‘That Summer’s Lie’: Busan Review

Dir/scr: Sohn Hyun-lok. South Korea. 2023. 138mins

A ‘what I did in my summer holidays’ school assignment becomes the catalyst for an intense teen melodrama in this first feature by Korean writer-director Sohn Hyun-lok. Beginning as an apparently slight tale of classroom sweethearts chastely dating during the summer vacation, That Summer’s Lie builds into a dark, stifling drama, all the while suggesting that what we see may not be the whole truth – or even the partial truth.

 This impressively controlled debut constructs its story in slow, incremental stages, without stylistic frills

Marked by a series of raw yet focused performances, not least from the two leads Park Seo-yoon and Choi Min-jae, Sohn’s impressively controlled debut constructs its story in slow, incremental stages, without stylistic frills. But it is the very sobriety of the approach that makes the quiet games this edgy drama is playing with its audience so intriguing. Even the film’s two-hour-plus running time does not feel like too much of an indulgence. Its ‘Korean teen romance’ wrapper may challenge programmers, but this is very much an arthouse prospect for resilient cineastes who like to take a gamble on promising new directors, and one that should enjoy a festival run after premiering in the New Currents section at Busan – Sohn’s hometown, and the film’s chief location.

Set in a bland schoolteacher’s room, a series of drab apartments and  a bland urban periphery, That Summer’s Lie feels like a gritty slab of realism until it occurs to us that, apart from one random café waiter, there’s hardly anybody in this town apart from high school girlfriend Da-young (Parl Seo-yoon) and boyfriend Byung-hoon (Choi Min-jae), plus the handful of people that appear in Da-young’s account of what happened that summer. This is written in a holiday homework essay she hands in to a puzzled teacher, who tells her she’s the only student to have bothered with the assignment, which scores no assessment points. On reading the essay, however, the male teacher criticises Da-young for being overly frank, and tells her she cannot leave until she has written a self-accusatory second essay correcting the mistakes of the first.

We are aware that the teacher is abusing his authority, that he is humiliating the unhappy young girl, that he may even have ulterior motives for ordering her to stay on in a school that seems to have no other occupants on this summer’s day. These currents of unease will surface repeatedly as That Summer’s Lie takes up the story Da-young is writing down. It’s about her and her serious classmate, Byung-hoon, who have been dating for all of 28 days when he tells her he wants to end it because he is seeing someone else. Intense and introverted, Da-young talks little and looks mostly at the ground, but when she is roused to passion she is a force to be reckoned with – and it is her furious delayed response to the betrayal of her boyfriend of four weeks that will push the film into darker territory.

As we puzzle out the true contents of the essay Da-young is writing, as we tussle with the possibility that the teacher in the framing narrative and another that we meet in the flashback story may be two avatars of the same person – or the same adolescent girl’s fantasy – we begin to reassess what we are watching. Sohn’s sombre melodrama, with its long silences and dream-like structure, could be as much about the seismic emotional and hormonal maelstrom of first love, and the monsters it can generate, as it is about a summer romance that went seriously off the rails.