Aloners (2021)

A 25% mixture of drama, 25% of psychological thriller and 50% of sobrenatural story. Korea already established itself as a country that know how to make good movies with good stories. While this one have characteristics not too well know in the west - aka people that lives a so lonely live because of work, distancing themselves from even their parents - it shows a reality into a strange form to most of us of the western countries. The directress is Hong Sung-eun which had before some small success movies inside South Korea.

The basic premise is a hard working CC call-center girls that lives a lonely life, not knowing even her neighbors. She have a distant life from their parents whom she talks by the way of a phone and a remote camera circuit, watching the daily life of her dad and her sick mother.

Everything changes when along while receiving the duty of train a new recruit for her workplace (that means that she must have close connections to teach the work), she learns that the neighbor she saw smoking outside his apartment have died before she saw him, by suicide. Enter the supernatural element on the movie. To worse things even more her mother dies too.

From here the movie lost some of the impact and discussion - we can resume that after all this she learns that she can have a live, she must have a live to not become a drone, but not much changes other than the closing relation with her father and depart of the new girl. She gets a new neighbor, that shares the same smoking patterns and talks of her deceased neighbor, and even she starts to take them.

I don't know if it is the culture gap that made me lose the interest on the scrip (I am sure of it), but I found it a bit previsible and it could be worked a bit more. It is a movie than is well done but more oriented to oriental culture or workaholics. A 7,0 out of 10,0 / B score.

Aloners delivers a subtle yet emotional portrayal of loneliness through Gong Seung Yeon’s impressive debut performance, capturing isolation and grief with nuanced expression. While the film's premise is compelling, its execution falls short of expectations, with underdeveloped character backgrounds and an unclear ending that weakens its emotional impact. Despite its flaws, the film still offers a reflective experience, though it could benefit from deeper narrative exploration.

Read the full review here: (Indonesian version : alunauwie.com)