Brief Story Line
Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won - Train to Busan: Peninsula, A Violent Prosecutor etc) was working in a church which was frequently used as a place where mothers gave up their unwanted babies inside a box there, hoping for them to be raised by the church. Together with his partner Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho - Parasite, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance etc), sometimes they would act as broker and sell the babies to other people. However, their business was disrupted when a young woman later revealed to be So-young (Lee Ji-eun - My Mister TV series, Hotel del Luna TV series etc) put her baby in the box only to regret and decided to "reclaim" him.
Meanwhile detective Soo-jin (Bae Doo-na - The Silent Sea, Stranger TV series etc) and her junior partner (Lee Joo-young - Baseball Girl, Itaewon Class TV series etc) were aware of Sang-hyun and Dong-soo's operation and had been on their tail for a while.
So what would happen to all these people? You can find them all in this drama movie.
End of Brief Story Line
The reason why my wife and I were excited to see this movie was because it garnered positive feedback in the Cannes Film Festival and it starred Song Kang-ho who impressed us in Parasite. And even in this year's event, he actually won the Best Actor award. So his performance definitely impressed the critics and audience there. In addition, there were also other cast whom my wife and I were already familiar with due to their past appearances in films or series.
From the brief synopsis and trailer that we have seen before, we already knew that this is a drama movie. Hence we expected this to be having a powerful story and many dramatic moments. And in term of story, it was indeed an amazing one. I felt that the story telling was good with the introduction of the characters done briefly but we grew to like them as it progressed. Even though Song Kang-ho won the award, I actually thought most of the main cast performed well here. There was one boy in particular named Hae-jin who was brilliantly portrayed by Im Seung-soo that provided real color to the movie with his funny remarks and behavior.
Aside from the drama, the movie also had few lighter moments usually involving Hae-jin and that part about eyebrows that made us laughed. The one thing that I did not expect though was despite being a drama film, it surprised me that there were not a lot of melodramatic scenes. I was thinking there would be many of those which would be very touching and made us emotional, but somehow that did not occurred. So it was not one of those emotional joyride where we would be laughing out loud at one moment and crying hysterically subsequently.
This movie was directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda who was famous for directing movies that were critically acclaimed or nominated/won awards. Few of his previous works were Like Father, Like Son that won Jury prize in 2013 Cannes festival and the 2018 multiple award winners Shoplifters. It would explain the high regards of this film which has a unique premise. During the whole movie, I felt moments where the music were well placed (the piano playing in the background was really nice) and there were times where we could embrace the silence as well. Kore-eda seemed to love using visuals without dialogues as there were plenty of those here. My wife also noticed that he gave real attention to details such as that scene involving the petal flower on the car window and few others.
Overall this is definitely a unique drama movie with a strong festival film vibe. It is going to be a nice experience for those who love this kind of films. For general audience, this is not a really heavy movie that would make us think real hard, although it did have some strong moral message. So if you are into films with such attributes, then surely you do not want to miss out on this.
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