’The World Of Love’ review: Complex, thoughtful South Korean drama deals with aftermath of assault

Dir/scr: Yoon Ga-eun. South Korea. 2025. 119mins

Seventeen-year-old Jooin (a knockout flip from newcomer Website positioning Su-bin) is spirited, common, assured and cheerful. She approaches life with excessive power and most quantity; she adores drama. A typical teen, in different phrases. She’s additionally a survivor of childhood sexual assault. She’s decided that her expertise as a sufferer of abuse received’t outline her, however when she impulsively reveals the reality to her fellow highschool college students, it units ripples via her social group and past. Director Yoon Ga-eun’s deceptively gentle contact belies the substance and complexity of this considerate and nuanced drama.

All the extra rewarding for its gradual reveal

The World Of Love screens in London’s fundamental competitors, following a world premiere within the Platform strand at Toronto. After TIFF, it confirmed at Pingyao, the place the movie picked up each the Folks’s Alternative award for Greatest Movie and the Jury Prize. Additional pageant curiosity appears seemingly, and the interesting mixture of Yoon’s deft dealing with of tonal shifts and the terrific performances throughout the board might make this a title of curiosity for adventurous arthouse distributors.

It’s the third function movie from Yoon, following her multi-award-winning debutThe World Of Us, which premiered in Berlin in 2016, andThe Home Of Us, which screened on the London Movie Competition and others in 2019. Beforehand, she earned popularity of her quick movie Sprout, which received the Crystal Bear for greatest quick movie in Berlin’s Technology Kplus strand. Childhood dynamics are a recurring theme within the director’s work however, withThe World Of Love, she strikes into the messy territory of adolescence, a milieu which is captured evocatively by a perceptive observational lens.

Jooin jokes that she “sucks at love”. However that doesn’t cease her from making an attempt. The movie opens with a shot of Jooin and her boyfriend of the second clumsily snogging. Neither appears solely positive what to do with their fingers, and the eagerness evaporates into angular awkwardness. Inside a couple of briskly edited scenes, Jooin is reporting to her amused mom (Parasite star Jang Hyae-jin) that she has damaged up with the lad the most recent in an extended line of boyfriends who don’t final greater than a few weeks.

Jooin’s household – she lives in a cluttered condo together with her single mom and youthful brother – is a loving however chaotic family. Jooin’s mom drinks an excessive amount of. and it’s commonplace for her daughter to search out traces of her mom’s vomit when she cleans the flat. Her father moved out three years earlier than, eradicating himself from parental duties and avoiding Jooin’s makes an attempt at contact. However nonetheless, there’s heat in what’s left of the household, encapsulated in a beautiful scene during which Jooin’s youthful brother inflicts a haphazard late evening magic efficiency on his mum and sister.Their strategies of caring for one another may be unconventional – Jooin’s brother has been stealing his sister’s put up, for causes that don’t grow to be clear till late within the movie – however they’re heartfelt.

The primary trace of Jooin’s buried trauma comes when she refuses to signal a petition objecting to the return of a convicted little one intercourse abuser to the neighbourhood. It’s not the substance of the doc she objects to, however relatively the wording, which talks of lives irreparably ruined by abuse. In a heated argument, she broadcasts that she is a rape survivor,then retracts her declare, dismissing it as a joke. It’s round this level that she begins to obtain chiding nameless notes, missives that solid a shadow on Jooin’s often upbeat nature.

Yoon tells the tory via fractured glimpses, reflecting the skittishness of the teenager consideration span. However she leaves the digicam working when it counts: a wrenching pivotal scene unfolding in a carwash advantages from an unbroken focus and from the anguished depth of Website positioning’s performing. Not all the pieces works: using a twinkly piano rendition of Bach’s relatively twee and placid ’Sheep Might Safely Graze’ as a recurring motif seems like a tonal mismatch, given the dynamic power of the movie and of Website positioning’s efficiency specifically. However largely,the image works effectively: a narrative that takes its time to piece collectively and is all of the extra rewarding for its gradual reveal