Medical students everywhere will likely feel vindicated at how their vocations’ unique struggles are rendered uncomfortably accurate in director Jason Park’s debut film Transplant.
Park grew up in Albany Park, and his subversive and nail-biting film, although set in New York City, was partially filmed in Chicago. It screened in the New Director’s Competition at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival with Park and others in attendance.
Transplant tells the story of Jonah Yoon (K-pop star Eric Nam in his debut acting role), a Korean American surgical resident in New York City. Wanting to fast-track his career and grow his skills, he requests to shadow Dr. Edward Harmon (Bill Camp), a ruthless cardiac transplant surgeon. Though brilliant, Dr. Harmon quickly reveals himself to be abusive in the operating room, craftily packaging the frustrations levied on him by former helpers as the complaints of disgruntled and untalented people who aren’t cut out for his level of genius and work. Jonah is pulled into this vortex of draconian structures and unreasonable requests, and he’s caught between wanting to thrive to support his family and community—particularly his mother, Minah (Michelle Lee)—and honoring his morals.
Nam shares that he was drawn to the ways the script explores Korean American identity in a nuanced way. “I could immediately connect with the character,” he tells the Reader. The film’s consideration of ambition and its darker sides also encouraged Nam to take on the project. “I was terrified. I had never acted before, but I love a good challenge. The film highlights the struggle to find the balance of honoring our ambition but also realizing where it can lead us astray, and I think that’s something I could also deeply relate to.”
Park found that exploring Jonah’s Korean American background allowed him to tell a familiar story in a new and heightened way. “I loved being able to use the mentor-mentee genre film as a pathway into exploring these larger cultural truths,” Park says. One of those truths is the role of the Korean American church and how it serves as a complex space that can be both a haven from the demands of work and an amplification of those same pressures.
“To be Korean American, you can’t discount the gravity of the role the church played in your formation,” Nam shares. “The church is more than just a place for spiritual worship; it’s a space for networking, forming friends, and a place to remain in touch with one’s cultural roots.” In one sequence, after a church service, as Jonah gets ready to leave, he’s ambushed by another congregant who asks him to help her daughter, as she hopes to go into the medical field. “The church establishes the context of the expectations and the hopes and the desires of not just the family, but the community itself,” says Park. “And then that, in turn, is reflected onto the family again.”
Transplant also subverts its genre story through the ways in which it doesn’t depict Jonah and Dr. Harmon’s relationship as a straightforward tale of a charismatic leader corrupting an impressionable youth. Jonah has resolve, and the central tensions come around as he learns how to stand his ground against Dr. Harmon in strategic ways, making defiance look like submission.
“I’m much more willing to harm myself than I am to harm someone else, and I think for Jonah, being Korean American, there’s an element of truth to that for him too,” Park shares. “He respects elders and those in charge, but what do you do when your ‘elder’ is someone like Dr. Harmon, who will become more aggressive if you don’t follow his demands?”
“From an aesthetic standpoint, I’m always motivated to come back to Chicago and make midwest characters, specifically Chicago characters, because I have such an appreciation for the culture.”
While Nam has created and worked on a variety of film projects related to his music, his time on Transplant was unique in the ways it reaffirmed for him how the creative process is a collaborative one. “My fans know I’m notoriously bad at remembering my lyrics,” he says, laughing. “As a solo performer, I can be as free as I like, and when I’m finished performing a concert, I’m done. Even if there’s a mistake, it’s already happened, and there’s nothing I can do about it then. Working on a film, though, I may be in front of the camera, but I’m a small part of this huge production. I have to relinquish control and trust the vision and the guidance of directors and the producers and all these other incredible professionals and artists in their own right to guide this little piece that I’m adding to the puzzle. It was scary to do but also cathartic.”
He jokes that his trust also led him astray at times. A commitment to realism was paramount, with medical consultants advising on the accuracy of the script’s details. In a scene where Jonah is operating using forceps, Nam recalls how Park told him that there were two ways to hold the tool, an easier method and one much harder. “He told me, ‘Jonah would do the difficult way,’ and I groaned,” Nam says. “The tool is very difficult to hold, and I practiced for hours, and then when it came time to do the scene, one of the doctor consultants came by and said, ‘Why are you holding the forceps that way? Nobody does that.’”
Another way the production challenged Nam was in how it required him to think of the art of acting as an inherently embodied one. Given that most of the film is spent in the darkness of operating rooms, actors are almost always wearing surgical masks, and for Nam, this meant he had to learn how to communicate emotion and tension with just his eyes, forehead, and eyebrows. “I think blinking and closing your eyes is such a telling way of how somebody is feeling internally . . . so I was paying attention to the speed of my blinking,” he said.
Transplant
93 min. Screened at the Chicago International Film Festival, wide release TBA
For Park, the focus on eyes was not only an exciting creative challenge but a way to pay homage to a variety of different film genres. While Transplant may remind viewers of many stories of devotion gone wrong, such as Black Swan (2010), or stories of unhealthy mentee-mentor relationships, like Whiplash (2014) or Wall Street (1987), for Park, the cinematic and aesthetic influence goes back further: westerns. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly [1966], Once Upon a Time in the West [1968] . . . Sergio Leone is such a master of capturing these eye shots. It might not be easy to think of where a medical residency thriller connects to these films, but something I was talking about with cinematographer Eric Lin was how these 60s and sometimes 70s westerns understood the way they were able to communicate tension. And we can feel it as an audience member just through a look.”
While Transplant is set in New York City, Park wanted exterior shots of Chicago to serve as stand-ins from New York. The director and his team filmed for just one day, and he fondly recalls how they ran around all night for the shoot, breathlessly going from location to location, trying to capture as many sights as possible. The newer portions of McCormick Place serve as stand-ins for the hospital Jonah worked at, while a pivotal sequence where Dr. Harmon and Jonah have one of their first conversations takes place in the famed West Loop steak restaurant, Blvd.
For Park, he hopes to continue to make films in the city, in the spirit of Chicago filmmakers and creatives like John Hughes and Steve James.
“From an aesthetic standpoint, I’m always motivated to come back to Chicago and make midwest characters, specifically Chicago characters, because I have such an appreciation for the culture,” Park says. “It’s also just a beautiful city to shoot in. I hope more people come here and do more work here.”
Producer Nina Yang Bongiovi, who visited Chicago for the first time to shoot Transplant, agrees with Park. “This city is so nice,” she remarks. “The fall is especially amazing. . . . You have to shoot in the fall if you’re going to film in Chicago.”
Park also cites how growing up in the city has shaped his approach to writing characters. “Being in the midwest . . . I’ve learned the importance of code-switching and existing in different places and being able to interact and communicate in different ways to different people. I think that will always be a part of the natural fascination I have for any kind of character—how these people maneuver through their environment and how they navigate it. I personally learned and experienced this growing up Korean American in a city like Chicago.”
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