Film Movement Plus
Film Movement PlusJina is the top employee at a credit card company call center. She avoids building close relationships, choosing instead to live and work alone – until she is suddenly tasked with training a new recruit.
For the bulk of Aloners—a breezy, 90-minute character study initially released in South Korea in 2021—Jina remains so frigidly misanthropic and anti-social that she’s hard to latch onto as our protagonist.Jina’s arc arrives at a place where her ultimate breakdown and emotional catharsis is genuinely affecting, but Aloners never escapes the mostly surface-level commentary that it coasts on for its majority.
One of them is filmmaker Hong Sung-eun’s feature directorial debut, “Aloners” (2021) (Sung-eun is also the film’s writer and editor).Hong Sung-eun reinforces how isolated she is by often having her walk looking at her iPhone on silent streets and never talking in the office to her co-workers. He also shoots her in hallways and framed by doors looking entrapped. Jina has built walls between herself and other people, and she sustains herself by living an affectless life.
