Secret Sunshine

This exploration of grief in contemporary South Korea plods along adequately and intelligently but never achieves the higher notes of human suffering and emotion that it threatens to hit. Shin-Ae (Jeon) is a vulnerable younger mother who arrives in Miryang from Seoul with her young son Jun following the death of her husband. She immediately attracts the desire of unexceptional local guy Jong-Chan (Song), whose repeated attention is one of the more wearying aspects of the film. Grief turns to horror when Jun is kidnapped and found dead, pushing Shin-Ae to embrace Christianity as a release-valve for her escalating pain. Jeon’s committed performance – which won the best actress prize at Cannes – is the most impressive element of a film that fails to engage as fully as its story demands. Solid, but never transcendent.