Tag: Moon Jeong-hee

The Unrighteous (원정빌라, Kim Seon-kuk, 2024)

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After discovering that all of his neighbours have become members of a religious cult, one young man tries to hold fast to his independence but finds himself confronted by the forces of conformity and mass hysteria in Kim Seon-kuk’s paranoid horror thriller, The Unrighteous (원정빌라, Wonjeong Villa). The film’s English title maybe somewhat misleading, though if anyone is unrighteous, it is the cult themselves rather than non-believer Ju-hyun (Lee Hyun-woo), while it’s also true that he lives in an unrighteous society obsessed with property values and social status.

It begins, however, with apartment complex horror as Ju-hyun gets into a vendetta with his upstairs neighbour Shin-hye (Moon Jeong-Hee) who first tries to bully him out of parking in “her” parking space which she is trying to hold for her husband who “always” parks there. Hearing strange sounds from above, Ju-hyun tries to complain about the noise, but Shin-hye ignores him and ironically insists that “neighbours should be more understanding” as if suggesting that Ju-hyun is being selfish and unreasonable and should rather make allowances for her son who is suffering from a serious illness. Ju-hyun had asked for quiet because his mother is recovering from recent surgery. 

The real problems start shortly after when it becomes apparent that Shin-hye has got religion after joining a Christian-leaning organisation that Ju-hyun has been warned is a cult that targets people with bogus surveys in order to recruit them. Though she had looked tired and took little interest in her appearance, Shin-hye is now nicely turned out with stereotypically middle-class housewife outfits, styled hair, and makeup. Grinning eerily, she seems to be intent on converting her neighbours. Ju-yhyun immediately earns her ire once again when he complains about her inviting the pastor to their residents committee meeting without prior notice. He’s not the only one who objects to being subjected to a religious lecture without his consent, though Shin-hye homes in on the neighbours’ various anxieties from job precarity to loneliness to win them over to her cause.

There seems to be a direct correlation between the literal cult Shin-hye is propagating and that of property ownership in that she often repeats that they are now all “homeowners” as opposed to tenants and “true owners of this land”. Ju-hyun is a property owner too, having paid off his mortgage at a comparatively young age, and himself hopes that the redevelopment project takes place so that he can move to a nicer apartment and have a better quality of life. Everyone is obsessed with how much more profit they might be able to make if the house prices rise in the area which is something the cult is also promising them happen. Ju-hyun isn’t disinterested in that, but also wants to see the town come back to life again and is heartened that so many people are moving to the area to take advantage of the currently lower than average prices.

Studying to become an estate agent, he seems to have an interest in finding people happy homes which might on some level be because of his own disordered familial background. Vague allusions are made to Ju-hyun’s long lost father being in some way abusive to the extent that Ju-hyun can’t forget the look in his eyes and is reluctant to let him back into their lives after he contact his mother to say he wants to apologise and make amends. It’s no surprise that he too has joined the cult, though the way that Ju-hyun reacts makes him something of a complicated hero and unrighteous in his actions. He justifies himself that he’s trying to keep his family safe and ensure the home he’s worked so hard to provide for them won’d be taken away, but his mother also has a point in resenting his bossiness and condescension as he repeatedly instructs her not to  have anything to do with the cult or open the door to strangers. When he has an opportunity to save his neighbours, he wonders whether he should bother given how mean to him they’ve all been through this whole ordeal.

In a sinister manner, the cult begins to encircle him as his employer and the leader of the redevelopment project turn out to be cult members. He’s fired from his job for refusing to join the cult, while the police seem to be in on it too and react to his attempts to explain with exasperation as if he were just a delusional conspiracy theorist. Only the local pharmacist with a side line in investigating cults is willing to help to help him. Nevertheless, the escalating darkness from trance-like religious mania to human sacrifice is quite steep even intended as satire that people would willingly sacrifice the lives of others in the name of house prices, even if they’re tricked into handing over the deeds to their properties to the cult become “the true owners of land”. Ju-hyun, however, resolutely refuses to drink the cool aid, in some ways quite literally, looking on with disdain as his neighbours dance in the street on receiving the news that the long awaited redevelopment project will indeed be happening as if it were a miracle fallen to them from some higher powers.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Noryang: Deadly Sea (노량: 죽음의 바다, Kim Han-min, 2023)

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The strange thing about Noryang: The Deadly Sea (노량: 죽음의 바다, Noryang: Jugeumui Bada), the third and final instalment in Kim Han-min’s trilogy about 16th century admiral Yi Sun-sin is that everyone wants to end the war but they all want to end it definitively and so are unable to simply let it run its course. Then again, there is a little more complexity involved in the depiction of Yi in asking whether his desire to repel the Japanese once and for all is really about the national good or personal vengeance for the death of one of his sons at the hands of Japanese raiders.

