Agree with so much of this, and its good contexting materials, that I just have a couple of suggestions about the figure of Mija. I too wondered why the ‘early Alzheimer’s’ strand seemed ‘dropped’ in such a well crafted film and screenplay. Perhaps it added to the (presumed) ending, whose power depends partly on the audience’s assumption that the character performing it has real agency, is gathering together the themes and images of the film, is not yet terminally impaired but perhaps partly afraid of an impaired future. Mija’s search for words, for ‘really seeing’ things, as the teacher puts it, overlaps cruelly with her fear that words may soon desert her, and makes the ending powerfully complex.

But the inability to ‘speak’ more adequately of her world is not simply due to illness. The men’s banal but brutal discussion of how to silence the truth about the rape and murder of the girl whose body opens the film–this is something she cannot verbally engage with –it’s unspeakable in a political sense. It is part of an overwhelmingly everyday patriarchal order, quietly constructed in most scenes. Wonderfully Mija just clambers out of the room, silently, almost over the bodies of the men doing the plotting.

It’s possible to read Mija’s obsession with writing a poem as connected to a vaguely feminist understanding of her positioning. She has been pretty or even beautiful (and how well the film’s casting doubles this resonance). But she seems not to have been given other ways, or, importantly, a language with which to understand how she might have been a woman outside or alongside the realm of appearance and appropriate femininity (her grace, modesty, ‘sweet’ clothes etc) on which others comment through the film.

It’s typical of the film that this is expressed obliquely. For example when she tells the childhood memory which moves her to tears in the poetry class, it culminates in the sense that ‘I must have been ‘pretty” (rather than strong, or valued, or another word which might have summed up that moment, and made better sense of it).

There are surprises within such an approach. As the review above says, the boorish and bawdy policeman who, strangely, belongs to the poetry group, has been banished from Central Seoul because he exposed corruption. ‘He’s really one of the good guys’, yes, politically, but he also seems interested in her naive questions about poetry, he joins her strange game of badminton in the street as the grandson is taken away. The fathers of Wook’s schoolfriends, apparently much friendlier, seem representative of a smooth but more brutal new culture.

And, taking further these gendered affiliations: if the ending can be seen as a magnificent moment culminating in an act of imaginative sympathy from one woman to another, the film leaves ambiguous the final look of the girl’s mother to Mija, after she has guiltily left the money–imploring? desperate? accusatory? guiltily complicit with the silence around her daughter’s fate?