My Brilliant Life

Dae-su and Mi-ra have a son when they are both seventeen. They name the boy Ah-reum. Ah-reum has a rare genetic condition, progeria: his body ages far faster than it should. Sixteen years later the child is in the body of an eighty-year-old, in the last days of his life. All he does in that time is write a book about how his parents fell in love. The source is Kim Ae-ran's novel, published in 2011. E J-yong's film does not turn the illness into spectacle; the weight lies in a sixteen-year-old thinking about his parents rather than himself. Song Hye-kyo and Gang Dong-won play a mother and father who physically look younger than their child, and that inversion carries all the pain of the film. The narrative openly sets out to make you cry and does not hide it; it became one of the most watched examples of that strand in Korean cinema.