This film was based on a book that was hugely successful in South Korea and was itself a major cultural phenomenon. Watching this, it’s obvious that it must have must touched a nerve among South Korean women who recognized themselves in the story of its protagonist. I think it tries to do a little too much. The range of topics that can be comfortably covered in a novel is necessarily wider than what we can accommodate in a film. Nonetheless it is a bold and timely rallying call for the country and a wonderful sign that its traditionally patriarchal society is changing.

Kim Ji-Young is a housewife and mother of a young daughter in Seoul. Her husband is supportive and her home life seems stable, yet there are inklings that things are not right. Her husband notices that when she is under stress, she acts as if possessed by deceased relatives and after that does not remember what has happened. Her unhappiness seems to be due to being forced to give up on her working life after being married and having a child, especially after all the hard work she has done during her studies and establishing herself as a professional. Through flashbacks, we also see how Korean families has traditionally favored male children and how female employees are not given the same opportunities as male ones. Even Ji-Young’s capable female boss at work is put down in not so subtle ways by male colleagues. When her boss asks her come back to work in a new company she has started, Ji-Young also has to consider the difficulty of finding appropriate childcare for her daughter.

It appears that the book this was based on was written in an episodic format, which explains why this film also has a scattershot, unfocused approach. The incidents shown here cover everything from Ji-Young as a school student being harassed by a male student, her colleagues at work being worried about spy cameras installed at their workplace toilets, being passed over for promotion, having to endure sarcastic comments and pressure from relatives about Ji-Young and her sister should be the ones serving their brother and so on. This is the debut feature of director Kim Do-young and part of the job involved tying these disparate stories together into a coherent narrative. Having Ji-Young’s mental breakdown take the form of a possession makes for a lot of drama, and I was worried for a while that they were really being serious about this being supernatural. Thankfully her family members realize that the problem is psychological and insist that she sees a doctor but it still feels like an outlier amidst the mundane problems she faces and ends up being resolved too easily.

But as my wife notes, this should be seen less as a story of an individual woman and more like the story of every woman in South Korea. All of the incidences reflect real difficulties faced by women in what is still overwhelmingly a patriarchal society. The many anti-feminist voices raised against the book and this film prove the point. Even though it’s frustrating that there is no follow through, each of the individual anecdotes are very well done. I especially love how the women intuitively sympathize and understand what is happening without words needing to be exchanged such as when a random woman on the bus helps a young Ji-Young who is being stalked by a male student, knowing that she cannot speak up about it. Meanwhile the men are clueless or actively perpetuate harm, even when they mean well. As a colleague at work remarks, it’s nice of the male colleague to warn a woman that a spy camera has been installed in the company’s toilet, but he must have been watching those videos himself to find out about them and why didn’t he take the cameras or officially inform the company’s management? It’s an adroit observation that while men may sympathize with individual women they have relationships with, they won’t actually fight back against the system as a whole.

Then there’s how some parts of the film work like a female power fantasy. We can see this in how Ji-Young’s female boss dares to directly confront the male boss and near the end when Ji-Young herself causes a scene in a coffee shop when a bystander makes snide insults against her. These are liberating, cathartic moments, but we also know that they are very unrealistic as it would exceedingly rare for any woman to be able to do something like this in real life in South Korea. But it is a good thing for a film to show scenes like this. We ought to show the world how things should be and we do need role models and examples. That’s why even though this film is imperfect and a little rough in its focus, it is a film that is breaking new ground and is well worth watching.