It is more difficult than most of us know to pull up roots and move to another country. The costs involved aren’t simply monetary. You give up community, culture, and your entire network of friends and family, but you do it in the spirit of finding a better life for yourself and your children. Mongrels, Jerome Yoo’s debut feature, tells the story of one such family that came to rural Canada in the 1990s.
Sonny (Jae-Hyun Kim) and his children, Hajoon (Da-Nu Nam) and Hana (Sein Jin), are each struggling not only with their new place in the world, but with grief. The recent death of the children’s mother hangs over them like a fog that keeps them from truly seeing one another.
The story plays out in three chapters: the first with Sonny struggling to fit into the community while also making a living exterminating stray dogs. The second sees Hajoon dealing with all the strife of high school, and the third observes Hanna processing her grief mostly alone.
It’s a novel structure and one that affords us time to focus on each character and his or her separate but closely related inner turmoil. Each family member processes grief in their own way, from Sonny speaking to his wife on the phone late in the evenings to Hana’s dreamlike adventures in the countryside and forest. Grief is a curious thing as it affects people in so many different ways. The characters’ journey with it–both individually and together–is sincere and believable.
The film is beautifully shot and acted. It may be a cheat to shoot a film in such lush forests one gets a stunning shot no matter the direction in which one points the camera, but Yoo has a strong visual instinct. Many of Mongrels‘ night scenes make excellent use of ambient light and shadow. All three of the film’s main actors are good, but Kim has the most work to do. He portrays a character pulled in several emotional directions sympathetically and convincingly. In one early scene in particular where he is confronted with a mistake, he shows great depth and an ability to pivot on a dime. Later scenes, where the family is reconnecting, give him space to show his character’s growth by going big, while making levels with smaller, subtler motions. It’s truly a great performance.
The structure is where the film struggles, though, leading to tonal inconsistencies. Hana’s dreamy, imaginative adventure doesn’t quite fit with the darker, more sombre chapters that focus on Sonny and Hajoon. The pacing is also languid which may turn off some viewers, and the resolution is a bit neat and perhaps a bit trite, but the emotional payoff of the last scene still works for all three stories well enough for Mongrels to be both an exciting first feature and one worth seeking out.
