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This review may contain spoilers
For once, a Korean take on school bullying that makes sense.
Second Sister is not a great artistic achievement by any means, but it gets extra points from me for its thoughtful and humane exploration of a theme Korean entertainment is perennially fixated on but so rarely gets right: school bullying.
For the first half of the movie, I thought it would hit all the obligatory story beats of a typical Korean revenge drama; a bullying victim's bereaved family member investigates her past, figures out how her evil classmates tormented her, and torments them back from the shadows, thus restoring a sense of justice and order to other powerless bullying victims who might be watching. The problem with this kind of story is that it doesn't denounce bullying, much less analyse or critique its societal causes, but merely marshals its violence against more deserving victims. The underlying message of so many recent classics of Korean TV and cinema on this topic is that it's okay for good people to do bad things to bad people (who are bad because they do bad things—and if that's too confusing for you, you should stop overthinking and just enjoy the show).
Well, Second Sister doesn't go there. It makes you think it's going to go there, but just as the protagonist, Soeun, is about to carry out her revenge, she has a moment of moral clarity and realizes that her younger sister's bully was a victim too; that her younger sister, Jieun, was a bit of a bully herself; that she should have paid more attention to Jieun's emotional needs while the latter was alive and her thirst for revenge now is a belated attempt to make up for her own shortcomings as her sister's guardian; and that Jieun was immersed in a voyeuristic culture of surveillance and judgment in which teenagers bond and gain status through participation in cyber lynchings, which makes it almost impossible to remain innocent without becoming a victim yourself. As these truth nukes hit Soeun one after another, the movie is no longer just about Jieun; it paints a picture of Korean adolescence in the 21st century, and perhaps of Korean society itself. Most impressively, it calls out the cultural preoccupation with revenge explicitly through the tech-savvy private investigator Jungyeong, who points out to Soeun that she never asked him to help her find out what actually happened to her sister because she was too busy looking for someone to blame.
Again, I love and appreciate this perspective because it is almost entirely absent from the school bullying genre. I believe it's a necessary corrective on the reactionary, even fascistic premises of mindless power fantasies like Teach You a Lesson, Weak Hero, Brave Citizen, etc. (although I enjoyed Weak Hero and Brave Citizen).
BUT... it's just too explicit, man. The movie's position, however smart and correct it may be, is spelled out so directly that the final 30 minutes feel like a lecture from one character (Jungyeong) to another (Soeun). The didactic purpose of the movie ends up taking over the world of the story, which was already feeling bland and unreal to begin with. The tight plotting and editing others have praised leave no room for scene-setting or characterization, so when Jungyeong starts explaining Soeun's own feelings to her in the climactic scene of the movie, it completely destroys any lingering impression I might have had of them as people embedded in a story I'm following and turns them into, like, podcast co-hosts or something.
Jungyeong's character is especially untethered from reality as an all-powerful and all-knowing judge-therapist-hacker moonlighting as a shady thrill-seeking private investigator who is also a rich tech company CEO. This kind of absurd character might work as the protagonist of a 400-episode webtoon about underground MMA fights (or House MD?), but not in a fast-paced 90-minute thriller that doesn't spare even a second to justify his existence. (That said, Kim Mingue and Kang Seoha do as much as they can with what they're given and I would say they even elevate the script a little, which is the mark of an above-average acting performance in my book.)
Overall, this is a mediocre movie in terms of emotional impact and artistry, but it does exactly what it sets out to do and I commend it for its strong and mature moral message.
For the first half of the movie, I thought it would hit all the obligatory story beats of a typical Korean revenge drama; a bullying victim's bereaved family member investigates her past, figures out how her evil classmates tormented her, and torments them back from the shadows, thus restoring a sense of justice and order to other powerless bullying victims who might be watching. The problem with this kind of story is that it doesn't denounce bullying, much less analyse or critique its societal causes, but merely marshals its violence against more deserving victims. The underlying message of so many recent classics of Korean TV and cinema on this topic is that it's okay for good people to do bad things to bad people (who are bad because they do bad things—and if that's too confusing for you, you should stop overthinking and just enjoy the show).
Well, Second Sister doesn't go there. It makes you think it's going to go there, but just as the protagonist, Soeun, is about to carry out her revenge, she has a moment of moral clarity and realizes that her younger sister's bully was a victim too; that her younger sister, Jieun, was a bit of a bully herself; that she should have paid more attention to Jieun's emotional needs while the latter was alive and her thirst for revenge now is a belated attempt to make up for her own shortcomings as her sister's guardian; and that Jieun was immersed in a voyeuristic culture of surveillance and judgment in which teenagers bond and gain status through participation in cyber lynchings, which makes it almost impossible to remain innocent without becoming a victim yourself. As these truth nukes hit Soeun one after another, the movie is no longer just about Jieun; it paints a picture of Korean adolescence in the 21st century, and perhaps of Korean society itself. Most impressively, it calls out the cultural preoccupation with revenge explicitly through the tech-savvy private investigator Jungyeong, who points out to Soeun that she never asked him to help her find out what actually happened to her sister because she was too busy looking for someone to blame.
Again, I love and appreciate this perspective because it is almost entirely absent from the school bullying genre. I believe it's a necessary corrective on the reactionary, even fascistic premises of mindless power fantasies like Teach You a Lesson, Weak Hero, Brave Citizen, etc. (although I enjoyed Weak Hero and Brave Citizen).
BUT... it's just too explicit, man. The movie's position, however smart and correct it may be, is spelled out so directly that the final 30 minutes feel like a lecture from one character (Jungyeong) to another (Soeun). The didactic purpose of the movie ends up taking over the world of the story, which was already feeling bland and unreal to begin with. The tight plotting and editing others have praised leave no room for scene-setting or characterization, so when Jungyeong starts explaining Soeun's own feelings to her in the climactic scene of the movie, it completely destroys any lingering impression I might have had of them as people embedded in a story I'm following and turns them into, like, podcast co-hosts or something.
Jungyeong's character is especially untethered from reality as an all-powerful and all-knowing judge-therapist-hacker moonlighting as a shady thrill-seeking private investigator who is also a rich tech company CEO. This kind of absurd character might work as the protagonist of a 400-episode webtoon about underground MMA fights (or House MD?), but not in a fast-paced 90-minute thriller that doesn't spare even a second to justify his existence. (That said, Kim Mingue and Kang Seoha do as much as they can with what they're given and I would say they even elevate the script a little, which is the mark of an above-average acting performance in my book.)
Overall, this is a mediocre movie in terms of emotional impact and artistry, but it does exactly what it sets out to do and I commend it for its strong and mature moral message.
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