“Next Sohee” Theatrical Poster

Director: Jeong Joo-ri
Cast: Bae Doo-Na, Kim Si-eun, Jung Hoe-Rin, Kang Hyun-Oh, Park Woo-Young, Park Hee-Eun, Kim Yong-Joon, Sim Hee-Seop, Park Yoon-Hee, Yoon Ga-I
Running Time: 135 min.

By Paul Bramhall 

It can sometimes be a tough job being a Korean cinema fan, with some of the best directors often taking years between the movies they release. Oh Seung-wook made audiences wait 9 years between 2015’s The Shameless and 2024’s Revolver. Lee Chang-dong kept us hanging for 8 years between 2010’s Poetry and 2018’s Burning. Even a director as popular as Park Chan-wook left 6 years between 2016’s The Handmaiden and 2022’s Decision to Leave. Jeong Joo-ri, a former student of Lee Chang-dong who made her debut with 2014’s Bae Doona starring A Girl at My Door (which Chang-dong notably produced) looks set to follow a similar path, with her sophomore feature Next Sohee finally arriving in 2022.

Once more directing from her own script, Joo-ri has also re-teamed with Bae Doona (The Drug King, Tunnel), however Next Sohee for the most part belongs to actress Kim Si-eun as the titular Sohee of the title. Here given her first starring role after minor supporting turns in the likes of The Negotiation and Boys Be!! (along with plenty of K-drama work), Si-eun completely owns the role as a teenager attending a vocational college in rural Korea, one that offers a pathway to fulltime employment through placement in an ‘externship’ program. Despite dreaming of being a K-pop dancer, when she’s given the opportunity to be placed in a telecom companies call centre, the corporate surroundings being a stark contrast to the factories many of the students find themselves placed, it seems like she’s landed herself a good deal.

It’s only once she starts the role that she learns her job is to take calls from customers wanting to cancel their subscription service, and convince them to stay (or even better, convince them to stay and upsell another product). Faced with high retainment targets, an initially supportive manager who soon begins to crank on the pressure, and the frustration of discovering her salary incentives are being withheld due to contract fine print, what seemed like a good deal gradually starts to turn into a soul-destroying nightmare. The call centre environment that Next Sohee takes place in somewhat inevitably echoes the previous year’s Aloners, a movie that similarly focused on a female who joins a call centre, however despite the initial similarities Joo-ri takes her story in a very different direction.

Watching someone fresh to the workforce become slowly beaten down by the unfairness of the program she’s been placed into may not sound particularly engaging, but much like A Girl at My Door Joo-ri’s ability to create characters who feel relatable shines through. Si-eun is a revelation in the role, imbuing Sohee with a sense of resilience that makes her easy to root for, even when the difficulties she faces start to feel overwhelming (especially when her manager commits suicide in his car). It’s worth to point out that once I read Next Sohee was being directed by Joo-ri, I decided to avoid reading anything further and went in blind, so after spending an hour in the company of Si-eun and getting to know her character, it came as a genuine shock when she also chooses to kill herself.

It’s at this point that the plot reveals itself to be a tale of 2 halves. In the latter half we meet Bae Doona’s character, who up until this point we’ve only glimpsed briefly in the dance studio that Si-eun would go to practice her K-pop routines. In recent years Doona seems to have become the go-to Korean actress for playing slightly distant cop characters with an undisclosed traumatic past (usually re-located to a rural station for good measure). Here she could well be playing the same character as she did in A Girl at My Door, and of course we also saw a similar role in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker. Initially tasked with a straightforward round of interviews of those who knew Si-eun so the case can be closed, when it comes to light she wasn’t the first person to kill herself who worked at the call centre, Doona refuses to wrap things up, and begins to look deeper into what led to the deaths.

There’s a quietly seething anger that permeates throughout Next Sohee, an anger that bubbles ever closer to the surface as the narrative progresses. Joo-ri has stated in interviews that the idea for the story came about after she saw a news report in 2016, covering an incident where a girl who’d been sent on an externship program in a call centre killed herself within 3 months of working there. The investigation afterwards brought to light the unfavourable working conditions and how, to some degree, the students who were placed from vocational colleges were being exploited by the companies the colleges partnered with.