The opening scenes taking place in 1598 witness the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi who had launched two invasions of Korea in the previous decade which were in themselves precursors to an invasion of Ming China in an attempt to disrupt the Chinese Tributary System that prevented Japan from trading with China without agreeing to pay them taxes and recognise their political superiority. In the film at least, his deathbed order is to withdraw troops from Korea where they had been unsuccessfully fighting for the previous year. The leader of the Japanese forces, Konishi Yukinaga (Lee Kyu-hyung), is however prevented from leaving by a naval blockade placed by Admiral Yi around their fort on Suncheon Island. With Hideyoshi dead, Yukinaga is keen to return to Japan as quickly as possible in order to defend Hideyoshi’s young son, Hideyori, from Tokugawa Ieyasu who makes a very sinister appearance at Hideyoshi’s deathbed.

One might wonder why Yi does not allow Yukinaga to simply leave and return to Japan now that the war is technically over yet he insists that without a full surrender nothing is guaranteed and the Japanese may simply regroup and return as they had done before. Then again, he’s haunted by nightmares of his son’s death in which he witnesses him cut down by Japanese pirates while unable to intervene dragged back by shadowy figures rising from the water. Yi also later makes clear that his motivation is coloured by a desire for revenge to the extent that he is willing to sacrifice his life for it, which is one thing but it also necessarily means he’s willing to risk the lives of his men over what is partly a personal vendetta. 

Yukinaga, meanwhile, and the Japanese in general are depicted as cruel, ruthless, and cowardly. Shimazu (Baek Yoon-sik), the admiral leading the reinforcements sent to help spring Yukinaga, wilfully fires on his own men in order to cut his way through to the enemy and then threatens to execute sailors who tried to desert. In the end Yukinaga breaks his promise and declines to come to the assistance of Shimazu’s fleet as arranged, turning away and sailing back to Japan (he is subsequently beheaded after being on the losing side of the battle of Sekigahara as he was unable to commit ritual suicide because he was a Christian). They had originally been let down by a Chinese general they’d bribed to assist them but had decided not to turn up given the war was already over, making a secondary agreement with Admiral Chen (Jung Jae-young) who also desires a peaceful end to the disruption but vacillates between each side while not really wanting to get involved before making a fairly disastrous intervention in the final battle. 

There is something a little a uncomfortable in the film’s framing and most particularly in its post-credits scene which reinforces Yi’s conviction that the war isn’t really over without a complete surrender from Japan. In any case, Yi becomes a literal beating heart of the battle banging the drums of war to encourage weary fighters that it isn’t over yet and to keep going to the last man buoyed by the spirits who appear to him of his son and allies who lost their lives fighting similar battles in the previous films. That aside, Deadly Sea is mostly standalone though some knowledge of Japanese and Korean history in the late 16th century is undoubtedly helpful. Kim devotes the second half of the film to a lengthy series of naval battles as Yi tries to lure Shimazu to a vulnerable position, eventually shooting a harrowing long take from the perspective of an ordinary sailor trying to cut his way through after boarding a series of enemy boats. The senseless futility of the violence is the point, but it’s one that’s continually lost on Yi who continues to insist that this war will never really be over until they chase the invaders all the way back to their own islands and into total capitulation even as his quarry sails away towards his own unhappy destiny in an equally turbulent Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Seven Years of Night (7년의 밤, Choo Chang-min, 2018)

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Seven Years of Night posterThe sins of the father are visited upon the son. Cycles of abuse and fatalistic retribution are a persistent theme in Korean cinema but Choo Chang-min plunges them to new depths of tragic inevitability in his adaptation of the best selling novel by Jeong You-jeong. The biblically titled Seven Years of Night (7년의 밤, 7 Nyeonui Bam) pits two visions of failed fatherhood against each other as two broken men attempt to restore order to their lives but damn their children in the process through their own refusal to engage with past trauma.

