’The World Of Love’ review: Complex, thoughtful South Korean drama deals with aftermath of sexual assault

Dir/scr: Yoon Ga-eun. South Korea. 2025. 119mins

Seventeen-year-old Jooin (a knockout turn from newcomer Seo Su-bin) is spirited, popular, confident and cheerful. She approaches life with high energy and maximum volume; she adores drama. A typical teen, in other words. She’s also a survivor of childhood sexual assault. She’s determined that her experience as a victim of abuse won’t define her, but when she impulsively reveals the truth to her fellow high school students, it sets ripples through her social group and beyond. Director Yoon Ga-eun’s deceptively light touch belies the substance and complexity of this thoughtful and nuanced drama.

All the more rewarding for its gradual reveal

The World Of Love screens in London’s main competition, following a world premiere in the Platform strand at Toronto. After TIFF, it showed at Pingyao, where the film picked up both the People’s Choice award for Best Film and the Jury Prize. Further festival interest seems likely, and the appealing combination of Yoon’s deft handling of tonal shifts and the terrific performances across the board could make this a title of interest for adventurous arthouse distributors.

It’s the third feature film from Yoon, following her multi-award-winning debutThe World Of Us, which premiered in Berlin in 2016, andThe House Of Us, which screened at the London Film Festival and others in 2019. Previously, she earned acclaim for her short film Sprout, which won the Crystal Bear for best short film in Berlin’s Generation Kplus strand. Childhood dynamics are a recurring theme in the director’s work but, withThe World Of Love, she moves into the messy territory of adolescence, a milieu which is captured evocatively by a perceptive observational lens.

Jooin jokes that she “sucks at love”. But that doesn’t stop her from trying. The film opens with a shot of Jooin and her boyfriend of the moment clumsily snogging. Neither seems entirely sure what to do with their hands, and the passion evaporates into angular awkwardness. Within a few briskly edited scenes, Jooin is reporting to her amused mother (Parasite star Jang Hyae-jin) that she has broken up with the lad the latest in a long line of boyfriends who don’t last more than a couple of weeks.

Jooin’s family – she lives in a cluttered apartment with her single mother and younger brother – is a loving but chaotic household. Jooin’s mother drinks too much. and it’s not unusual for her daughter to find traces of her mother’s vomit when she cleans the flat. Her father moved out three years before, removing himself from parental responsibilities and avoiding Jooin’s attempts at contact. But still, there’s warmth in what’s left of the family, encapsulated in a lovely scene in which Jooin’s younger brother inflicts a haphazard late night magic performance on his mum and sister.Their methods of caring for each other might be unconventional – Jooin’s brother has been stealing his sister’s post, for reasons that don’t become clear until late in the film – but they are heartfelt.

The first hint of Jooin’s buried trauma comes when she refuses to sign a petition objecting to the return of a convicted child sex abuser to the neighbourhood. It’s not the substance of the document she objects to, but rather the wording, which talks of lives irreparably ruined by abuse. In a heated argument, she announces that she is a rape survivor,then retracts her claim, dismissing it as a joke. It’s around this point that she starts to receive chiding anonymous notes, missives that cast a shadow on Jooin’s usually upbeat nature.

Yoon tells the tory through fractured glimpses, reflecting the skittishness of the teen attention span. But she leaves the camera running when it counts: a wrenching pivotal scene unfolding in a carwash benefits from an unbroken focus and from the anguished intensity of Seo’s acting. Not everything works: the use of a twinkly piano rendition of Bach’s rather twee and placid ’Sheep May Safely Graze’ as a recurring motif feels like a tonal mismatch, given the dynamic energy of the film and of Seo’s performance in particular. But mostly,the picture works well: a story that takes its time to piece together and is all the more rewarding for its gradual reveal