LOST IN STARLIGHT - Mark Reviews Movies

Lost in Starlight, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 29, 2025

There's a specific type of animated film that seems as if it could have existed as a live-action project but gradually makes one realize what a mistake that probably would have been. Lost in Starlight possesses that exact sense, since it's really just the simple story of two people meeting by chance, falling in love, and having to deal with the complications and obstacles life and circumstances throw at them.

However, the screenplay by director Han Ji-won and Kang Hyun-joo also sets this tale in the future—circa the 2050s in an alternate timeline in which human expeditions to Mars have been possible for almost 30 years. Any "real" version of this story, then, would be filled with so many visual effects, as well as props and set decorations, in order to create the futuristic world within it that we might not be convinced that it looks real anyway.

One of the sneaky things about animation is how it can create entire and entirely imaginative worlds, put us right in the middle of them, and make us stop thinking about whether or not everything within it is "real." Animation invents its own reality and, when the actual technique is as effective as it is in Han's film, presents it without any seams in the visual aesthetic. Once we enter and accept that world, it simply becomes the reality of the story.

The reality here is that this is a future with more plans to explore and potentially colonize Mars, following the disastrous and tragic failure of that first mission a few decades prior. A quake hit the underground facility where a group of astronauts and scientists were working on assorted experiments, killing them all.

Enough time has passed that NASA is planning a second trip to the red planet. They're putting together a team, which might include Nan-young (voice of Kim Tae-ri), a Korean woman working on a drone that can identify micro-organisms and, hopefully, show some former or current signs of life on Mars.

She also happens to be the daughter of one of the scientists from the first, doomed mission to the planet, and after going through a holographic simulation of a potential catastrophe while she's there, the powers-that-be determine that it might not be the best idea to send someone whose life has been so defined by that very specific kind of trauma. NASA sends her back home to Seoul to continue her work on the drone, to work through the grief of losing her mother all those years ago, and to find a way to put all of her focus into the mission, should she be selected to go to Mars.

With its mind seemingly set on space, the film quickly comes back down to earth, giving us marvelous sights of a Seoul of the future, in which that hologram technology fills the streets and skylines with advertising and news broadcasts as hanging monorails pass through the skyscrapers. The colors here are bright and potent, and those backdrops look as handcrafted as the characters themselves, even though it seems entirely unlikely computer animation wasn't involved in their design. If the art of animation is a kind of illusion, though, this is part of the modern form of it—crafting pieces of art by hand and digitally that all look like a cohesive whole.

Han and his team pull off that trick well, but they also give us a surprisingly grounded and increasingly affecting romance along the way. It starts when Nan-young, looking for someone to repair her mother's old record player, meets Jay (voice of Hong Kyung), a man who specializes in fixing older pieces of technology. The two see each other a few times on this business, but Jay eventually lets it be known that he wants a more personal relationship with Nan-young. A little moment in which he chases after her in the rain, because he noticed she didn't bring an umbrella to their meeting, makes her toss aside her rule not to make any new connections, since she might be leaving the planet in a few months, after all.

At first, the romance feels a little thin, as we're given montages of the couple happily spending time together against that backdrop, discovering how much they have in common, and realizing that Nan-young knew Jay before they even met in person. He's a musician, who was in a band and partially wrote a song that didn't go anywhere, but she found it randomly online years ago and became obsessed. Nan-young supports Jay in and pushes him to further his music career, and both the relationship and the story start to feel a little one-sided.

Then, the inevitable happens as the mission to Mars gets closer, and what appears to be the most obvious obstacle for the romance becomes something else entirely. After all, love isn't just a one-sided affair, and the film opens up—in terms of its characters, its ideas, and its scope for the worlds it will show us—once Jay realizes Nan-young's dreams are as important to her as his dreams are to him.

It's as if everything within the story, which is fairly simple in its romantic aims, reconfigures itself. The characters feel richer, even as Lost in Starlight takes one of them and us elsewhere, while also forcing them to figure out what matters to each of them and why each one's understanding of the other's goals is why this romance matters in the first place. This is a film that's clearly complex in its visuals, but the real depth of it is how sneakily complex its central relationship becomes.

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