*This review contains spoilers for the film “The World of Love.” Director Yoon Ga-eun has expressed her wish for viewers to embark on the journey into Jooin’s world without any prior interpretation of the film. It’s highly recommended to come back to this article only after having seen the movie.

Life might ultimately be a process of trying to conceal parts of yourself. The film “The World of Love” follows high schooler Jooin (Seo Su-bin) and her family, who all come across as fun-loving and outgoing but are actually struggling to hide things. When Jooin stares blankly at an apple during career counseling and the teacher kindly offers it to her, she appears to have trouble breathing, then plays it off as a joke. But the truth is, she really does hate apples. Jooin’s kindly mother, Taesun (Chang Hyae-jin), runs an accommodating daycare center, but she also shows signs of being an alcoholic, sipping privately from her tumbler throughout the day. Jooin’s younger brother, Hae-in (Lee Jae-hee), goes around digging through things or hiding them whenever his mother and sister aren’t home, and sneaks junk food despite his eczema. It’s no coincidence that he’s always working on magic tricks meant to delight and mislead an audience. Jooin’s comfortable discussing her love life—emotional and physical—with her mother, and watching them clap encouragingly during sweet, lovable Hae-in’s magic shows might all feel like the image of a picture-perfect family, but there are traces of something unspoken hiding beneath—like when Taesun uses painkillers to mask her chronic stomach pains, or when the bits of paper Hae-in wanted to make magically disappear ultimately end up scattered at his feet.

The movie opens with Jooin brazenly sharing a kiss with her boyfriend Chanwoo (Kim Ye-chang) during a break at school. She playfully roughhouses with her male friends and laughs it up as she recounts a trip to the OB-GYN with her girlfriends. Whatever else might’ve happened in the past, Jooin’s life is brimming with excitement now—and she has every right for it to be. But just because you can act as though there are no lingering traces of the past doesn’t mean it’s completely true. When her classmate Suho (Kim Jeong-sik) organizes a petition against the release of a sex offender who assaulted a young girl eight years earlier, Jooin refuses to sign it, objecting to the part of the petition that says “sexual abuse leaves scars that can’t be erased as long as they live.” In the middle of the heated exchange, Jooin declares that she’s a “survivor of sexual violence” and loudly protests whether it seems like her life is over before twisting her own words into a joke—just like when she pretended to choke so she wouldn’t have to take the teacher’s apple. Her flippant attitude is a part of who she is, but it’s also a coping mechanism. In one scene at a temple, Jooin’s grandmother urges her to pray while saying, “It’s all my fault, my karma,” trudging up her granddaughter’s trauma. Jooin’s attitude is again evident when she brushes this off with a wry quip about going to perform some good deeds to accumulate some points and runs off. It’s only natural to want to speak the truth about what you’ve been through, but someone might also want to bury it and live as if nothing happened because that reality revolves around them.

The challenging part is that everyone has their own way of showing that reality. Suho is genuinely devoted to taking care of his younger sister, Nuri (Park Jiyoon). He helps her use the bathroom and stands up for her at the slightest problem, marching into Taesun’s daycare to complain over the smallest scratch. He was likewise headed there with her when he learned about the convicted pedophile moving into the neighborhood. Though Suho mostly sees Jooin as the annoying girl who likes to bump into him for fun, he makes every effort to persuade her when collecting signatures for his petition. By the end, he even brings her apple juice as a gesture to sway her over, unaware she can’t stand the fruit. The breaking point comes when Jooin counters by asking what he would do if his younger sister experienced a “horrific sexual assault.” While Jooin’s intention is to highlight how Suho’s repeated insistence on simply labeling sexual assault as “horrific” fails to respect survivors, Suho, all-consumed with protecting his sister, is focused solely on the potential for danger, blinding him to survivors’ perspectives. Suho can’t hold back any longer and retorts, “What about you? What if you were the victim of that horrific assault?” From there, the argument reaches its peak. For Jooin, it isn’t about a theoretical danger—it’s about the echoes of her lived reality. For the first time, she can’t laugh things off with her usual irreverence, and instead has a go at Suho in a moment of escalated emotions. Suho is equally passionate about his position, but what he fails to consider is that some people have already experienced that pain and that they’re still living with it—and that’s a profound difference.

“My life isn’t over yet, so please don’t say things like that,” Jooin says.
“Please.” She says it to Suho after he insists she sign the petition rather than resolve their conflict through the school violence countermeasure committee and after revealing that she was a victim of sexual assault as a child herself—just as “The World of Love” passes the one-hour mark of its one hour and 59 minute runtime. The film doesn’t treat its protagonist’s big reveal as the climax, instead spending the remainder focusing on how the heaviness of Jooin’s reality begins to weigh on those around her too. “Jooin, you’re just a bit too much for me,” Chanwoo tells her at one point afterward. “Sorry.” Though their relationship grows deeper and deeper, Chanwoo ultimately finds himself unable to deal with Jooin’s trauma and ends up breaking up with her. Even as they become progressively more intimate, Jooin’s instinct is to push him away when things get more serious physically, and it’s not easy to change that. And even though Jooin confesses that this reaction stems from her traumatic experience, to Chanwoo, it’s something he finds “too much” to deal with. Her friends admit they preferred when they didn’t know about Jooin being a survivor. They even inadvertently objectify her pain, saying they’d never want to have to go through what she has, even if it meant they could have the kind of full life she does. Her close friend Yoora (Kang Chae-yun)—someone who would show Jooin the R-rated comics she drew—stops joking around with her and can’t even make eye contact with her, clearly overwhelmed. “Hey, how is it that you’re okay with everything?” she asks to Jooin. “Are you really that okay?” These are her closest friends, and yet they’re the ones most flustered around her. Jooin’s day-to-day life goes on as usual, but she can never go back to the way people used to see her. Jooin hasn’t changed, but the world around her has. Meanwhile, the notes that confront Jooin as she jokes about, denies, and finally confesses she is a survivor—“Do you find it fun making people uncomfortable and confused? … Who is the real you, even? Is anything about you real?”—seem to represent society’s broader views around them. Ironically, it’s from people managing to live their lives one day at a time that the world most wants to hear the real truth from.

