There is a certain tentativeness to the 14-year-old Eun-hee (Ji-hu Park) in writer-director Bora Kim’s sure-handed feature debut “House of Hummingbird,” a tender yet somewhat underpowered coming-of-age film set in the Seoul of 1994. Lonely, reserved, and stuck in a dysfunctional household among her frequently quarrelling parents (Seung-Yeon Lee and In-gi Jeong), her troublemaking sister Su-hee (Su-yeon Park), and bully of a brother Dae-hoon (Sang-yeon Sohn), eighth-grader Eun-hee seems to move through life involuntarily, like a bird with a pair of broken wings. And yet, she still copes with routine neglect behind a youthful shield of resilience — Kim slowly lays bare Eun-hee’s toughened spirit from a minimalist and acutely feminine perspective.
Loosely inspired by the writer-director’s own adolescence, Kim’s personal film timidly drifts without narrative spikes for a while, until a sense of direction emerges alongside era-specific facts (like Seoul’s undisciplined real-estate expansion) in the backdrop.
Loosely inspired by the writer-director’s own adolescence, Kim’s personal film timidly drifts without narrative spikes for a while, until a sense of direction emerges alongside era-specific facts (like Seoul’s undisciplined real-estate expansion) in the backdrop.
- 5/1/2019
- by Tomris Laffly
- Variety Film + TV
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