Everything Is Connected
Why it is hard sci-fi
Six interlocking stories across centuries. Two of them are explicit science fiction. Neo-Seoul in 2144 is a corporate dictatorship that grows fabricants for service work and recycles them as food, and the post-apocalyptic Big Isle thread takes place after a near-extinction event called the Fall. The film commits to the idea that the same souls thread across lifetimes, which is its only flagrant supernatural rule.
Science inside it
Cloning and engineered servitude in the Sonmi thread. Genetic drift and oral history preservation in the Big Isle thread. Recurring birthmark as the films diegetic claim that identity persists across bodies, treated as data rather than mysticism by the world itself.