A Girl at My Door

Young-nam is a police chief transferred from Seoul to a coastal town. Why she was sent is not stated. In the town there is a girl called Do-hee, beaten by her stepfather and her grandmother, and everyone knows it. Nobody intervenes, because the man runs the fishing business in the district and works it with undocumented labour. Young-nam takes the girl into her house. Then her own past comes out. July Jung writes and directs in her first film. Bae Doona plays Young-nam and Kim Sae-ron plays Do-hee. What the film builds is the insufficiency of good intentions. Young-nam wants to protect the girl and has neither the authority nor the social backing to do it; when the town wants a culprit, it finds her. The second matter is undocumented labour. The town's economy rests on it, and that is why the violence is overlooked; the film joins the two. Kim Sae-ron was a child actor at the time and does not play the part as an appealing victim; Do-hee is manipulative, angry and difficult. Lee Chang-dong is among the producers and the film screened in Un Certain Regard at the 2014 Cannes film festival. Who it is for: viewers who follow Korean social drama and films about child abuse. Who it is not for: the subject is very heavy, the pace is slow, and the ending provides no relief.