The "Secret Sunshine" of a Vengeful Mind
Anger Incarnate
Devastating.
Heartbreaking.
Absolutely vicious in the way our emotions are ripped out, turned over to dry, and flagellated until nothing but dust remains.
This is a fucking fantastic movie.
It also rifled through more emotions than I knew I had and set alight trenches of anger I never knew I possessed.
At times, Shin-ae Lee’s (Jeon Do-yeon) suffering feels pointless and gratuitous. There is no end to the trauma this woman must face, and there is no lead up. Not as clearly, not the first time you watch, but bad thing after bad thing happens to this lady and you can’t help but feel her anguish and anger through the grainy screen.
Then we gather more and more moments of her life as the movie progresses and then it hits you:
As discombobulated and foreign and random as all the events seem, that’s life. This is how we go about life in all its nuances, its inequities. How we cope with grief and hatred and mind-numbing desperation.
We are dragged along by director Lee Chang-dong and the incessant, never-ending creep of time edging along.
There’s the cinematic way of dealing with these emotions, with grand numbers and promises of change and an inspirational theme to fill your sails as you face an unforgiving world.
And then there’s reality, captured in Kodak film, wrestled from prayer and presented to you as a film.
This film is the latter.
Secret Sunshine feels like a home-movie that went sour. Moments of a family suffering in every way possible and the desperate ways they try to cling to what is “normal” in the aftermath.
There are triggers. There’s an emotional depth I cannot feel because I am not a wife and I am not a mother. But I am human.
And the absolute breadth of human emotion we are allowed to experience in this film is equal parts devastating and cathartic.