CinemaSerf

After the young “Soo-hyun” (Yoon-ho Ji) emerges from a car accident in a coma, his distraught mother “Mi-Kyung” (Bae Jong-ok) has to juggle her failing marriage with her determination to keep her son on the road to recovery. The fellow passenger in the accident “Yong-joon” (Lee Won-geun) has emerged unscathed but she wants nothing to do with him. Over the course of the next couple of very slowly paced two hours, we learn a little of what she is learning about her beloved child. Her son had a secret, and she is struggling to reconcile with that. Is it shame? Was it deceit? In any case, she moves him to a remote hospital only for “Soo-Hyun” to follow like a lost lamb. He even gets a job there as an handyman, but is there any chance that the injured man will recover and/or that his mum will be prepared to reconsider her polite but clear hostility to the his friend - a man clearly going through a fair degree of trauma of his own. Now there is a lot of standing around, there isn’t a great deal of dialogue and very little actually happens for much of this film, but by using some retrospective scenes illustrating the boys friendship and featuring a pretty poignant performance from both actors here, auteur Dong-Eun Lee does create something quite emotionally charged. Essentially it is the two beginning to get to know who each really are, and that plays out sympathetically but not too sentimentally. There is one scene where the patient is given an haircut by his friend and I did wonder if it might not be better if both of them went to an a actual hairdresser, but that is all that might pass for humour here; it’s an observation of just how visceral parent/child love is, and at how difficult it can be to realise that it might just have a rival. It takes it’s time, but is worth a watch.