (Ye Soo-jung). But her decision, when reached, has horrific consequences for all involved—and for the very future of robot technology. Min Kyu-dong returns to NYAFF with the feature-length version of his SF8 series episode (NYAFF 2020), featuring remarkable performances, beautiful but bleak cinematography, and an indelible Grand Guignol climax.
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