Move to Heaven - a film review

l to r: neighbor, uncle, Geu-ru, father

I learned a long time ago that there are conflicts that do not actually need resolving. Sometimes it’s perfectly OK to just let two conflicting views sit there, side by side, each side saying what it has to say. Resolution doesn’t add anything, since there is no action that needs to be taken.

I decided the other day I’d take that approach to a Netflix Streaming film called Move to Heaven. Korean movies are not my favorite things. I find the acting style a turn-off. Too exaggerated, histrionic, over the top. And while I’ve known lots of Koreans who were delightful people, I’ve never related well to Korean culture as a whole. Can’t stand kimchi. Hate eating out of metal dishes with metal chopsticks.

For some reason, I tuned into Move to Heaven when I read it was about a crew of people who make a living cleaning up after people who die and leave their place in a mess and don’t have family to pick up the pieces. Japan has such a profession too, and for all I know so may dozens of other countries. I checked, just now, and found a website of one right here in the San Francisco Bay Area, in fact.

Move to Heaven opens with Jeong-u and his autistic son, Geu-ru, preparing to go out on a job with the family business, one of these clean-up operations. Geu-ru is handicapped by what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome, but these days is generally referred to as ASD - autism spectrum disorder. The father suddenly drops dead of a heart attack and a lawyer-friend manages to locate the father’s younger brother, Kim Su-cheol. Su-cheol is a thug and moves in thinking only of how to take advantage of the situation, full of resentment for his older brother, who, he believes, abandoned him when he was a child. Another major character, who keeps the action going, is Yoon Na-mu, who lives across the street and tries to get between Geu-ru and his shifty uncle and prevent him from being taken advantage of.

Now here are my two ways of looking at the movie:

Perspective 1:

Moving to Heaven is one of the worst examples of Korean films of the histrionic acting genre I’ve ever seen. It’s sentimental sometimes beyond human endurance, filled with unlikely plot twists, manipulative and unrealistic from almost any perspective. It swings from tragedy to comedy and back, never really finding its way. It takes on Korean social problems (homosexuality, bullying, corruption, gambling, sending orphans abroad to be adopted) without resolving any of them, drags mercilessly in spots, and portrays the kid with ASD as a wunderkind, and not as somebody with special needs and special gifts. Tear-jerking at the graduate level.

Perspective 2:

Moving to Heaven grabs hold of you from the very beginning, sucks you in and makes you care about the characters. The father, Jeong-u, deserves an academy award for warmest-faced actor of the year. It even has you rooting and cheering for the bad-guy uncle who gradually comes around because of his association with others in his life who live theirs without his cynicism and teach him the meaning of love and family. Most episodes begin, like the much earlier serial, Six Feet Under, with a tragedy around which the plot-line is based. Eventually the many separate lines are drawn together into a single whole, leaving you teary-eyed and wishing for more.

There.

That’s all I have to say.

Pick your narrative.

And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

photo credit (link also takes you to a trailer worth watching)