Joy Joy Nails
2017 · 18m · USA
Directed by Joey Ally
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, provocative
A Korean salon manager suspects her Chinese trainee of chasing the boss's son — until the neon-pink illusion cracks and everyone's exploitation shows through.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the love-triangle setup to play it safe; instead Ally dismantles the whole power structure underneath and leaves you staring at complicity instead of romance—the kind of rug-pull that makes you retroactively uncomfortable.
The film's formal control—how it uses the salon setting's geometry and the neon palette as both comfort and cage—sits squarely in a lineage of spatial cinema about labor and visibility, executed with the precision of someone who understands how to load a single room with class and gender.
That moment when the framing shifts and you realize the trainee's quiet performance has been reading the room the entire time—not playing a victim, but surviving—is the decision that transforms what could've been a genre exercise into something that actually sees these women.
Reviews
Beyond its lush neon pink styling, pop music, and pretty smiles, you'll experience the same mirage as the film's protagonist as the salon's carefully crafted illusion falls away to reveal something much more sinister under the varnish. JOY JOY NAILS will move you and unsurprisingly open your eyes that much wider.