[Herald Review] ‘Our Season’: a relatable story for all moms and daughters

The plot of director Yuk Sang-hyo’s “Our Season” is quite simple.

Bok-ja (Kim Hae-sook) visits her daughter Jin-joo (Shin Min-a) as part of her “vacation from heaven” after suddenly passing away. Despite Bok-ja’s excitement over the prospect of seeing her daughter again, she is startled to find out that Jin-joo has quit her job as a professor at UCLA and settled down in the countryside to open a restaurant.

Together with Jin-joo's best friend, Mi-jin (Hwang Bo-ra), Jin-joo tries to revive her mother's recipes as she looks for ways to fill the emptiness she feels after her mother died alone while she was in the US.

Although Bok-ja is next to her, Jin-joo cannot talk with, touch or see her mother.

Accompanying Jin-joo wherever she goes for a full three days, Bok-ja finds out that Jin-joo has been suffering from depression for a long time, mainly due to her childhood memories of when Bok-ja had left Jin-joo under the care of her uncle in order to work to make ends meet.

Jin-joo feels betrayed by her mother, thinking that her mother was only obsessed with making money because she thought it was the only way to make her daughter happy.

The complexities of their relationship and the misunderstandings between them, with neither truly understanding each other, is an aspect that many in the audience might be able to relate to.

In addition to the detailed depiction of the complicated relationship of love and hate between a mother and her daughter, food, such as noodles, dumplings and kimchi jjigae, becomes a central theme, reminding Jin-joo of her mother and helping her to form a connection to her memory.