'Cheoldeul Muryeop' asks who really bears the burden of caregiving

A review of director Jeong Seung-o's new film, starring Ki Joo-bong, Ha Yun-kyeong and Yang Mal-bok in a family drama that questions the unspoken obligations passed off as love

A scene from "Cheoldeul Muryeop" [Indistory, Jumaeng Film]

Everyone grows old. Everyone dies. The relentless pace of daily life makes it easy to forget these simple truths. But the taken-for-granted does not stop there. Parents are expected to give their lives to their children; children are expected to see their parents through old age; siblings are expected to show up when things get hard. We each exploit these assumptions in whatever way suits us best. No one formally agreed to any of it, yet many people find themselves bound by a sense of duty they never chose. Blood is thicker than water, and that bond rarely grants us the freedom to simply walk away.

If something cannot be avoided, it must be faced. If it is a problem, it must be examined. If it makes us uncomfortable, we owe it to ourselves to ask why. Director Jeong Seung-o's new film "Cheoldeul Muryeop" peers into the web of relationships inside one family, carefully scratching at an itch that most of us have quietly tried to ignore. Perhaps growing up means realizing that what we took for granted was never really a given at all. At the center of that realization, the film inscribes one word in bold: caregiving.

The story opens on Cheol-taek (Ki Joo-bong), a welder who has never quite grown up. He prays for a lottery win in front of his late mother's memorial portrait and gets through his days with the help of alcohol. His only child is Jeong-mi (Ha Yun-kyeong), a bit-part actor cycling through uncredited roles — Ghost No. 1, Friend No. 2 — while holding out hope that her moment will come. Then one day she learns that her father has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Already struggling to keep her own head above water, Jeong-mi begins cooking banchan and ferrying it to her father, tending to his health with quiet care. Cheol-taek accepts all of it as a matter of course, as though his daughter's effort were simply owed to him. When Jeong-mi arrives late to the hospital one day because she had an audition, he greets her with a dismissive remark: "That's just like you." The throwaway line lands like a blade in the middle of all the effort no one else has bothered to notice.

What at first appears to be a burden Jeong-mi carries alone gradually reveals other faces as the film unfolds.

Hyeon-suk (Yang Mal-bok), Cheol-taek's estranged wife who has been quietly enjoying her later years on her own since their de facto divorce, receives calls from her siblings telling her it is now her turn to look after their 90-year-old mother, Ok-nam. Meanwhile, Cheol-taek's older brother Gwan-taek — who already lives with his son's family and helps care for his grandson Dong-min — gets a call from Jeong-mi asking him to help cover their father's surgery costs. The obligations of being a child, of being a sibling, obligations no one ever signed up for, put both of them in an impossible position. Refuse, and you are an unfilial child. Look away, and you have cut yourself off from the family. Those who invoke "family" only when they need something treat any refusal as a grave moral failing.

From the outset, the film refuses to reduce caregiving to a matter of filial piety or moral duty belonging to one person. As Jeong-mi takes on the role of her father's guardian, she comes face to face with family members she has barely seen. Hyeon-suk's four siblings offload the responsibility of caring for their mother onto her for no reason other than that she lives alone. In watching this, we come to understand that the assumption that "someone has to take care of them" has quietly been placed on one person all along. It is worth noting that the person chosen is, in particular, a daughter — while Gwan-taek's son, by contrast, receives support from his father rather than providing it.

Caregiving is, when you start to think about it, a genuinely thorny problem — all the more so when it falls on someone like Jeong-mi, who can barely manage her own credit card debt. Yet the film does not approach this complexity with unrelenting solemnity. Particularly effective is the contrast between Jeong-mi, who starts out full of energy as her father's caregiver and slowly wilts under the weight of it, and Cheol-taek, whose color and health visibly improve thanks to her care. The juxtaposition goes beyond the patient-caregiver dynamic to offer a wry reflection on the reality of caregiving in Korean society — and it is more than enough to make us look hard at a man who seems to believe that because he fed and raised his daughter, it is only natural that she should now nurse him.

What fills out the density of this narrative is the actors' faces. Ki Joo-bong does not play Cheol-taek as a simple deadbeat father. His face moves between shamelessness and embarrassment, and a remorse that only surfaces in the shadow of death — keeping the audience from ever fully writing the character off. Ha Yun-kyeong conveys Jeong-mi's slow weariness through the gradual collapse of her expressions and the cooling temperature of her voice, making viscerally felt just how quietly and thoroughly caregiving labor can hollow a person out.

Yang Mal-bok's performance as Hyeon-suk — a woman caught between grievance and resignation — combined with the presence of the elderly Ok-nam, gives the ensemble an emotional range that keeps the film from narrowing into the story of any one generation or character. It expands instead to register the temperature of an entire family.

Ultimately, the film offers no tidy answers. As with so many works that raise questions about caregiving, it does not simply assign the problem to failures of social infrastructure. Who should bear the responsibility of care, and how that burden might be divided fairly — the film stays silent on all of it. That silence feels like an honest admission that there was never a right answer to begin with.

Near the end, Ok-nam flatly rejects her children's suggestion that she move in with Hyeon-suk. "To me, you are all the past," she tells them. "Can't I be allowed to imagine a future for myself?" With what little time she has left, she wants to live in peace — not cleaning up after her children. Her words jolt us out of the reflexive, one-size-fits-all way we tend to think about caregiving. So who, in the end, is caregiving really for? It is a question this warm but quietly devastating family drama leaves hanging in the air, and it weighs more than it has any right to.

balme@heraldcorp.com