Secret Sunshine: Lee Chang-dong

Warning: Review Contains Spoilers

I love it when a movie reads my mind. Sometimes I'll be watching a film and I'll start to wonder how I would have directed it differently. My mind will be consumed by different camera angles, different actors, and potential plot twists. And once in a blue moon, a film will surprise me by doing exactly what I dream up. The most recent occurrence of this phenomenon took place during Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine. Let me explain. The film begins with a single mother moving to her dead husband's home town with her young son in order to start a new life. They struggle to fit in and become accepted within the community. And then, suddenly, the young boy disappears. The mother receives a phone call from a man saying that he has kidnapped him and demands ransom. At this point, I thought to myself, "If I had control over this movie, I would make it so that she would pay the ransom and discover that the criminal killed her son anyway." And, to my amazement, it does just that. Oh, don't give me that look. This is a two and a half hour film and this all takes place within the first third. The majority of the film studies this young woman as she struggles to cope with this incomprehensible loss. She soon finds solace in Christianity after a local shopkeeper reaches out to her in her agony. In what I can only describe as a Perfect Scene, the woman enters a church during a service, sits in a pew, and begins to cry for the first time over the death of her son. Most film-makers DREAM about making a scene with this much power and emotion. But then the film starts to deteriorate when she goes to visit and forgive her son's murderer. I won't spoil what happens, but she has a revelation that seems extremely childish in my opinion. She then goes about sabotaging the Church out of spite. Maybe I'm biased as a Christian and as the son of a preacher, but to me, striking out at the only group of people who tried to help her in her time of grief seems immature and selfish. The last hour of the film seems out of place, almost as if another director came in. But regardless, Secret Sunshine is a heart-breakingly fantastic film...at least for the first hour and a half.

8/10