3 days Ago By Namrata Joshi
There is no denying that an Adolescence wave appears to have taken over the world of entertainment across the globe. As Philip Barantini’s mini-series brings issues of toxic manosphere and online radicalisation to the fore, it is worthwhile to catch South Korean filmmaker Hur Jin-ho’s A Normal Family as an apt companion piece to the British crime drama. Adapted from Herman Koch’s Dutch novel Het Diner (The Dinner), A Normal Family had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, came home to local viewers in October last year and is set to release in North America in April.
Like Adolescence, it also casts a glance at the darkness that resides deep within teenaged souls but places all that’s grim and gloomy in the larger, complex realm of family ties that divide more often than bind. Incidentally, the novel was also adapted in 2017 into an American film of the same name starring Richard Gere, Steve Coogan, Laura Linney and Rebecca Hall. The film abounds in deaths, needless ones at that, violence and blood and an incipient sense of dread for all the hideousness that humans can be capable of.
Unforeseen twists and turns propel the narrative as the characters find themselves trapped in situations they hadn’t quite bargained for. It makes for a good serving of high drama but one that is typically Korean in its restraint of expression. The action is centred on two brothers and the widely varying beliefs and ideologies that pitch them against each other, tear them and their families apart even as a veneer of politeness and decency and the ritual of monthly dinners in expensive, fine-dining restaurants help maintain a sense of tenuous equilibrium.
The film starts with a bloody accident. Jae-wan (Sul Kyung-gu), a successful lawyer, takes on the case of a rich man’s son, who deliberately runs over and kills a man, leaving his little daughter injured and his wife at sea with no one to hold on to and no future to look forward to. By a quirk of fate, it’s Jae-wan’s morally upright paediatrician brother Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-gun), who takes charge of the dead man’s injured daughter in his clinic.
Will he be able to save her? If being on the opposite side of this crime wasn’t enough, it gets worse when the two come face to face with an offence involving their own children. Dinner table tensions rise, individual conscience begins to play games as the right and the wrong get entangled and indistinguishable from each other. What follows is an exploration of materialism and privilege, and how it gets furthered by compromised adults and impacts the young, impressionable minds.
In the circle of crime, guilt, morality, remorse, forgiveness, punishment and salvation, a dreadful secret hits like a ton of bricks. How desensitised can kids get to violence? How much of the responsibility for their sense of entitlement lies with the parents? Have they failed their children and hence themselves? The film gets extremely relatable with the audience often ending up putting itself in the characters’ shoes. Hur commands and controls the film with the finesse of a music conductor.
The perfect ensemble cast doesn’t leave a note out of place—not just the two leads but also the wonderfully nuanced Ji-su (Claudia Kim), the young second wife of the lawyer, his daughter Hye-yoon (Hong Ye-ji), the doctor’s wife, Yeon-kyung (Hee-ae Kim) and the much-bullied son Si-ho (Kim Jung-chul). The sock in the jaw finale, involving yet another accident, has you thinking for long about the extent to which the love for our children can drive us. A film that comes full circle to turn the tables on its own characters and their driving forces, compulsions and integrity and, in turn, the audience’s empathy (or the lack of it) for them.
At its core A Normal Family questions parenting, society, justice while also asserting that normalcy is nothing more than an anomaly when it comes to families..
