‘En Route To’ review: A surprise teenage pregnancy fuels this accomplished South Korean debut

Dir/scr: Yoo Jae-in. South Korea. 2025. 106mins

When a South Korean high school student falls pregnant she and her best friend embark on a difficult journey in Yoo Jae-in’s accomplished debut feature. One half of the film is better than the other, but Yoo – who also writes the script and serves as her own editor – nevertheless brings a level of honesty and understanding to the story, marking her as a filmmaker to watch; particularly as one of South Korea’s few female directors.

Benefits from a lack of judgement of its characters

En Route To, which premieres in Busan Competition, is a Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA) graduation project; one of a handful that make it onto the Busan schedule each year and one of the stronger examples in recent memory. In it, Yoo extends the exploration of family, continuance and fulfilment she began in her 2023 short Ghwa the Last Name, demonstrating a notable leap in confidence. A festival run in Asia looks likely, but this thoughtful, deliberate drama about girls becoming women could be a tough sell in the current theatrical environment. Beyond Asia and a possible arthouse release in Korea, the film may attract the attention of a curated streamer.

While the film’s premise seems to encourage comparisons to Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the three films are quite distinct. En Route To is both more ambitious and scattered than either of these, beginning as a gentle exploration of female friendship and support in the wake of a pregnancy crisis, and ending as a love triangle melodrama. 

The film starts out as the story of teenage boarding school roommates Yun-ji (Sim Su-bin) and Kyung-sun (Lee Ji-won). Yun-ji is introverted and clearly pre-occupied with something she’s unwilling to talk about – aside from the whereabouts of her absent parents. Kyung-sun is the school’s resident rebel, the daughter of a single mother who sells vape refills on the down low. When Yun-ji finds herself pregnant by their teacher, who has suddenly gone missing, she goes online and purchases a course of dodgy abortion pills. To do so, however, she has to steal Kyung-sun’s hard won drug money, which she is saving to pay for an overseas work-study programme. When Kyung-sun discovers the theft she is furious, but after learning why Yun-ji needs the cash she decides to help her instead. 

At this point En Route To flirts with soap opera territory as the teacher’s wife Min-yeong (Jang Sun) storms the school looking for her husband and befriends Yun-ji, who decides to have the baby in the misguided belief that it will complete her family. She grows up fast in a facility for pregnant teens, where she is soundly disabused of her optimistic beliefs.

There is more to the sprawling narrative, as Yoo is keen to explore the connection forged between Yun-ji and Kyung-sun; one rooted in a range of emotions, fears and perceived shortcomings that feels contemporary and convincing. Yoo keeps her images still and unfussy, never demanding anything ostentatious from cinematographer Baek Jae-ryung, and deploys simple, streamlined language to help the story along. Lee’s performance is also a highlight, a perfectly balanced combination of wise beyond her years, irreverent, selfish and selfless.

The film stumbles a tiny bit in its de facto second half, in which Yun-ji settles into a home for wayward ladies while dealing with her status as ‘the other woman’ and the drama that entails. Sim often has difficulty making Yun-ji much more than morose and non-communicative but, either way, this part of the film is not as compelling as earlier scenes in which the two young women navigated new emotions and ideas of the world together.

Much like Mungiu and Hittman’s work, En Route To benefits from a lack of judgement of its characters. Yoo isn’t interested in their moral rights and wrongs, their behaviour or the situation – only in how their past experiences have shaped their ideas about the world, and how their current experiences are reshaping them; perhaps for the better.