Review of Swimming to Sea / 파닥파닥, directed by Lee Dae-hee

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

In March 2025, which is much closer to when I am writing this (the publication day of my blog posts, outside of timely ones/new releases, tends to be much farther in the future to make sure I’m not overloading myself later on), I went to San Diego and Los Angeles for half the month. I was visiting family in San Diego for Nowruz, or Iranian New Year, during the first chunk of my trip, then I headed up to Los Angeles to go to the Association of Writers (AWP) conference.

I spent a day at my friend’s apartment in Anaheim, as she was getting her MFA at Chapman University at this time. We were heading to Los Angeles the next day together, but before we went, she had to get work done with her master’s thesis and whatnot. So I watched some television and got work done myself as well.

There was one movie she made me and her fiance watch when I made them hotpot to eat that night: Swimming to Sea. I’ll remember how she was cackling at that moment, especially when it came to how she was so pumped to watch this. I had no idea what to expect beyond it being a Korean movie, which was interesting in some ways because I speak Korean and largely covered it as a critic, yet had never heard of this movie.

So we watched it that night! Let’s get into the review, as I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction of this post.

Fish, waiting to be served at a Korean seafood restaurant, debate whether they should give up or try to escape their tank.

This movie begins with a mackerel: she becomes later known as Padak/Flappy. But for now, she’s captured from the ocean and put in the tank of a seafood restaurant in Korea, and when she spots another mackerel being prepared as food beyond the walls of the tank, she knows she needs to get out of there and tries to escape.

She fails, but she meets the other residents of the tank.They’re Bream (a beakfish), Bar (a sea bass), an eel (Jooldom), Nollaemi (a snapper), a greenling (Spotty), and the Master, who is a flatfish who hides under a grate and commands everyone to play dead when the restaurant’s patrons come to pick out a fish.

These fish are not even fed themselves, and they have to eat the dead or dying that are dropped in the tank with them. It’s after Padak’s failed attempt they dub her Padak, and they gather around as the Master tells stories of the ocean he got from another fish. Padak and the Master have a bloody altercation, and Jooldom asks Padak to give a riddle.

She decides to get everyone to contemplate the thought of escape, but that backfires when she seems to have broken the hierarchy and taken away authority from the Master. The group beats her, but Spotty decides to try and escape with her the next day. Spotty doesn’t get far and Padak stops with him.

A dying halibut is tossed into the tank and everyone except Padak eats him. Padak jumps into the king crab tank below theirs, then almost dies because of their spikes and ruthlessness. The restaurant owner’s son scoops her out of the tank and puts her in with his clownfish, but then Padak eats them all in a fit of madness.

This gets her put back in the regular tank, but Spotty has died. He jumped into the king crab tank in an attempt to speak to them, and everyone else is given his body to eat. The Master tries to stop the rest from eating their friend, but then Padak attacks him when returned to the tank because she thinks he killed Spotty.

The restaurant owner then grabs the Master and prepares him to be fed to a customer. However, he’s spared when the customer asks for mackerel instead, and Padak apologizes to him before she is taken away. The chef prepares her in an awfully cruel fashion, and the Master decides to leave this life behind.

When morning breaks, he jumps out of the tank and flops away to freedom, right outside the chef’s grasp. He is reunited with the sea, and sees the rest of the crew watching him from the tank. The movie ends after the credits with him exploring a coral reef that’s full of fish and life.

Overall Thoughts

This was a movie I had no expectations about going into it, and I was pleasantly surprised by what it had to offer. It’s a pretty existentialist and brutal movie if you’re coming into this no idea what it’s about, but the themes are something I contemplate a lot as someone who despises eating meat.

I personally don’t eat seafood at all, but if I watched this kind of movie, I honestly might be traumatized out of it. The animation style and humanization of the fish is extremely effective for what it is, and I feel like that there’s something to be learned from movies like these.

Regardless, this is definitely not the movie for just anyone. I was surprised my friend knew about it, but at the same time, there’s a lot of really odd and out there movies that she just knows and can spitball about after just thinking for a second about it.

Go watch it if you’re interested! Maybe not if it’s not your thing at all.

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