Summary
A social family drama from South Korea that manages to mostly avoid being misery porn by concentrating on a handful of characters living on the fringes.
According to a recent study, despite Seoul’s success in reducing homelessness overall by 20 per cent since 2014, “the average period of homelessness in Seoul remains high at 11.2 years.” Indeed, the Academy Award winning Parasite looked at the class strife in the country.
Director Lim Seung-hyeun’s debut feature reflects on his own time as a child growing up in saunas by following a pair of parents who care for their baby in a similar fashion. In HOMELESS (홈리스), baby Woo-rim is cared for by his loving parents Han-gyeol (Jeon Bong-Seok ) and Go-woon (Park Jeong-Yeon). Moving from sauna to sauna while waiting for an apartment, their pleasant façade belies their crippling financial issues.
Eeking out a living in the gig economy, Han-gyeol hits upon a solution: temporarily moving into a house belonging to an elderly woman on his delivery route. Yet this soon takes on the shade of something more sinister. Han-gyeol remains paranoid, in desperate need of money from his not-unsympathetic boss (Jang Jun Hee), while Go-woon is forbidden from visiting the rooms upstairs.
It’s always great to see more social drama coming out of South Korea, especially when dealing with issues that often get hidden or forgotten. Of course, the working poor are a global concern, not just a South Korean one. Indeed, we learn that Go-woon’s parents also lost their house due to foreclosure, compounding the problem with inherited debt. “Why do we have to live like this,” she asks at one point, but neither director Lim nor her husband have an adequate answer.
From a dramatic point of view, Lim relies on the capable abilities of relative newcomers Jeon and Park to carry the emotional weight of the piece. There are some gripping moments of individual angst or resignation, but Lim also gives them the space to just exist in a few quiet moments of family bonding.
Look, there will be inevitable comparisons to Parasite and Shoplifters — and there’s a certain extent of riding in on the bandwagon of family-themed class-based misery drama — but this is still a tense little piece that uses the working poor as its backdrop. There is a sense of inevitability to the ending, but major props for not providing any easy answers on the way out the door.
2020 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Lim Seung-hyeun | WRITERS: Lim Seung-hyeun, Kim Seung-hyeun | CAST: Jeon Bong-seok, Park Jeong-yeon, Jang Jun Hee | DISTRIBUTOR: M-Line Distribution, International Film Festival Rotterdam | RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 2-6 June 2021 (IFFR)
