This film broke me in the most beautiful way. Nora and Hae Sung spend twenty-four years and two continents orbiting a childhood that only one of them was able to leave behind, and the film never once raises its voice about it.
There is a Korean word in the film — in-yun — for the providence that ties people together across lifetimes: eight thousand layers of it, they say, before two people can be married. The film treats the idea gently, skeptically, and then lands it on you like an anvil made of feathers.
“That last scene — two people standing on a street saying everything by saying almost nothing — is the most I have ever felt from so few words.”
It is a film about the lives we don't live and the people we would have been in them, and it somehow makes that feel like grace instead of grief. We walked home the long way after, not saying much. That felt right.
row F · he pretended he wasn't crying