In 2004, security guard Hyun-su (Ryu Seung-ryong) buys an apartment he can’t afford in order to placate his wife who is in constant worry over their precarious financial circumstances. Hyun-su can’t really manage the interest payments on the mortgage so the family will be renting out the fancy apartment and moving to a remote house provided by his new employers at a hydroelectric dam. On the day that he was supposed to go and check over his new accommodation, Hyun-su partied hard with his former colleagues and set off drunk, getting into an altercation with another driver on the way. Lost in a thick fog and fuzzy from the drink, he hits a little girl who ran out in the middle of the road, panics and hides her body, planning to forget any of this ever really happened.

Forgetting is not, however, something anyone is permitted to do in Choo’s world of elemental retribution in which the buried past is always destined to make its way to the surface sooner or later. The lake around the dam was once home to a village which was sunk, intact, to make way for its construction. Locals fear the water with superstitious dread, believing the lake sucks the souls of men and is polluted with something darker and older than industrial corruption. Attempting to drown the inconvenient may have its appeal, but nothing stays underwater for long and the harder you try to push it down, the faster it will rise.

Unfortunately for Hyun-su, the father of the girl he has killed, known to all as Dr. Oh (Jang Dong-gun), is not a man to be messed with. Dr. Oh, apparently an upscale dentist in the city, rules over all with a tyrannical authority and, as he owns almost all the land around here, enjoys a near feudal level of deference from the villagers. Violent and controlling, Oh’s wife, who describes him as the Devil incarnate, has recently escaped and gone into hiding leaving their small daughter Se-ryung (whose name is coincidentally the same as that of the sunken village) alone to face his wrath. Doubtless, Dr. Oh was raised with an authoritarian father of his own and is unable to see beyond himself and understand that his reign of terror prevents him from achieving the very thing he craves – the love of his wife and daughter.

Desperate for revenge, needing to prove that this is all someone else’s fault to avoid admitting that his own violence drove his wife from him and his daughter into the path of another violent man, Dr. Oh vows poetic retribution by targeting the life of Hyun-su’s innocent son, Seo-won (Go Kyung-pyo). Increasingly disturbed by his crime, Hyun-su dreams of his own father – a violent drunk with PTSD from a pointless war whose death he longed for and who he swore never to become, only to be confronted with a vision of himself as a small boy in the face of his own son watching his father strike his mother in anger. Hyun-su sees. He sees what his father passed to him and what he fears he will pass to his own son. He wants to break the curse, but doesn’t know how. 

Still, Hyun-su would drown the world to save his son even if he hates him for it. Seo-won, left with a series of dubious legacies, struggles to emerge from the shadow of his father’s crimes, is disowned by his family as the son of a murderer and cast out from regular society as one polluted by murderous blood but eventually saves himself through skills learned from a second father, himself hoping to atone for a selfish decision that led only to tragedy. Deliberately disjointed and self-reflexive, Seven Years of Night is a dark tale of supernatural dread masking a horror all too real in the impossible task of exorcising the living ghost of defeated male pride.

Seven Years of Night was screened as part of the 2018 London Korean Film Festival.

International teaser trailer (English subtitles)

Pandora (판도라, Park Jung-woo, 2016)

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pandora (korean) posterIn a time of crisis, the populace looks to the government to take action and save the innocent from danger. A government, however, is often forced to consider the problem from a different angle – not simply saving lives but how their success or failure, decision-making process, and ability to handle the situation will be viewed by the electorate the next time they are asked who best deserves their faith and respect. Pandora (판도라) arrives at a time of particularly strained relations between the state and its people during which faith in the ruling elite is at an all time low following a tragic disaster badly mishandled and seemingly aided by the government’s failure to ensure public safety. Faced with an encroaching nuclear disaster to which their own failure to heed the warnings has played no small part, Pandora’s officials are left in a difficult position tasked with the dilemma of sacrificing a small town to save a nation or accepting their responsibility to their citizens as named individuals. Unsurprisingly, they are far from united in their final decision.

As the film opens, a group of children marvel at the towers of the new nuclear plant which has just been completed in their previously run down rural town. Not quite understanding what the plant is, they repeat snippets they’ve heard in their parents’ conversations – that the plant is a “rice cooker” that’s going to make them all rich, or it’s a “Pandora’s box” which may unleash untold horrors. Still, they seem excited about this new and futuristic arrival in their dull little village.

