Kim Min-ha shines in assimilation drama ‘Hana Korea’

We meet young refugee Hyesun (Kim) as she’s sternly interrogated by immigration officers at a South Korean port of entry. She’s eager to call an intermediary to send a message to her ailing mother, having left her in the rural sprawl of the North’s Ryanggang Province. However, messages in and out of her country are tightly controlled. Until she can earn enough to send money back home, she’s granted South Korean citizenship and placed in a cultural integration center for recent arrivals, under the auspices of a kindly mentor.

Most of Hyesun’s peers are North Koreans who grew up in China, leaving her as one of the few adult students totally unfamiliar with the South’s traditions and technology (for instance, washing machines). A skirmish with a fellow refugee who claims to know her hints at unsavory survival tactics during her tumultuous journey, which she also gestures toward in imagined voiceovers addressing her mother. However, this potentially hefty occurrence seldom adds weight to the plot of Hyesun trying to find her place, as she attempts to study nursing, rather than taking the program’s advice and opting for a more immediate job either cooking or cleaning. This makes sending money for her mother’s medical bills a difficult endeavor, but the dilemma between her familial duty and what she owes herself, as an individual, runs throughout Hana Korea.

Kim’s conception of Hyesun is silent and mousey, but resilient deep down. This works wonders for her day-to day-interactions, both in the integration center, and when she’s finally placed in Seoul to begin a new life. The oddities she isn’t used to yield some of the most interesting reactions from any actor in recent years; as timid and vulnerable as Hyesun might be, she never wants to let it be known that she isn’t familiar with some term or custom. A scene of her responding to a local coworker who asks for her Instagram—an app she isn’t familiar with—is a particular delight. Kim walks a remarkable tightrope in these moments, finding the perfect balance between hiding her ignorance and inexperience from other characters, while silently letting the audience in on how scared and oblivious she is beneath her polite nods and self-effacing half smiles. No matter how anyone else reacts, Hyesun is never the butt of the joke as far as the film’s POV is concerned.

Kim Min-ha portrays protagonist Hyesun

Stepanie Stål Axelgård

However, beyond a point, she isn’t much of anything in this regard. Sølberg maintains a respectful distance as he captures the character’s most difficult and intimidating moments—Hana Korea is ultimately a film about the small cruelties wrought upon refugees, and the unjust systems that allow for their exploitation. But in order to access Hyesun’s actual thoughts or feelings, the movie uses her narrations as a crutch, rather than the camera probing how she feels in the moment. Her words have to work overtime, since the frame seldom accentuates her mood, or her fears, through lighting, framing, or blocking.

On one hand, centering an actress of Kim’s caliber is a sure path to emotional dividends. On the other hand, too much rests on her shoulders. She’s enrapturing to watch, but the movie around her meanders for lengthy stretches without taking concrete shape. That Hyesun makes friends with some of her fellow asylees seldom feels meaningful. Granted, this is in part because of how her worries tend to isolate her—her mind is always back home—but in the process, the movie loses all sense of the present too, making it hard to track just how much time has passed between scenes, and how much Hyesun has or has not adjusted accordingly.

The movie’s gentle neutrality, while apolitical on the surface, is socially complex. South Korea, although nominally free, doesn’t end up a bastion of liberation for outsiders like Hyesun, while its Northern cousin, for all its fascistic faults, is a place she still considers home. She yearns for its music, its familiar dishes and delicacies, and above all, her own family. The movie, in its closing five or 10 minutes, brings this yearning into collision with Hyesun’s maladjustment, and in the process, finally blooms into a tale of silent suffering, and of people whose worlds are turned upside down when they’re thrust into entirely new modes of living, often without a life vest. This has been the focus of some of Sølberg’s previous work, like his 2018 documentary Doel, about a scant European ghost town whose few dozen inhabitants hold it dear. The story of Hana Korea—of people whose homeland is entwined with its political notoriety—is a perfect fit for Sølberg’s interests, at least in theory.

Hyesun with fellow asylees.

Stepanie Stål Axelgård

The movie’s final act verges on cinematic sleight of hand, if only because its gradual crescendo allows Kim to reach a riveting emotional denouement. However, the aesthetic elements surrounding the lead actress, and those preceding even her showiest scenes, tend to flatten Hana Korea as the story unfolds. Even the highs of Kim’s admirably, often heart-wrenching performance aren’t enough to stop the film from losing momentum. Its underlying message is worthwhile—the idea that place, and a people, are more than just their most controversial perceptions—but unfortunately, the movie seldom replaces those aspersions with anything more meaningful. Hyesun is largely defined by what she isn’t, and what she doesn’t want to do or be, and the closing credits roll well before she comes into her own.