Recencies van critici

Few performances have so bitterly captured what it looks like to be tangled up in emotion while also, to some degree, manipulating it for an audience, dialing it up for maximum impact, luxuriating in that moment when the tears finally do come.

The effect of this depiction of a mother’s worst fear realized is no less powerful for being, formally speaking, quite demonstratively restrained.

This 2007 feature by Lee Chang-dong (Oasis) begins as a quiet drama about mourning but grows steadily darker and more complicated, its unpredictable plot touching on religious fanaticism, mental illness, and even murder.

A film of subtle rhythms and an almost novelistic attention to experiential detail.

SECRET SUNSHINE begins with a shot of the sky and ends with a shot of the ground, and could therefore be described as a nearly-2 1/2 hour downward pan: from milieu to character, from ambitions to realities, from action to aftermath, and from a higher calling to its failure to its fitful application.

Like a twisted sister to Rabbit Hole, Secret Sunshine doesn’t just posit grief but probes the hidden biology of it, like a parasite slowly chewing up its host from the inside.

Teeming with incident, full of emotions, roiling with anger, Secret Sunshine is nevertheless something like a blank canvas. Director Lee Chang-dong's protracted yet endlessly involving tale of grief and regeneration is a classically tailored assemblage of small, clipped moments, prizing the intricacies of human behavior but also acknowledging it as remote and difficult to define.

Director Lee Chang-dong’s protracted yet endlessly involving tale of grief and regeneration is a classically tailored assemblage of small, clipped moments, prizing the intricacies of human behavior but also acknowledging it as remote and difficult to define.

It easily ranks among my favourite films of the year – and not only because of the luminous performance of its main actress, Jeon Do-Yeon (who was awarded Best Actress at Cannes). There are no false notes in Lee’s powerful depiction of a woman’s struggle to overcome a double tragedy and the madness that threatens to engulf her.

Lee Chang-dong’s new film holds many secrets, and the act of writing about it necessarily risks revealing far too many of them. There are many small surprises, twists, and lunges that Lee artfully plants throughout like submerged mines, in the steady flow of his film.