Flashforward fifteen years or so and one way or another all the kids now work at the plant, like it or not, because there are no other jobs available. Kang Jae-hyuk (Kim Nam-Gil) is one such conflicted soul who doesn’t disapprove of the plant in itself but has good reason to fear that the powers that be are not taking good enough care seeing that both his father and older brother were killed during a previous incident at the plant some years previously. Jae-hyuk lives with his widowed mother (Kim Young-ae), sister-in-law (Moon Jeong-Hee), and nephew (Bae Gang-Yoo) but is reluctant to marry his long-term girlfriend Yeon-ju (Kim Joo-Hyun) due to his lack of financial stability and growing disillusionment with small town life.

Meanwhile, the wife of the Korean president has been passed a file by a whistle-blower hoping to bypass the corrupt bureaucracy and go directly to the top. The file, compiled by a worried engineer, details all of the many failings at the recently reconfigured plant which has been recklessly rushed into completion without the proper safety checks and required maintenance procedures. Unfortunately the president does not have time to read the report before a 6.1 magnitude earthquake strikes and destabilises the plant to the extent that it edges towards meltdown.

Unusually, in a sense, the president is a good man who genuinely wants to do the best for his people even if he sometimes ignores sensible advice out of a desire to protect those on the ground. Unfortunately, he is at the mercy of a corrupt cabinet headed by a scheming prime minister intent on withholding information in order to push the president into cynical decision-making models predicated on the idea of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few but which mainly relate to the needs of the prime minister and his cronies in the nuclear industry.

The man in charge of the plant has only been there a few weeks and has no nuclear industry experience. His second in command is a company man and his loyalty lies with his employers – he needs to keep everything functioning and ensure the plant will not be decommissioned. The only voice of reason is coming from the chief engineer who wrote the whistle blowing report and nobly remains on site throughout the disaster putting himself at grave personal risk trying to ensure the plant does not pose a greater danger to those in the immediate vicinity.

Claiming a desire to avoid mass panic, the government attempts to order a media blackout, giving little or no information to civilians stranded in the town and fitting communications jammers to prevent the spread of information. The town is eventually given an evacuation order and orderly transportation to a shelter but once there the townspeople are kept entirely in the dark. When they become aware of the full implications of the disaster and try to leave independently, they are locked in while officials flee and leave them behind.

Conversely, the emergency services are hemmed in by regulations which state they cannot act because they would be putting themselves at unacceptable risk. Kang Jae-hyuk, despite his earlier irritation with his place of work, abandons his own cynicism to walk back into the disaster zone to help his friends still trapped inside. The president nobly refuses to order anyone to tackle the disaster directly knowing that it would mean certain death but opts to appeal for volunteers willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Unexpectedly, he finds them. The president is well-meaning but ineffectual, the government is corrupt, and the emergency services apparently overburdened with regulation while under-regulated commercial enterprises put lives in danger. The only force which will save the Korean people is the Korean people and its willingness to sacrifice itself for the common good even in the face of such cynical, self-interested greed.

Despite the scale of the disaster, Pandora takes its time, eschewing the kind of black humour which typifies Korean cinema disaster or otherwise. Serious rigour, however, goes out of the window in favour of overwrought melodrama, undermining the underlying messages of widespread societal corruption from corporations cutting corners with no regard for the consequences to politicians playing games with people’s lives. The powers that be have opened Pandora’s Box, but the only thing still trapped inside is men like Kang Jae-hyuk whose disillusioned malaise soon gives way to untempered altruism and eventually offers the only source of hope for his betrayed people.

Original trailer (English subtitles available from menu)

Cart (카트, Boo Ji-young, 2014)

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cartUp until very recently, many of us lucky enough to live in nations with entrenched labour laws have had the luxury of taking them for granted. Mandated breaks, holidays, sick pay, strictly regulated working hours and overtime directives – we know our rights, and when we feel they’re being infringed we can go to our union representatives or a government ombudsman to get our grievances heard. If they won’t listen, we have the right to strike. Anyone who’s been paying attention to recent Korean cinema will know that this is not the case everywhere and even trying to join a union can not only lead to charges of communism and loss of employment but effective blacklisting too. Cart (카트), inspired by real events, is the story of one group of women’s attempt to fight back against an absurdly arbitrary and cruel system which forces them to accept constant mistreatment only to treat their contractual agreements with cavalier contempt.

