Soulmate (2023)

Based on a Chinese film from 2016 with the same name, Soulmate is a South Korean film directed by Min Young-keun. A film about friendship, love, and life. Or rather, how friendship eternalizes itself in the progression of life and what love truly means. The protagonists Mi-so and Ha-eun, characters who live in parallel to each other, which is so greatly expressed through the foil side of the relationship but, sadly falls flat when establishing the excitement of the relationship. They are two characters that just feel too independent from one another and so this limits the vulnerability in key moments of the friendship, due to filmmaking issues of rushed pacing and bored shot selection, just not visually provocative enough to make it truly work. Soulmate felt too difficult to understand emotionally with the bond between Mi-so and Hae-mi so as the cracks start to form in the end of the first act, it’s hard to care but, the great thing about Soulmate is that it shows you the meaning behind the friendship through the fall of it. Though at first, the feeling does feel a bit empty because the style of the film is like Japanese pop art films, it is a film which swings back and forth hard enough to finally reveal its tenderness. A film which barely grasps you but once it does, you grow a real fond for it. Love is displayed through a timeline of memories remembered by Mi-so, the off-tempo brisk of the pacing between the memories feels rather important as if the tragedy of life is felt through the limited time, we have with the ones we love.

Soulmate also works as a wonderful tribute to art. The development of emotion through fragmented memories, broken hearts and happy times expressed only through the explosive image of art. Hae-mi makes her comments about the importance of art in an early point of the film, stating she can only understand her feelings on life through her construction of art. This is a film which feels very stale in the depiction of life on the surface as well but as the film goes on, you begin to understand the true beauty of life through art.