All the People I'll Never Be

The story created a nice cultural conflict between a young adult in the modern world against the old Korean way of life. Park Ji-min was a prefect choice for the lead. The end was unnecessarily long.

Magnetic and sad and Ji-Min Park is a STAR!!

Return to Seoul really impressed me. The main character, French adoptee Freddie born in Korea, is not particularly likable, but the film managed to make me sympathise with her and helped me to understand why she behaves the way she does. Her development is non-monotone: not a path of steady growth, but a meandering one with several set-backs as she struggles with the needs both for self-sufficiency and for the love of her biological mother.

I could relate to searching for your family and the awkward rekindling but couldn't relate to the spoiled French woman. Everything felt a little too elongated and contextually superficial.

A very well-made character drama about a young woman coming to terms with impossible circumstances.

"Return to Seoul" is a well-crafted character study with insightful themes and strong performances, despite some pacing issues and a disrupted narrative flow in the second half.

Return to Seoul is a frustrating movie about a frustrating person. That's not a criticism - at least not most of the time. You can't wrap up multi-generational unhealed wounds in 120 minutes, especially if doing so would force you to give up the person you did become. Park Ji-min as Freddie is a mess of contradictions, but it's never not her mess. So much quiet character work here. By and large, we don't have epiphanies. We are who we are, a slow meat process.