Critics reviews

But it’s Ji-Min’s staggering debut performance that proves the standout of the show: primarily a visual artist, this is her first acting role, and she’s a complete natural, summoning a story with a single face-flicker or dance move. It’s her performance that will leave you feeling wistful and heartbroken by the film’s quiet, soulful end.

There’s something mesmerising about the silent cacophony of conflicting emotions that Park conveys, with recognition and alienation locked in speechless battle.

The solid narrative foundation of the film is beautifully supported by Thomas Favel’s mesmerising cinematography...

It’s a gorgeous study from the director and co-writer Davy Chou. The other co-writer is Laure Badufle, a French-Korean on whose story the film is based. There are, unsurprisingly, deep truths here.

An ambivalent, accusatory depiction of intercountry adoption, Return to Seoul mines South Korea’s controversial adoption history to craft a smart if maddening character study.

[I]n Davy Chou’s daring and mesmeric Return to Seoul, an adoptee’s search for her birth parents tears open wounds and unearths neither meaning nor resolution.

The implacable forces of nature, nurture and destiny are what this movie grapples with; it is a really emotional and absorbing drama about adoption with terrific performances (many from nonprofessional first-timers) and compelling soundtrack musical cues.

[A] visceral, astonishingly assured work, compelling, rarely predictable, and vital.

The film isn’t inconclusive but its time and continent-sweeping structure is anything but conventional: and that’s what makes the mercurial Return to Seoul, in the end, so remarkable.

It is in that gap – between self-protection and exposure; between theory and reality – that this spirited, stimulating film finds its resonance.

Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset’s eclectic score, full of off-kilter percussion, punctuates the observational drama with electrifying interludes.

Channelling Wong Kar-wai’s influence, Chou directs as if by intuition, taking radical turns and time jumps as Freddie’s episodic story develops.