Young Sohee (Kim Si-eun) is a bubbly, tenacious high-school student with a fiery temperament living in rural Korea. She has chosen a labour-market-oriented education and enters a paid employment programme with high hopes. Her school motivates her to sign a contract with a call centre that abuses its trainees with the promise of non-existent bonuses, pushing them to use highly unfair techniques. Sohee is constantly yelled at, even receiving threats and obscenities, but when her overworked supervisor takes his own life, she begins a psychological descent that will lead her to commit an irreparable act. Detective Yoo-jin (Bae Doona) is in charge of the investigation. Impassive, temperamental, and unwilling to follow orders, what she discovers about the events that led to Sohee's suicide eventually gets to her. Her crusade against all those who get rich off vulnerable teenage girls becomes personal.
A powerful and essential work, NEXT SOHEE was hailed as one of the gems of the recent Cannes Film Festival, where it closed the Critics' Week. Writer-director July Jung (A GIRL AT MY DOOR) was inspired by a 2016 event that shocked her to the core, creating an unforgettable feature film that shakes us to our cores. With a two-part narrative that first exposes the genesis of a tragedy, and then reveals the cruel details of a known reality that we look away from, as well as an unadorned yet beautiful direction in which the camera constantly highlights the two masterfully developed protagonists. In the role of Sohee, the young Kim Si-eun (GOOD MORNING) delivers a masterful performance in which she demonstrates an exceptional range, and the great Bae Doona (the KINGDOM series) lights up the screen with an exemplary restraint and sobriety that gradually crumbles, leading the viewer to break down at the same time as her. NEXT SOHEE is a true masterpiece and one of the must-sees of Fantasia 2022. - Translation: Rupert Bottenberg
Showings
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