(비닐하우스)
DIRECTOR: LEE SOL-HUI
WRITER: LEE SOL-HUI
PRODUCER: JOH KEUN-SHIK
CAST: KIM SEO-HYUNG, YANG JAE-SUNG
DRAMA, THRILLER / 2022 / 100 MIN / CERT. 15
Greenhouse-inhabiting Moon-jung (Kim Seo-hyung) is a messy, contradictory figure - bitterly divorced, desperate to find a new home for when her teenage son is released from juvenile detention centre , solicitous towards the elderly wife suffering from dementia and her blind husband (Yang Jae-sung) whom she looks after for a living while indifferent to her own care-home mother, and identifying a little too closely with the abandoned, abused young woman (Ahn Soyo) whom she has met at a community group for people prone to self-harm.
Moon-jung does harm herself, but also others, as her own deep damage ramifies outwards. Lee Sol-hui’s feature is an elliptical portrait of a complicated woman, sent spiralling when an accident and its aftermath lead to Hitchcockian tensions. With its central greenhouse setting and narrative ambiguities, this subtle, suggestive feature is like Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018) regendered - and similarly bleak in its assessment of the human condition.
Anton Bitel
