This is a 2016 movie that was screened as part of the special Actor Retrospective section for Son Ye Jin at the 28th Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN) and since it was my first time watching it, I thought I’d write a review. It also ended up being my favourite watch at the festival!

Yeon-hong (played by Son Ye Jin) is the wife of politician Jong-chan (played by Kim Joo Hyuk) who is running for a position in the National Assembly. Two weeks before the election, their daughter Min-jin (played by Shin Ji Hoon) goes missing and Yeon-hong transforms from being the “perfect wife” to becoming a desperate mother frantically looking for her daughter while her husband seems unbothered and continues focusing on his election campaign.

I don’t really follow Son Ye Jin’s career so I didn’t know about this movie earlier, but when I told a friend that this was one of the movies I was going to watch during the festival, she made a frantic hand gesture about Son Ye Jin’s acting in this movie which apparently meant it was KILLER. And she was not wrong. Having seen Son Ye Jin mostly in her earlier works, I always saw her in roles where she was more of the youthful, innocent, sometimes tragic female lead in melodramas. So I was blown away by her role here, and her acting!

We begin by seeing her in this “perfect wife of a politician” role at home where she’s basically just supporting her husband’s career. But when their daughter goes missing and her husband refuses to make this information public to help with the search because he’s worried it would hurt his election chances, she goes berserk (and rightly so). And as she investigates her daughter’s life in order to find out where she could have gone (there was suspicion that she wasn’t missing but had simply “run away”), she starts to uncover more and more secrets and she realises that she didn’t really know who her daughter was after all…

The storytelling was so good (for lack of a better description) and everyone’s acting was on point (but especially Son Ye Jin who KILLED at her role!). The story just slowly built up until we reached the climax when she finally finds out what happened to her daughter. And wow, so many plot twists. You could hear the audience gasp at different points during the movie. Maybe I wasn’t the only one watching it for the first time…

I believe you can watch it on streaming sites now (although it would be the best to watch on a big screen in the theatres), and I personally recommend watching it if you enjoy mystery crime thrillers. And have I mentioned Son Ye Jin’s acting in this?! If nothing else, you should watch it just to watch her in this role.

This film was screened at BIFAN 2024.

Thank you to the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival for the opportunity to cover this year’s festival!