Birthday

Lee Jong-un's 2019 Korean film follows Jeong-il, returning after eight years abroad and in prison. His relationship with his wife has broken down and he tries to reconnect with a young daughter he barely knows, but at the centre of the household there is an unclosed loss. The film covers the later years of a family who lost a child in the Sewol ferry disaster of 2014. The subject is not the disaster but the impossibility of sharing the grief; the mother and the father carry the same loss in entirely different ways. The title points to the memorial gathering families hold on the dead child's birthday. Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu lead, and the final section is largely given over to that gathering. Who it's for: those who like Korean drama and quiet narratives about mourning. Who it's not for: viewers sensitive to the loss of a child; the film treats it directly and at length in its final section.