Mesmerizing performances fuel this wrenching drama about a troubled policewoman’s attempt to protect a teenage girl from domestic abuse in provincial Korea.<\/p>\n
“Bae Doona plays Young-nam, a cop who is transferred from the police academy in Seoul to take change of a police sub-station in a small coastal village. We soon realise that this demotion has come about due to her sexual orientation; homophobia, alas, isn\u2019t the only prejudice she faces. Not long after her arrival, Young-nam encounters Sun Do-hee, a 14-year-old who is violently bullied by both classmates and family. Unhappily, the locals are not prepared to take on the girl\u2019s drunken abusive father, as the local economy is entirely dependent upon his oyster farm.<\/em><\/p>\n Young-nam is not prepared to stand idly by, but her relationship with the troubled titular teen soon becomes increasingly, well, stalker-ish. In recent years, Bae Doona has played Grace Kelly to the Wachowski\u2019s Hitchcock. But while the film-making siblings\u2019 repeated casting of the artist in\u00a0Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending, and the TV seriesSense8, may have attracted global attention, she has not yet been given an Anglophone role to properly knock your socks off.<\/em><\/p>\n Happily,\u00a0The Girl at My Door\u00a0gives the divine Ms Bae an opportunity to flex all of her acting muscles, albeit with small, delicate motions. Marvel at the way she slumps over the soju she decants into water bottles. Gaze at her not-entirely convincing deportment as she rocks up to her office. \u00a0<\/em>Her accomplished turn is matched by July Jung\u2019s clever nuanced drama, which shares DNA with Boon Joon-Ho\u2019s police procedural,\u00a0Memories of Murder. Here, however, the secrets and lies are doubly complicated by a tangle of gender politics.<\/em><\/p>\n Kim Hyun-seok\u2019s deceptively sunny cinematography adds to the notion that nothing is quite as it seems but that still won\u2019t prepare you for the denouement.”<\/em> – The Irish Times<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n