San Diego Asian Film Festival 2025 

Two friends tired of their precarious existence in the nighttime life of Gangnam, in South Korea, plan to gather a bunch of money and start a new business elsewhere, only to find themselves embroiled in fixed sports games with high gangster stakes, buried gold treasure, and an uncontrollable mother with her own agenda! 

This sort of neo-noir thriller has plenty of precedent, but director Hwan Lee keeps us happy with sharper protagonists, a surprisingly sly performance from Mom-figure Ga-yeong (Kim Shin-rock), and all the breathless and totally ironic pacing you can shake a camera at. Make sure you still have at least a base stake for the down-payment later, and let’s get into this! 

So Mi-seon (Han So-hee) and Do-gyeong (Jeon Jong-seo) are lifelong friends eking out a kind of living in glamorous Gangnam through terrible hostessing conditions, driving jobs, and whatever else they can scam, scrounge, or sell. But they both want more, and better, than this, and somehow have settled on opening up a flower shop, just as soon as they have enough money saved for a down payment. 

Of course, that’s just the beginning of this everything-that-can-go-wrong-will kind of movie. Our heroines discover their money has been frittered away by disreputable men doing all kinds of bad things, and determine that they earned some serious backpay for their “retirement” flower shop project, and so go hunting for their stolen cash. Neither of them expected to find not only a bunch of cash, but buried under that, a cache of gold bars. 

Apparently the cache of gold bars was something of a legend here in the city amongst the players and gangsters, so now, it seems as though everyone and their freaking brother knows Mi-seon and Do-gyeong have struck it terribly rich and want a piece, or the whole thing lets be real here, of the action! Chased by thugs who have a weird penchant for torturing people by sinking them up to their necks in tar, our gals kick much ass and can certainly hold their own against all these powerful men but at some point somethings got to give and so, the unfortunate choice of going to the girls’ mother-figure Ga-yeong is made. And somehow of course, it turns out the wildly unpredictable Ga-yeong has heard about the girls’ financial adventures, including the unexpected gold stash, and has plans of her own for it! 

With echoes of the Spanish-language blockbuster Money Heist, The Italian Job and even Ocean’s Eleven, Project Y is a zany crime drama about two friends planning a heist that goes fantastically sideways, and how they deal with the twists through a single insane evening, set against the backdrop of the colorful Gangnam district of South Korea. 

Reviewed by Alicia Glass