119 min | R | February 17, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
A French woman lands in Seoul on a whim and decides to find the birth parents who gave her up. Everyone wants the reunion to mean something. She refuses to give them the satisfaction.
Freddie flies to Seoul on a whim. She is a French adoptee, raised by a French family, who speaks no Korean and claims she came for the food. She tracks down the agency that arranged her adoption and starts the machinery that could connect her to her birth parents. The film is not about the reunion. It is about the violence of being claimed by a country and a family that already decided who you should be.
Park Ji-min plays Freddie as a woman who refuses every role offered to her. She turns away from her birth father’s grief and toward her own appetites. Oh Kwang-rok plays the Father as a man drowning in apology and need, and his desperation curdles into something Freddie cannot stand. Kim Sun-young plays the Aunt as the family’s anxious translator, smoothing wounds she cannot close. Park makes Freddie prickly and magnetic at once, and she changes her hair, her clothes, and her whole posture across the years the film tracks without ever softening the core refusal.
Davy Chou directs and writes with a structure that jumps across years without warning. He drops the audience into a new Freddie and forces it to reassemble who she has become. The needle drops do the heavy lifting here. Chou scores Freddie’s nightclub scenes with pounding electronic music that isolates her in the frame, dancing alone while the camera holds on her face. The cuts between time periods arrive mid-life, never at clean breaks, so each return to Seoul feels like an ambush.
This is a film about the lie that origin equals identity. Freddie’s birth country wants to absorb her. Her birth father wants to start over. The film refuses to grant either the closure it craves. Chou builds a portrait of a person who will not be reclaimed and has the nerve to leave the wound open.