The narrative structure is a bold one, eschewing what looks and feels like a murder mystery in its back half, but isn’t precisely because we already know there’s no mystery, having seen how Si-eun chose to take her own life. Rather it becomes the tale of 2 people, both somehow connected through their willingness to rail against the injustices that they see, even though there’s no singular villain for either them or us as the audience to aim our anger towards. In many ways Doona’s role doubles as the avatar for the audience watching, as what starts as mild frustration at the lack of clarity she gets from anyone she speaks to soon develops into outright exasperation at the system that’s operating in plain sight.

On the one hand the approach can be viewed as a nihilistic one from a purely plot perspective, but Joo-ri’s script and direction is constructed in such a way that our closeness to the characters onscreen feels like it’s more important than the circumstances that surround them. In any other filmmaker’s hands Next Sohee would likely have been structured from the perspective of Bae Doona, uncovering how Si-eun decided to take her own life by unfolding it in flashbacks, thus framing it from the perspective of the mystery genre. However by spending the whole of the first hour with Si-eun it feels like we get to know her intimately, as if she’s the main character of the movie (which it could well be argued she is), and therefore allowing the investigation in the second half to be more about getting to know Doona’s character, since we already know Si-eun’s story.

The reason why Next Sohee manages to be so compelling is in the way it crafts a pair of characters who in some way mirror each other’s values, refusing to be defeated by a system that’s so deeply entrenched it’ll never change, yet still remain true to their principles. Will that make it enjoyable for everyone? Probably not, and those expecting any kind of cathartic payoff at the end of the 135-minute runtime will be left disappointed. The injustice is a part of the hierarchal nature of Korean society, and no single suicide or person is ever going to change that, so in the face of such an overbearing beast, the best you can do is be kind to others and let them know they’re not alone. In the final scene Doona’s character seems to realise this, embracing a willingness to do what’s in her control to try and stop a similar tragedy happening to the next Sohee, and hoping the offer of connection is enough.

Managing to tread the fine line between being both a subdued character study and seething indictment of certain aspects of Korean society, Joo-ri’s sophomore feature is a success not so much because of the system it portrays, but rather the impact that it has on the characters that she’s created. For Bae Doona, Next Sohee marks another stellar performance that’s a standout in her filmography, and for Kim Si-eun she’s already gone on to be cast in the 2^nd season of the popular Netflix series Squid Game. As for Jeong Joo-ri, my only hope is that we don’t have to wait another 8 years for her next production to hit the screens, as she remains one of the brightest talents working in Korea today.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8.5/10

The post Next Sohee (2022) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“A Girl at My Door” Korean Theatrical Poster

Director: Jeong Joo-ri
Producer: Lee Jun-Dong
Cast: Bae Doo-Na, Kim Sae-Ron, Song Sae-Byuk, Kim Jin-Gu, Son Jong-Hak, Na Jong-Min
Running Time: 119 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Korea has arguably been producing the best movies to come out of Asia for the last 15 years, however one criticism of the industry has always been the lack of lead roles for women, outside of romantic comedies and flower vase roles in male dominated thrillers. In what’s still considered to be a male dominated society, the issue is confounded further by the lack of female directors. While directors like Shin Su-won and Bang Eun-jin are exceptions to the rule, there’s no doubt that the Korean film industry could be even stronger if it embraced the large amount of female talent that’s out there.

With A Girl at My Door, first time director and scriptwriter Jeong Joo-ri will hopefully be a name that can be added to the expanding pool of female directors active in the industry. Joo-ri’s talent had a notable hand to guide it, which came in the form of Lee Chang-dong. Chang-dong, the director of such masterpieces as Green Fish, Oasis, and Secret Sunshine, was Joo-ri’s teacher at the Korea National University of Arts, and he clearly had enough confidence in his students ability that he came on board as producer for her debut.