Sun-hee (Yum Jung-ah) is a loyal employee at the Mart. She’s had zero penalty points for five whole years and has been told that she’s about to be transferred from a temp worker contract to a regular employee position. Run more like a cult than a supermarket, the Mart’s workers all wear pristine blue and white uniforms and recite the dramatic sounding company credo every morning, vowing to increase sales whilst honouring customer service, and are instructed to say “Welcome Beloved Customer!” to each and every visitor. Eager to take on extra overtime with no extra pay and always at the beck and call of brusque manager Choi (Lee Seung-joon), Sun-hee is respected by her colleagues but perhaps not always liked as her goody two-shoes persona both makes them look bad and encourages the management to continue taking advantage.

Sun-hee’s dreams are about to crumble when the evil corporate suits at HQ decide it would be cheaper to fire all the temp workers and use outsourced labour instead. Despite all her long years of hard work and sacrifice, not only is she not getting her secure position, she might not have a job at all. Some of the other women decide they’ve had enough with their poor working conditions and it’s worth taking the chance on forming a union to fight head office together. Sun-hee is reluctant but is eventually convinced to become one of the spokespeople, after all, if they won’t listen to miss five years no penalties, who will they listen to?

It’s worth asking the question why all these terrible jobs with low pay and frequently exploitative conditions are being done exclusively by women. All of the workers on temporary contracts are female from the cleaning staff to the shelf stackers and cashiers, but all come from different backgrounds from young university graduates to old ladies and ordinary working wives and mothers. The management is unwilling to listen to the concerns of their staff because they are “only women”, “working for pocket money” and should just be grateful that the store gave them something to do rather than being bored at home. Pointing out that many of these women are single mothers or live in difficult economic circumstances meaning they need that money to eat would likely not go down well with these fiercely conservative, wealthy executives whose only response is to tell the women not to be so silly and to stop making a fuss over nothing because the men have business to do.

After just ignoring the women fails and they decide to go on strike eventually occupying the store for a longterm sit in, the company go on the image offensive, offering minor concessions including the reinstatement of some, but not all, workers and other small improvements designed to guilt some of the employees with more pressing circumstances to cross the picket line. Eventually, they go to the extreme measures of employing armed thugs and riot police to remove the women by force. In contrast with other similarly themed films from other countries, there is no attempt to get the press onside to expose the company’s workings and the only news reports seen in the film are extremely biased, painting the women as selfish loonies making trouble for everyone by refusing to shut up and accept the status quo.

Following a fairly standard trajectory, the main narrative thrust is the gradual blossoming of near brainwashed and timid employee Sun-hee into a firebrand campaigner for social justice. Through being encouraged to stand up for the other women, Sun-hee becomes concerned not just with her own treatment but the general working environment in Korea. This new found indignation also helps rebuild her relationship with her sullen teenage son after he experiences some workplace discrimination of his own which his mother is able to sort out for him now that she is not prepared to simply smile, nod, and apologise every time someone attempts to get their own way through intimidation.

Cart treats an important issue with the kind of levity and interpersonal drama which make it primed for a screen one hit rather than a later night run in screen five catering to those already aware of the issues. It probably isn’t going to agitate for any direct social change and according to the final caption the outcome of the original incident was more of a bittersweet accomplishment rather than an outright victory. Still, the fight goes on, even if you find yourself ramming a supermarket trolley into a riot officer’s shield to get the message across – an effect which Cart mimics in its quest to ensure as many people as possible get the memo that the time for passive acceptance has long since passed.

Reviewed at the 2016 London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Take Care of My Cat (고양이를 부탁해, Jeong Jae-eun, 2001)

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take-care-of-my-catThe time after high school is often destabilising as even once close groups of friends find themselves being pulled in all kinds of different directions. So it is for the group of five young women at the centre of Jeong Jae-eun’s debut feature, Take Care of My Cat (고양이를 부탁해, Goyangileul Butaghae). All at or around 20, the age of majority in Korea, the girls were a tightly banded unit during high school but have all sought different paths on leaving. Lynchpin Tae-hee (Bae Doo-na) is responsible for trying to keep the gang together through organising regular meet ups but it’s getting harder to get everyone in the same place and minor differences which hardly mattered during school grow ever wider as adulthood sets in.

