Small in scale, unusual in approach, The Woman (2025) is an intriguing one. It begins with some apparently random events, moving from a chance meeting to a sequence of increasingly alarming follow-ups – and as it goes, it gets increasingly psychologically dark. Its oblique approach may not be for everyone, but it’s in that oblique approach that the film is able to pose its biggest, toughest questions about modern life and modern identities.
Chaptered broadly into two parts, starting with ‘The Man’, we begin at a job interview where we meet the film’s lead character, Sun Kyung (Han Hye-Ji). She’s being challenged on her tendency to move jobs a lot: we don’t really want to go to the trouble of training you, her interviewer says, if you’re just going to leave. It’s one of those strange points in your life when someone sitting in a ramshackle office with a seriously unprofessional workmate is nonetheless in a position of power, so Sun Kyung is polite and positive, assuring him that she has no intentions of moving again. She gets the job, so with her new role and her new apartment, it seems she’s up for a fresh start. It feels like she’s only just moved in: she needs all the basics, and she’s pleased to find a vacuum cleaner being given away for free nearby via a marketplace app. She arranges to collect it from the owner’s address, and in a touching, if strange gesture, takes a punnet of strawberries with her to hand over as a small token of thanks.
She gets her vacuum cleaner, but it’s fair to say that the man handing it over is a little odd. He’s friendly, but very nervous and seems paranoid: this makes him behave both overbearingly and tetchily by turns. When she attempts to hand over the strawberries, he refuses on the grounds that his mother was poisoned by a contaminated vitamin drink recently; she died as a result and he feels he can’t take the risk. This isn’t a conversation which you’re likely to be prepared for. Luckily for her, an old college friend just happens to pass by as this situation is unfolding, and her friend – a man called Ui-Jin – intervenes on her behalf, getting into a brief scuffle with the man. Trying perhaps to fix the situation, or in a frenzy of good manners, the man decides he does want the strawberries after all, then he eats a number of them in front of her. She, clearly, can’t wait to get home; the bloody vacuum cleaner doesn’t work either, but it feels like the least of her worries. She texts Ui-Jin her thanks for his help, and settles in for the night.
Things take a turn the following day when Sun Kyung is contacted by the police. It seems that Ui-Jin committed suicide later than evening – by consuming a spiked vitamin drink, exactly as the man said had happened to his mother. They want to talk to her because the altercation was captured on CCTV: she’s happy to do so, but her suspicions are growing, and then when the same man turns up at her apartment block that evening (and sees the now abandoned vacuum cleaner outside in the trash), she begins to get scared. This previously normal, everyday event seems to be escalating into something quite threatening. Clearly Sun Kyung has been socialised into being calm and polite, so she engages with the man, Young-hwan, via her phone – but by the next day, her alarm prompts her to go and do something. She goes back to the police, this time armed with her belief that Young-hwan may have had something to do with Ui-Jin’s death, which perhaps wasn’t a suicide after all.
The police are surprisingly uninterested in her story, though. Partly this is because of the autopsy report, which doesn’t suggest there was any foul play. However there’s something more, and it’s at this point in the film that expectations and certainties begin to splinter; the detective in charge of Ui-Jin’s case runs through a gamut of emotions during his meeting with Sun Kyung, ranging from barely-restrained mirth to annoyance. As she leaves, he speaks to one of his colleagues about her – and it’s this moment of uncertainty which takes us into the film’s second and last chapter, ‘The Woman’.
By the time the second segment of the film starts, it’s Sun Kyung’s own wry smiles which look out of place. Invited to Ui-Jin’s funeral-not-funeral by some of their other peers, she’s not made welcome by all of the party. Drink flows, tempers rise, and talk turns to whether or not their friend really did intend to take his own life. Discussions of private loans and crippling debts are a frequent occurrence in Korean TV and cinema and it happens here, too. But it feels, at this point, that Sun Kyung’s drive to prove that Ui-Jin did not take his own life is less important to her than other people’s ideas, or more specifically their emotions, their reactions. She is very motivated by what they tell her is being said online; she looks for herself; she even goes to Ui-Jin’s apartment. So is she trying to crack this case, or something else? Behaviour previously presented to us as bizarre when coming from Young-hwan, now shifts towards Sun Kyung – she’s not wild-eyed, she’s not histrionic, but her responses, her priorities; they seem off.
The Woman is full of narrative gaps; there’s more gap than narrative in some key respects, and the film feels like a deeply uncertain, often disorientating experience. In this respect, you cling all the more to what you can glean. Without a script which expounds everything or a crystal-clear timeline which explains everything, you come to rely on a facial expression here or there, or the reaction of a minor character who seems to know Sun Kyung, somehow, from some past we are never privy to. This certainly shifts your sympathies, and the film becomes maddeningly cruel in places as those sympathies move, but again, nothing moves so far or so clearly that you can feel you have a full understanding of characters or their motives.
The wider world of the film touches on crime – sometimes horrific, brutal crime – but at a remove. We see it, again, through the facial expressions of those who see it for us, or we see it refracted through the lowest of the low gossip and true crime message-boards online, full of confirmation bias and flippant interest. As a small tragedy consumes the lives of people in this small corner of Korea, the bigger picture seems to be how people seek meaning in all of this. There are only minor hints of people’s fears or regrets; as far as Sun Kyung goes, she hangs onto nearly all of her own secrets and busies herself on the periphery of other people’s lives. This is a film about peripheral people; some of them find a way through, and some do not. She seems able to cope with her occasional flashes of past regrets, if that’s indeed what we’re seeing.
The end result here is an unusual film, to say the least, but it’s strangely compelling. Han Hye-Ji plays the ambiguous Sun Kyung very well, never giving more than the role requires. She invites you to wonder at all the house moves, the new jobs, the guarded welcome from her old friends – but never clears up all of the doubts and loose ends. It’s a tense, fraught experience, which uses a neat structural reveal at the end to show us how little we’ve really learned about anything going on here – whilst at the same time developing a new, cynical sense of the bigger picture. This is clever directing by Hwang Wook.
The Woman (2025) featured at the Fantasia International Film Festival on 26th July.