[HanCinema's Film Review] "FAQ"

Dong-choon (played by Park Na-eun-I) is an unremarkable little girl who doesn't really fit in well with her classmates, but doesn't really seem to want to fit in with them that much anyway. This is no feat of bravado- quite the opposite actually. Dong-choon is just very shy, and seems to feel most at ease speaking with imagnary friends based on colorful cartoon characters from one of her many textbooks. Incidentally, despite going to eight private schools, Dong-choon is equally disinterested by the prospect of dropping any of her demanding courseload.

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"FAQ" is an odd little movie. The utimate punchline to Dong-choon's adventures really just amounts to a single riddle. Why does she, or any other kid, need to take so many classes about so many wildly unrelated subjects? After English, art, and science, Dong-choon eventually joins a weirdly specific Persian language class. This seems as irrelevant as anything else until Dong-choon has a revelation upon learning that Persian, like many Middle Eastern languages, isn't written the same way as other languages she's used to.

This revelation quite literally serves to teach Dong-choon how to better communicate with rice wine, a state of affairs that puzzles her about as much as it does anyone else. But since Dong-choon is so unexpressive, she can't really explain what's going on even if she wanted to. Besides, her mother Hye-jin (played by Park Hyo-joo) has a lot on her mind too. Mainly, the ennui of being a middle-aged woman who fears that her decision go become a mother didn't serve any real purpose.

Despite that description, Hye-jin really is trying to do the very best she can, dealing with very adult depression that her daughter genuinely just can't relate to. Hye-jin sublimates a lot of this depression by focusing on her daughter's education, to limited success. The world they both in seems quite incomprehensible, and the sci-fi plot twist at the end, despite its overall absurdity, is actually a fairly logical explanation for what's been happening to bother our leads.

This sort of sci-fi realism isn't for everyone, and "FAQ" has a lot of literary novel qualities in that many characters and subplots never seem to actually go anywhere. Yeong-jin (played by Kim Hee-won) is Dong-choon's estranged uncle, whose eccentric off-the-grid lifestyle has led to him not even knowing that his mother is now in a nursing home. There's a lot of unspoken aggression on Hye-jin's part regarding her absentee brother too.

Did "FAQ" really need an explanation or confrontation to cap off this ambiguous relationship? Many would say yes, but I disagree. Hye-jin and Yeong-jin both represent adulthood possibilities for Dong-choon that are neither especially likely nor especially ideal. This is why Dong-choon finds her own purpose, as all children eventually must, for their role is not to uphold our world for future generations, but to find their own world that the adults in her life may never truly understand, even if that doesn't change the fact that they all still love her.

Written by William Schwartz

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"FAQ" is directed by Kim Da-min-II, and features Park Na-eun-I, Park Hyo-joo, Kim Hee-won, Kim Ji-hoon-IV, Han On-yoo, Kim Jun-I. Release date in Korea: 2024/02/28.