This Charming Girl

Jeong-Hae is a pretty young woman who works in a Seoul post office, lives alone, leads a fairly quiet life, and seems generally to be happy, though her acquisition of a kitten could be due to loneliness. She can appear a little distracted at times, so that at first she barely notices the writer who regularly uses the post office to mail his manuscripts. Then she suddenly invites him to dinner… An impressive first feature centred on a very fine debut performance by Kim Ji-Soo, this takes a remarkably quietist approach to material that in other hands tends to end up feeling something like ‘Repulsion’. The heroine has her psychological problems, but the low-key narrative eschews melodrama for something more subtly affecting and, in the end, suspenseful. As meticulous, delicate and strong as a spider’s web.