Critics reviews

It is this curious—but not timid—desire that propels the film past the clichés of exotic memorabilia and self-conscious didacticism and into a higher dimension of complexity, precisely because we see and feel through David's eyes, and the sensations running through his body.

The film takes too much time to portray David's achingly slow and incomplete coming-out process, but its focus on the interior maelstrom of a teenager is extremely insightful. David is a dutiful son and a gay kid yearning to be himself in a community where that is just not done.

There have been upbeat coming-out films (But I'm a Cheerleader) and tragic, infuriating ones (Boys Don't Cry, Brokeback Mountain). Andrew Ahn's Spa Night is executed on a significantly smaller scale, a deliberately anticlimactic one, which makes it all the more doleful.

The film illustrates certain symmetries between David's parents' experience and his own. At home and at the spa, he's a stranger in a strange land, a man without a country. That Ahn implies the parallel, yet resists belaboring it, is a function of the film's careful construction, always holding fulfillment at arm's length. Spa Night can be tender, even plaintive, yet its most forceful mode is that of control, maintained and momentarily relinquished.

It's rare to see the Asian-American experience—with David Cho (Joe Seo) torn between his filial piety toward his struggling immigrant parents and his desire to see the world—rendered with such sharp eye for details and acute understanding as it is here. Such culturally specific details enhance its standard coming-of-age arc, as does Seo's impressively internalized performance as 18-year-old David.

In queer-friendly Sundance, other films imposed themselves. The one in which the age-old dilemma of "coming out" was expressed in the loveliest, most sensitive way, was Andrew Ahn's Spa Night, which focuses as much on the plight of an immigrant family in Los Angeles Koreatown as on the sexual explorations of the son.

There are not enough movies made about first generation Americans, and miraculously, here's a great one at Sundance. "Spa Night" perfectly encapsulates the uncomfortable pressure of straddling two cultures and the insecurity that comes with falling out of your immigrant parents' expectations... Unafraid to show Koreatown and its neighbors, "Spa Night" may be the most authentically L.A. story to grace the screen in recent memory.

Though Andrew Ahn's Spa Night has precisely the opposite problem—an admirably open ended conclusion that nevertheless feels narratively under-realized despite its authenticity—it's an even more emotionally resonant depiction of an alienated young man [than Morris from America].