TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2023 REVIEW! There’s something unsettling about Hur Jin-ho’s A Normal Family. It gets under the skin like a blade and, with every scene, begins to peel. The film could be described as a commentary on class struggle, but that would put it in the flattest terms. The renowned Korean filmmaker’s latest work cuts so deeply not because it is about some extraordinary caste but because it is an unyielding portrait of ordinary people.
A Normal Family revolves around the emotionally restrained relationship between two brothers and their families—Jae-wan (Sol Kyung-gu), a successful and magnanimous surgeon, and his older wife Yeon-kyung (Kim Hee-ae), and Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-Gun), a high-powered and pragmatic lawyer, and his younger wife Ji-su (Claudia Kim). Both brothers have contrary world views, frequently engaging in high-flown discussions of right and wrong over dinners at expensive restaurants. But their conceptual moralities are suddenly thrust into reality when an unexpected revelation about their children is placed between them.
Much like a theatrical play, Hur Jin-ho uses intimate spaces to slice away the cinematic fat and get directly to the marrow of the brothers’ relationship. He portrays them and their families in precise and spotless frames, using the camera to impart the subtleties of body language and facial expression. There is a grandeur to the composition of each scene that conveys the characters as beyond the trappings of the every day, but, simultaneously, that there is a tangible normalcy to their interactions that obliterates the sense of them being anything but average.
“The brothers swivel around each other, constantly trading roles, blurring the lines of right and wrong marvelously.”
Likewise, all four lead actors are exquisitely lucid in their portrayals of specific archetypes. The respective wives, Yeon-kyung and Ji-su, strike an artful balance of embellishment, affecting every scene with understated femininity. Even more, then, are the brothers’ portrayals scintillating: Jae-wan is a wondrously charismatic man who splinters with impeccable timing, while his counterpart Jae-gyu is ominously subdued, growing ever more resolute as the screws are tightened. The brothers swivel around each other, constantly trading roles, blurring the lines of right and wrong marvelously.
However, the film’s entire narrative construction is so densely packaged and so causal in its conception that much weight is placed on the film’s resolution. Unfortunately, the delicate balance of minimization and exaggeration is fractured with a conclusion so precipitous that it impairs much of the film’s momentum up to that point. Compared with the rest of the film—which is remarkably aware—the finale of A Normal Family comes across as a blind shock twist. It is the one blemish on an otherwise remarkably nuanced script.
Still, while the film’s culmination holds A Normal Family back from outright genius, it does not undo how exceptional every other aspect of the film is. The actors are directed with an auteur’s panache, and the cinematograph is finely tuned to showcase how the littlest of foibles, once habits, can have enormously destructive effects. A Normal Family is a statement—one that will carve its place in modern Korean cinema just as surely as its conclusions penetrate so profoundly and so indelibly.
A Normal Family screened at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.
