The uncomfortable brilliance of Andrew Ahn’s ‘Spa Night’
A decade later, the film remains a vital queer Asian American film about desire, repression, family, and belonging
Joe Seo stars in Andrew Ahn's debut film, "Spa Night."
Courtesy of Strand Releasing
Words by Anjana Pawa
When Spa Night premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, it did so with a budget partly crowdfunded on Kickstarter, no star-studded cast, and a first-time director. Filmmaker Andrew Ahn has since admitted that he made the film without really expecting many people to see it. To his surprise, it ended up leaving the festival with a Special Jury Award for its then-unknown lead actor, Joe Seo. At an anniversary screening last month at the New York Asian Film Festival, with a Q&A session moderated by Bowen Yang, Ahn was candid about how dated one detail of the film now feels. He joked that the film “takes place in a world where going to college matters,” while the film's actual throughlines and concerns have aged much differently. A decade later, what's striking isn't how much of the setting and family dynamics have changed, but how much hasn’t.
The film follows David (Seo), a closeted Korean American teenager who lives at home with his first-generation immigrant parents, helping them out at their failing family run restaurant. He ends up taking a job at a spa in LA’s Koreatown to help support himself financially and finds himself entangled in the gay cruising scene. In 2016, there wasn't really a category for the story this film was telling. Queer Asian American identity on screen mostly showed up as a subplot or not at all. Ahn wasn't working from a genre that he could reference. He was more or less inventing one.
When Yang asked Ahn how his personal life fits into his filmmaking, especially his debut, Ahn said that he knew what made Spa Night distinctive was the juxtaposition at its center: A shy, mostly quiet kid discreetly helping men cruise at the spa—a place that he often attends with his father—then going home to sit through a family dinner like nothing happened. He shared that the split felt uncanny to his lived experience, although it looked a little bit different. During his youth, he was sneaking out to party in West Hollywood while living under his parents' roof and telling them he was headed to Pinkberry.
From left, Bowen Yang and Andrew Ahn at the New York Asian Film Festival.
NYAFF Photo Team
One of the film’s most powerful elements is restraint. The story’s entire unfolding, according to Ahn, was built on a very deliberate sense of withholding emotions. David stays visibly closed off for nearly the film’s entire runtime, almost uncomfortably so. He only breaks open in one scene toward the end. During the editing process, Ahn recalled real pressure to loosen up on that restraint, including from Seo, who kept asking whether he should react more visibly in some of the more tense scenes. Ahn's answer, consistently, was to hold back and to let David's expression surface with time, slowly. Seo's performance carries that decision perfectly, giving the character a sense of autonomy over his own unraveling identity. It’s powerful and hard to forget, even after the ending credits are over.
Ahn also spoke highly about the actors who were cast as David's parents, Youn Ho Cho and Haerry Kim—both accomplished stage performers from South Korea whose work visas were delayed so long that he didn't actually meet them in person until the second week of the shoot. Ahn admitted he was initially worried the family might lack chemistry going into the shoot, but the moment he introduced Seo to the two of them, they were instantly protective of him, treating him, in Ahn's words, “like he's just such a baby bird.” That initial parental instinct from the actors toward their onscreen son carried through to the finished film. There is a warmth between David and his parents that never fully resolves into mutual understanding, but the relationship never curdles into anything sour either. It's a part of what makes the family feel like it was imagined from true, lived experiences.
"Spa Night" follows a closeted Korean American teenager navigating identity and life and with his first-generation immigrant parents.
Courtesy of Strand Releasing
Ten years and three feature films later, it's easy to see Spa Night as the origin of what Ahn has spent his career figuring out how to say more openly. Each feature he’s made has moved a little further from his debut's restraint and closer toward unguarded desire, often told with a bit of humor. But Ahn has pushed back on the idea that this is an arc that seamlessly unfolds from repression to freedom. He's described his process as more of a negotiation with identity, seeking to understand it as it changes. He wants to answer the hard questions—like how a queer Asian person is meant to navigate familial relationships and belonging inside structures that weren't necessarily built with them in mind. When asked at the NYAFF screening how he might write Spa Night differently for a 2026 audience, he didn't offer an example of a rewrite. Instead, he replied, “you have to be generous to your past self.” The film reflects who he was capable of being then, and what he makes now is allowed to be different.
That's really the case for revisiting Spa Night now, a decade out. Nobody else was really making a film like it 10 years ago, and there wasn't yet a template for what queer Asian American identity could look like onscreen. Ahn built one on a small budget with a cast largely unknown at the time, and it’s just as memorable and impactful as it was on the first watch.
Published on August 19, 2026
Words by Anjana Pawa
Anjana Pawa is a Brooklyn-based culture reporter who regularly covers music, entertainment and beauty. You can find her on Twitter at @apawawrites.