Film Review: Return to Seoul is blackly funny and bracingly cynical

Park Ji-Min in Return to Seoul

• Return to Seoul
• ★★★★☆

Return to Seoul (15A) stars Park Ji-min as Freddie Benoît, a South Korean-born twenty-something adopted as an infant by French parents who travels to Seoul and sets out to locate her birth parents with the help of her new friend Tena (Guka Han).

Unwittingly disruptive, uncaring about local tradition and culture, Freddie explodes into the quietly despairing life of her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok) without pausing to consider the consequences.

Written by Davy Chou and Laure Badufle, with Chou directing, Return to Seoul is a blackly funny and bracingly cynical account of Freddie’s reckoning with a past that she has no wish to understand. Flummoxed by the culture, the food and the language, Freddie is given a terrific reading by Park Ji-min as she rips through the subtleties of South Korean etiquette, even if Freddie’s best efforts at insulting her hosts are undermined by the polite translations offered by the long-suffering Tena.

Oh Kwang-rok is poignant in the supporting role, and not least because he cannot communicate directly with the daughter he professes to love, but Park Ji-min is in crackling form as a woman so deeply wounded by a past she cannot remember that she finds it impossible to reconnect, not even with her true self.