A Girl at My Door also gives us a female-centric story, which is headlined by Bae Doo-na and Kim Sae-ron. Doo-na is no doubt one of the most recognizable faces in Korean cinema, having caught audiences attention with her roles as the quirky girlfriend to Sin Ha-gyoon’s mute in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, to the crossbow wielding family member in Bong Joon-ho’s monster movie The Host. Understandably Hollywood came calling, and most recently she’s starred in the Wachowskis’ (of The Matrix fame) blockbusters Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending.

Sae-ron has equally being making a name for herself as one of the busiest child actors in Korea. While readers here will most likely recognize her as the kidnapped girl Won Bin goes on a mission to rescue in 2010’s The Man from Nowhere, she’s been in plenty of drama series’ and movies in-between. While in The Man from Nowhere Sae-ron was just 9 years old, 4 years later and she’s now a teenager, and very much looking to be one of the brightest female acting talents in Korea.

In A Girl at My Door Doo-na plays a police captain who, in the opening, we learn has been transferred to a new post in a remote seaside town. As she drives into the town on a bright summer’s day, she inadvertently runs through a puddle, dousing a scruffy and tattered looking girl by the roadside with water. The girl is played by Sae-ron, and as Doo-na stops the car to check if she’s ok, instead of speaking they wordlessly stare at each other, before Sae-ron dashes off into a field. It’s worth noting that Sae-ron’s character is called Do-hee, which is also the name of the movie in Korean, and from that first meeting between the two characters, the ominous tone which you can’t quite put your finger on is set.

It’s established from the word go that proceedings are going to revolve around the relationship between Doo-na and Sae-ron’s characters, and Joo-ri shows an assured hand at constantly feeding small hints of information about both of their characters as the movie progresses. This isn’t a type of movie which spoon feeds the audience, and it’s all the better for it, as with each part of their history that’s revealed, we gain a greater understanding of their actions, which makes it a highly rewarding experience to watch. That’s not to say things move at a fast pace, if anything the opposite is true, however there’s never a moment when proceedings feel slow or dull, as every scene and frame is there to add something to the fabric of the story being told.

When it’s revealed that Sae-ron’s character is living with her highly abusive step-father and his elderly mother, who abuse her both physically and verbally on a daily basis, Doo-na’s police captain eventually ends up taking Sae-ron under her wing, allowing her to stay at her home. However when the step-father’s mother is found dead, seemingly by accident, things begin to get complicated. The step-father is played by Song Sae-byeok, and in a refreshing change from the comedic roles he’s most well known for, here he comes across a constantly drunk brute, always seething with anger. Feeling harassed from the sudden attention off Doo-na’s police captain, both because of the abuse, and what appears to be his hiring of illegal Indian immigrants to help run the towns fishing fleet, he begins to do his own research as to the reasons behind her transfer.

A Girl at My Door is a decidedly difficult movie to market, while for international audiences it will most likely be touted as a murder mystery, the event is really only a device in which to frame the relationship that develops between Doo-na and Sae-ron. It’s the effect that they both have on each which forms the heart of the movie. Both characters are essentially broken, Doo-na from whatever it was that led to her being transferred to such a remote town, and Sae-ron from the years of abuse she’s being suffering after being abandoned by her mother. While Doo-na’s story arc is thoroughly addressed, to go into any details of it would be to spoil some of the movies finest moments.

Joo-ri shows the influence of her teacher in many of the scenes, with plenty of visual metaphors to enjoy for viewers who are looking for them. Perhaps one of the best being the image of a trail which is overgrown with vines and bushes, with Sae-ron’s house at one end of it, and the vast expanse of the ocean at the other. The direction the characters go along the trail, from the beginning to the end of the movie, being a meaningful representation of their mindset. While the story may seem like yet another entry in Korea’s genre of dark family dramas, this would be misleading. A Girl at My Door is actually about the hope that two people can bring to each other, and while neither of the two leads are given an easy time throughout the movie, their efforts are ultimately rewarded, and as a result, so are the audience.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8/10

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