With all that in mind, how can the world of love be kept safe? As we see in the conflict between Suho and Jooin, good intentions alone aren’t some magical shortcut to really understanding someone. The approach the film takes to portraying Jooin’s world may offer some guidance, however. The support group scenes in “The World of Love” for sexual violence survivors that Jooin attends come across as completely ordinary and need no additional setup. Everything about the group feels completely natural as they do cleaning as a form of volunteer work and casually mention lawyers in conversation. Viewers get a sense of the boundaries that the group holds dear in the way Mido (Go Min-si), who normally interacts with Jooin on intimate terms, goes into a tailspin when Jooin brings her boyfriend to a meeting without consulting anyone first. All this is to say that the film doesn’t use sexual violence as a mere plot device but rather depicts it as a part of a survivor’s life. And the camera maintains its distance with every change of scene, sticking with extremely wide shots, whether showing the school basketball court, the parking lot for an apartment, or a riverbank covered in trash—as if refusing to pass judgment too quickly on anything. We don’t even get close-ups when Jooin’s having a ball dancing to karaoke the evening after she shouts at Suho about being a survivor before brushing it off as a joke, or in the scenes where students are standing around in the hallways. We see the same frame of mind from Taesun when she and Jooin are sitting in a car wash—the only place where her daughter can spill out all the resentment and anger she’s held onto for so long. Her mother listens quietly, responding by handing her a bottle of water and suggesting they pull through the car wash one more time. We don’t have the right to make snap judgments about someone’s world, nor can we claim to understand their pain and sorrow, but what we can do is stay by their side and be there for them.

One important aspect of the film is in how Jooin repeatedly leaves marks on Nuri and how Nuri insists nothing hurts her. The marks lead Suho to mistakenly believe that they might be abusing his little sister at Taesun’s daycare. When Suho won’t back down, Taesun reluctantly reviews the security footage. Even without audio, the tension between Jooin and Nuri on the screen is palpable. As Taesun watches the footage, bearing her own stomach issues, Nuri, who’s in the room with her, repeats what Taesun can guess Jooin said to Nuri when pinching her skin: “That doesn’t hurt? You have to say if it does. They say lying only makes it hurt more.” At that, Taesun pulls Nuri close and finally admits that she’s in pain. She decides from then on to stop ignoring her pain and thus begins the process of healing, and the fact that she finally gets gallbladder surgery after that is highly symbolic. Over time, Jooin and her family decide to confront the lingering issues that have haunted them rather than turn away from them. Jooin, who used to mask her pain with humor and playful deflection, finally resolves to speak out and demands Nuri likewise acknowledge her own pain. Taesun, who once numbed herself with alcohol, pours what she’d been drinking down the sink and urges Jooin’s father, Gidong (Kim Sukhoon), to return home instead of avoiding things just because he feels guilty about being the sex offender’s brother. Hae-in writes a letter to the offending uncle, telling him to stop sending letters to Jooin. Jooin said her “life isn’t over yet,” and indeed, no artifact of the past has the right to define an entire life, but ignoring pain instead of allowing yourself to heal can prevent you from seeing your own value as a person. Maybe it’s at a line between being consumed by the past and disregarding it entirely, a space where we avoid doing either, where we can all become the authors and protagonists of our own stories. Ultimately, “The World of Love” asks us how we can face remnants of days gone by while preserving our own dignity.

At one point in the film, while talking with Mido, Jooin says that, if there’s one thing that “no one but me finds hard” and “never works out” for her, it’s “love”—but she also writes that it’s her dream. After hearing her mother lament that her daughter’s relationships never last beyond a month, and despite breaking up with Chanwoo even though he genuinely cared about her, Jooin comes to define herself as someone who’s “gifted when it comes to dynamic relationships.” Once hesitant to open herself up to others because of the weight of her past, she now embraces this part of herself, allowing her to dream of true love. The notes she receives—from an anonymous classmate simply seeking the truth and who previously called her actions into question—now offer words of apology and reconciliation: “I won’t keep quiet anymore.” As seen in how Mido’s grilled over everything from the friendly texts she sends to appease her biological father who sexually assaulted her to asking him for pocket money to cover daily expenses, the world won’t stop relentlessly demanding explanations anytime soon. And just as with the distress Jooin’s friends go through, even well-meaning people can make mistakes or end up causing more pain when what’s happening is happening to somebody else. What’s important is that we stick with people when they speak up about their past so that their world can slowly grow—just like Taesun’s quietly there for Jooin when she unloads about her burden within the confines of that little car, finding the real her in the process. Maybe then, everyone who speaks out can be the protagonists of their own stories completely—you, me, each and every one of us, living by our own rules, carrying traces of the past along with us.