Return to Seoul (2022)

 

I saw Return to Seoul last summer and have been sitting on an analysis ever since. It is a movie that stays with, if you give it a chance, as it goes through the trip to Korea by Freddie, a Korean woman who was adopted by a French couple, and ends up, “sort of by accident” looking for her biological parents.

The trip itself yields a surprising result to Freddie, who manages to meet her biological father, but not her mother. The experience deeply affects her, since she he’s not able to process emotions without giving in to the temptation to destroy them, once she feels them. And thus begins a complicated relationship between Freddie and Korea that goes on through several years.

I must say though that the movies’ time jumps are a bit off at times, since it takes a while to figure out what is the state of Freddies’ life in each one, and muddy up the plot a bit. But in the end, this is always about a complex character and her way of relating to others, mostly in a destructive way. Ji-Min Park makes her debut in this movie, and she is compelling beyond words.

In the end, the reason why this movie is hard to write about is because, it did make an impact, but is hard to explain why, and I leave this recommendation to whoever reads this and hope that they give this amazing story a chance to affect them as well.