“Next Sohee” Theatrical Poster
Director: Jeong Joo-ri
Cast: Bae Doo-Na, Kim Si-eun, Jung Hoe-Rin, Kang Hyun-Oh, Park Woo-Young, Park Hee-Eun, Kim Yong-Joon, Sim Hee-Seop, Park Yoon-Hee, Yoon Ga-I
Running Time: 135 min.
By Paul Bramhall
It can sometimes be a tough job being a Korean cinema fan, with some of the best directors often taking years between the movies they release. Oh Seung-wook made audiences wait 9 years between 2015’s The Shameless and 2024’s Revolver. Lee Chang-dong kept us hanging for 8 years between 2010’s Poetry and 2018’s Burning. Even a director as popular as Park Chan-wook left 6 years between 2016’s The Handmaiden and 2022’s Decision to Leave. Jeong Joo-ri, a former student of Lee Chang-dong who made her debut with 2014’s Bae Doona starring A Girl at My Door (which Chang-dong notably produced) looks set to follow a similar path, with her sophomore feature Next Sohee finally arriving in 2022.
Once more directing from her own script, Joo-ri has also re-teamed with Bae Doona (The Drug King, Tunnel), however Next Sohee for the most part belongs to actress Kim Si-eun as the titular Sohee of the title. Here given her first starring role after minor supporting turns in the likes of The Negotiation and Boys Be!! (along with plenty of K-drama work), Si-eun completely owns the role as a teenager attending a vocational college in rural Korea, one that offers a pathway to fulltime employment through placement in an ‘externship’ program. Despite dreaming of being a K-pop dancer, when she’s given the opportunity to be placed in a telecom companies call centre, the corporate surroundings being a stark contrast to the factories many of the students find themselves placed, it seems like she’s landed herself a good deal.
It’s only once she starts the role that she learns her job is to take calls from customers wanting to cancel their subscription service, and convince them to stay (or even better, convince them to stay and upsell another product). Faced with high retainment targets, an initially supportive manager who soon begins to crank on the pressure, and the frustration of discovering her salary incentives are being withheld due to contract fine print, what seemed like a good deal gradually starts to turn into a soul-destroying nightmare. The call centre environment that Next Sohee takes place in somewhat inevitably echoes the previous year’s Aloners, a movie that similarly focused on a female who joins a call centre, however despite the initial similarities Joo-ri takes her story in a very different direction.
Watching someone fresh to the workforce become slowly beaten down by the unfairness of the program she’s been placed into may not sound particularly engaging, but much like A Girl at My Door Joo-ri’s ability to create characters who feel relatable shines through. Si-eun is a revelation in the role, imbuing Sohee with a sense of resilience that makes her easy to root for, even when the difficulties she faces start to feel overwhelming (especially when her manager commits suicide in his car). It’s worth to point out that once I read Next Sohee was being directed by Joo-ri, I decided to avoid reading anything further and went in blind, so after spending an hour in the company of Si-eun and getting to know her character, it came as a genuine shock when she also chooses to kill herself.
It’s at this point that the plot reveals itself to be a tale of 2 halves. In the latter half we meet Bae Doona’s character, who up until this point we’ve only glimpsed briefly in the dance studio that Si-eun would go to practice her K-pop routines. In recent years Doona seems to have become the go-to Korean actress for playing slightly distant cop characters with an undisclosed traumatic past (usually re-located to a rural station for good measure). Here she could well be playing the same character as she did in A Girl at My Door, and of course we also saw a similar role in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker. Initially tasked with a straightforward round of interviews of those who knew Si-eun so the case can be closed, when it comes to light she wasn’t the first person to kill herself who worked at the call centre, Doona refuses to wrap things up, and begins to look deeper into what led to the deaths.
There’s a quietly seething anger that permeates throughout Next Sohee, an anger that bubbles ever closer to the surface as the narrative progresses. Joo-ri has stated in interviews that the idea for the story came about after she saw a news report in 2016, covering an incident where a girl who’d been sent on an externship program in a call centre killed herself within 3 months of working there. The investigation afterwards brought to light the unfavourable working conditions and how, to some degree, the students who were placed from vocational colleges were being exploited by the companies the colleges partnered with.
The narrative structure is a bold one, eschewing what looks and feels like a murder mystery in its back half, but isn’t precisely because we already know there’s no mystery, having seen how Si-eun chose to take her own life. Rather it becomes the tale of 2 people, both somehow connected through their willingness to rail against the injustices that they see, even though there’s no singular villain for either them or us as the audience to aim our anger towards. In many ways Doona’s role doubles as the avatar for the audience watching, as what starts as mild frustration at the lack of clarity she gets from anyone she speaks to soon develops into outright exasperation at the system that’s operating in plain sight.
On the one hand the approach can be viewed as a nihilistic one from a purely plot perspective, but Joo-ri’s script and direction is constructed in such a way that our closeness to the characters onscreen feels like it’s more important than the circumstances that surround them. In any other filmmaker’s hands Next Sohee would likely have been structured from the perspective of Bae Doona, uncovering how Si-eun decided to take her own life by unfolding it in flashbacks, thus framing it from the perspective of the mystery genre. However by spending the whole of the first hour with Si-eun it feels like we get to know her intimately, as if she’s the main character of the movie (which it could well be argued she is), and therefore allowing the investigation in the second half to be more about getting to know Doona’s character, since we already know Si-eun’s story.
The reason why Next Sohee manages to be so compelling is in the way it crafts a pair of characters who in some way mirror each other’s values, refusing to be defeated by a system that’s so deeply entrenched it’ll never change, yet still remain true to their principles. Will that make it enjoyable for everyone? Probably not, and those expecting any kind of cathartic payoff at the end of the 135-minute runtime will be left disappointed. The injustice is a part of the hierarchal nature of Korean society, and no single suicide or person is ever going to change that, so in the face of such an overbearing beast, the best you can do is be kind to others and let them know they’re not alone. In the final scene Doona’s character seems to realise this, embracing a willingness to do what’s in her control to try and stop a similar tragedy happening to the next Sohee, and hoping the offer of connection is enough.
Managing to tread the fine line between being both a subdued character study and seething indictment of certain aspects of Korean society, Joo-ri’s sophomore feature is a success not so much because of the system it portrays, but rather the impact that it has on the characters that she’s created. For Bae Doona, Next Sohee marks another stellar performance that’s a standout in her filmography, and for Kim Si-eun she’s already gone on to be cast in the 2nd season of the popular Netflix series Squid Game. As for Jeong Joo-ri, my only hope is that we don’t have to wait another 8 years for her next production to hit the screens, as she remains one of the brightest talents working in Korea today.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8.5/10
