Minari

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Running time: 1hr55 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Steven Yeun, Noel Cho, Alan S. Kim and Yeri Han star in Minari

Some films you remember for a single performance or dramatic twist. Others, it’s an enduring piece of music or a particularly striking set-piece. 

With Lee Isaac Chung’s robust yet graceful family drama Minari (2020), the apparently trivial thing that anchored me in the world of this film was the sound of baby chickens cheeping. I absolutely don’t mean to imply that the film isn’t brilliantly performed and written and shot with great skill, elegantly tracing a deceptively simple narrative around one family’s attempt to set up home in a new part of America, because it is all of those things. And in a literal sense, baby chicks cheeping is only the sound of the workplace of a father and mother engaged in the unglamorous farmyard labour of sorting hundreds of baby chicks into disposable males and useful females. 

But it’s stayed with me, this sound, because it’s figuratively the sound of compromise, and like most compromises, it doesn’t register as brutal in a single moment, but through accumulation. It’s the sonic equivalent of death by a thousand tiny paper-cuts. This sound, which recurs throughout the film like a quietly despairing leitmotif, is a masterful piece of sound design, teasing out themes of vulnerability and ill-founded optimism, giving this sensitive, nuanced film a kind of fragile organic pulse, underscoring the precarious nature of so much apparent security. 

MINARI (2020) Written by Lee Isaac Chung | Shot by Lachlan Milne | Edited by Harry Yoon

In UK cinemas soon, available to watch now on digital cinema platforms listed here on the distributor’s website, including Prime, Curzon and BFI Player