Inside a crowded mental institution, a strange menagerie of patients weaves a quiet, unsettling tapestry of lives. Young-goon, Lim Soo-jung, a factory worker who believes she is a cyborg, is kept apart from ordinary meals and ordinary conversations. Her self-imposed exile from humanity centers on a peculiar ritual: she refuses to eat, instead licking batteries and attempting to shock herself back to “recharge.” She talks almost exclusively with machines and electrical appliances, and every night she tunes in to her tube radio for guidance on becoming a better cyborg. This strange fixation casts a spell over her days and shadows her dreams, painting a fragile line between reality and a world built from circuits and sounds.
The film paints a portrait of a household’s secrets through the eyes of Young-goon’s mother, Lee Yong-nyeo. In an interview with the institute’s head doctor, she claims ignorance about her daughter’s delusions, even as it becomes evident she once knew and simply didn’t act. The discussion peels back layers of guilt and avoidance, revealing that Young-goon’s grandmother, who suffered from delusions of being a mouse, had long ago been institutionalized. That trauma echoes through generations, triggering in Young-goon a corresponding fantasy of revenge against the “men in white” who took her grandmother away. The roots of her psychosis unfold like a quiet, painful family history, shaping her longing to reconnect with a grandmother who exists only in memory and in the echoes of a past that refuses to stay buried.
Into this ward steps Il-soon, a young male patient played with unsettling calm by Rain. He exists on the margins of the hospital’s social world, a kleptomaniac whose anti-social impulses are rooted in schizophrenia. He moves through the ward with a sense of detachment, yet he is strangely drawn to Young-goon. Il-soon wears handmade rabbit masks and moves with a nervous energy, brushing his teeth when he feels uneasy. He claims a remarkable, almost mythic ability to steal other people’s traits and identities, a talent he wields without malice and returns when he’s done. His complex relationship with Young-goon becomes the story’s emotional center: a dynamic in which he alternates between scorn from others and a protective, almost compassionate instinct toward her.
As their bond deepens, Young-goon convinces Il-soon to take away her “sympathy” so she can kill the men in white. This collaboration leads her to a fevered hallucination of a rampage through the hospital, where the boundaries between patient and enforcer, victim and aggressor, blur into a terrifying dream of control and power. When she undergoes shock treatment for refusing to eat, she believes she has been recharged—an illusion that masks her deteriorating physical condition as doctors begin force-feeding to keep her alive. Il-soon, moved by a growing sympathy for her, conceives an elaborate plan to help her survive and, perhaps, to redefine what sustenance means for a body on the brink.
The plan centers on a bold invention Il-soon calls a rice-megatron, a supposed device to convert food into electrical energy inside Young-goon’s back. After a first meal, Young-goon confides secrets to the head doctor, and a recurring dream about her grandmother nudges her toward a philosophical question about the meaning of her existence. She interprets a lip-read message she believes her grandmother gave her as a kind of destiny: she is a “nuke bomb” that requires a bolt of lightning to detonate. With this revelation echoing in her mind, she and Il-soon venture into a violent storm, intent on using her radio’s antenna as a lightning rod.
The storm intensifies as the wind tears their tent away and forces them to secure their supplies. Il-soon, in a quiet, almost reverent moment, plugs a wine bottle with his little finger and places a cork atop the improvised lightning rod, a small act that unexpectedly protects Young-goon from the lightning’s strike. When dawn breaks, they sit together under a rising rainbow, weathered yet together, and they share a tentative embrace that feels like a fragile truce between two damaged souls who have found a reason to keep going.
In the end, the tale circles back to the quiet resilience of two people who navigate the borders between illness, imagination, and care. The hospital’s sterile walls fade into memory as a storm cleanses the night, leaving behind a glimmer of hope and a sense that, even in a world where machines and memories jostle for dominance, human connection can emerge as the strongest electricity of all.