Cheerful scenes of high school mischief give way to the uncertain present as five old friends prepare to celebrate the 20th birthday of the group’s self appointed star, Hye-joo (Lee Yo-won). Hye-joo, however, has moved on to a high level office job in Seoul and is about to blow off her high school friends to hang out with her possibly sleazy boss, only to revert back to plan A when he cancels on her. Too cowardly to ring her friends in person, Hye-joo leaves the business of calling off the party to the chief organiser, Tae-hee, who rings round letting the other three girls – jobless Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), and half Chinese twins Bi-ryu (Lee Eun-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-ju), know (and presumably has to then ring them all back to tell them the party’s back on).

Hye-joo moved farthest away from her roots both in terms of location and of her social ambitions through taking a well paid admin job in the city. Increasingly materialistic and status orientated, her friendship with the other girls suffers as she sees herself as transitioning to a higher social class. Ironically, her views are equally deluded as she continues to believe that her dedication and willingness to work hard can make up for her lack of a degree but quickly finds herself displaced when the next batch of newbies arrive.

This growing desire for material status has also contributed to a seemingly unbridgeable rift with Ji-young whose economic status is the most vulnerable. Orphaned and living in a shack with her elderly grandparents, Ji-young has recently lost her job and is having difficulty finding another one precisely because of her circumstances – one firm even point blank refuses her application because both of her parents are dead and they need a direct family member to vouch for her. Hye-joo is insensitive in the extreme and often flashes her money around whilst rubbing salt in Ji-young’s wounds by emphasising her lack of it and pouring cold water over her ideas of saving money to study abroad. Small digs like these and insisting that all the girls leave their home town to visit her in Seoul (leaving aside the additional costs for Ji-young whom she knows is having difficulty making ends meet) point to Hye-joon’s own sense of neediness and insecurity.

As a result, Ji-young distances herself from her friends, ashamed of her desperation and feeling unable to ask them for help. It is she who finds the cat of the title when she hears it mewing whilst trapped behind debris on her way home. The cat becomes almost a mirror of Ji-young – alone and abandoned on the streets with no one to look after her. Originally, Ji-young tries to give the kitten to Hye-joon as a birthday present only to have it immediately returned. The cat is then passed around among each of the friends looking for a more permanent kind of affection, but finding little in the way of stability.

The longest and most devoted guardian turns out to be Tae-hee who is perhaps most affected by the loss of her friends and changing circumstances. Tae-hee is from a moderately well off middle class family and has been helping out in her father’s business since leaving school (apparently without pay). Despite her lack of worry over material comforts, she finds herself feeling restless and increasingly interested in the “foreign” with dreams of taking off alone for adventures overseas. Her desire for freedom is partly down to her domineering father who simply overrules all of her decisions even down to ordering food in a restaurant. Tae-hee is the only one to reach out to Ji-young when she realises she might be in trouble and is the only one still there for her at the end. Their economic and familial circumstances may be different, but in their desire to escape the confines of the rundown Incheon for something outside of what it might have planned for them, the two girls are a perfect match.

Of the group of friends the twins receive the least attention, hovering on the sidelines, separate from the mini dramas erupting between the insensitive and self obsessed Hye-joo and the increasingly desperate Tae-hee and Ji-young. As a unit of two they have their own little world which seems much happier and more solid than that of any of the other girls and arguably have less need for the immediacy of their old friendships. They are therefore the ideal place to deposit them, in the form of a stray cat finally finding a home. The past has its place – in the past, the memories are warm and fluffy and deserve to be taken care of, but there comes a time you have to surrender full custody and be content to visit from time to time.

An extraordinarily well composed debut feature, Take Care of My Cat has a more European feeling than many a Korean coming of age drama but is filled with realistic detail such as the constant ringing of the girls’ ever present mobile phones and the onscreen representation of their straightforward text based conversation. There’s a kind of sadness associated with the transition from carefree adolescence to the difficult journey into adulthood with each of the girls discovering what it is they want out of life, or more aptly what it is they don’t want. Hye-joo emerges as the quasi-villain of the piece as she makes an obvious, superficial choice to follow the consumerist trend over valuing human relationships though it’s hard not to feel sorry for her when it appears she’s being set up for disappointment. Ending on a note of hopeful uncertainty, Jeong’s debut feature is a hymn to the theme of moving on but is careful to admit the bittersweet quality of a new beginning.

International trailer (English subtitles)