Honest Review of the Movie Chinatown with Kim Hye-soo

A ruthless world, Chinatown, survival, Fate, Choice, Chinatown. Director Han Jun-hee. Starring Kim Hye-soo, Kim Go-eun, and Uhm Tae-goo. Released in 2014. Korean film critic plot summary: Il-young, a child abandoned in the subway, played by Kim Go-eun, locker 10. In Chinatown, only a mother and a useful person can survive.

She meets a woman named Kim Hye-soo. The mother takes in capable children, including Il-young, as family and rules Chinatown.

The mother, who does anything without hesitation if it is for money, is the only stone house among Il-young, and Il-young is the most useful to her. Ni-young, who borrows money from her mother, shows her a warm and kind world completely different from her mother’s, and for the first time Ni-young becomes curious about the world outside Chinatown.

Sensing the change in Yi-ing, the mother assigns her one last dangerous task.

In the end, overwhelmed by emotion, she failed to find a job and was sold to Japan.

The place where a child is left alone in the world is none other than Chinatown. Flowing into this ruthless world that classifies people as useful or useless, the child meets a woman called mother and family without shedding a single drop of blood. Chinatown is a place where strangers gather. The immigrant mother, the godmother of Chinatown, and Ni-ing, abandoned in a subway locker, are typical figures whose pasts and real names are unknown. They survived and ruled Chinatown so that they would never be thrown back into the world again.

Il-young obeys her mother’s order to do anything to make money and does not hesitate to use violence against debtors who do not repay.

To prove her usefulness in Chinatown, the people who live together under the name of family reveal their innate survival instinct and dangerous inner nature as the plot continues.

Kim Hye-soo captivated audiences with shocking visuals in every film she appeared in, such as The Thieves, and became the leading woman who rules Chinatown.

Although Lee-young, played by Kim Go-eun, did not want anyone, the moment she survived through her survival instinct, Lee-young became a man.

For the first time, the mother senses subtle changes in her heart, and the drama with Il-young begins to move in an unexpected direction.

Even with Kim Go-eun’s signature bob haircut, she is fully immersed in Japan and England, where she lives in a world more cruel than men. Just from that dramatic encounter, Chinatown was at the center of the biggest buzz in the first half of the year.

The movie Chinatown was not very entertaining, but after looking at netizens’ comments, it seems there are many posts saying it was fun. I think there are many people who feel the same way as I do, but even so, the audience count was not as high as expected, so the trailer does not seem interesting.​