In Between Seasons (2018)

After the young “Soo-hyun” (Yoon-ho Ji) emerges from a car accident in a coma, his distraught mother “Mi-Kyung” (Bae Jong-ok) has to juggle her failing marriage with her determination to keep her son on the road to recovery. The fellow passenger in the accident “Yong-joon” (Lee Won-geun) has emerged unscathed but she wants nothing to do with him. Over the course of the next couple of very slowly paced two hours, we learn a little of what she is learning about her beloved child. Her son had a secret, and she is struggling to reconcile with that. Is it shame? Was it deceit? In any case, she moves him to a remote hospital only for “Soo-Hyun” to follow like a lost lamb. He even gets a job there as an handyman, but is there any chance that the injured man will recover and/or that his mum will be prepared to reconsider her polite but clear hostility to the his friend - a man clearly going through a fair degree of trauma of his own. Now there is a lot of standing around, there isn’t a great deal of dialogue and very little actually happens for much of this film, but by using some retrospective scenes illustrating the boys friendship and featuring a pretty poignant performance from both actors here, auteur Dong-Eun Lee does create something quite emotionally charged. Essentially it is the two beginning to get to know who each really are, and that plays out sympathetically but not too sentimentally. There is one scene where the patient is given an haircut by his friend and I did wonder if it might not be better if both of them went to an a actual hairdresser, but that is all that might pass for humour here; it’s an observation of just how visceral parent/child love is, and at how difficult it can be to realise that it might just have a rival. It takes it’s time, but is worth a watch.

This is a very non-traditional gay movie. It starts with a very bad car accident involving two best friends. One is minorly injured, but the other nearly loses his life and is left in a coma. The story then flashes back to about four years ago and advances forward to the accident, showing how the two friends met and the role that the one's mother played in their lives. The mother of the boy in the coma comes to be with her son and devotes her life to caring for him and trying to get him to heal. Shortly after the accident she stumbles up a camera with pictures and videos that reveal that the son and best friend were way more than friends. This devastates her. She is shocked that she didn't know her son was gay and she severs ties with the best friend. However, the friend continues to come see his boyfriend and the series is really about the mother and best friend working their way back to a relationship and the mother finding peace with the situation. I won't give away the ending, but it is a very moving story and well worth watching. The only thing I think they could have done better were the flashbacks, sometimes they happened randomly and you don't realize at first it is a flashback, but that is just a little thing and doesn't really distract from the story too much.