Enter the Void

His first feature in five years, “A Normal Family” marks both a return and notable departure for South Korean filmmaker Hur Jin-ho. Although lesser-known in the West than cohorts like Park Chan-wook (“Oldboy”) and Bong Joon-ho (“Parasite”), Hur has seen considerable success in Asia with both Korean and Chinese productions, most of them romance or period films shot with a firm but simple hand. His latest work features a similar visual simplicity, but its family drama takes slow, unexpected turns, making it worthy of comparison to the Netflix hit series “Adolescence.”

Hur’s domestic thriller follows two competitive brothers and their cutthroat wives, who convene for monthly dinners. Always mildly uncomfortable, these get-togethers become hair-raising when they discover a video of their teenage children assaulting a homeless man and leaving him in critical condition. Trying to keep this crime a secret sends the families into tailspins, as the film pivots around several ethical conundrums involving the parents’ duty toward their kids and society at large. The film’s most fascinating characters are largely left off screen: the couple’s two children, tech-native cuspers between Generation Z and Generation Alpha, whose outlooks appear to be shaped and contorted by social media — though this aspect of their experience is left a mystery. 

Like “Adolescence” — in which helpless English father Eddie is left shattered when his 13-year-old-son Jamie is accused of murder — “A Normal Family” maintains an intense focus on the parent characters, who remain largely oblivious to their children’s thoughts and motives. The key difference, however, is that the Netflix miniseries paints Jamie’s online existence (and venomous views on women) as unknowable to his father Eddie — and to the adult investigators — creating drama from grown-ups trying and often failing to cross this divide. In contrast, “A Normal Family” presents the inner lives of its teenage subjects — and the views on poverty and class that may have led to their crime — as a dark void from which neither light nor information can escape. The parents’ paralysis in the face of it may be familiar to any parent who ever felt ill-prepared and ill-equipped for today’s ever-mutating and toxic digital zeitgeist.

“A Normal Family” is based on Herman Koch’s 2009 bestseller “The Dinner,” which has also received big-screen adaptations in the Netherlands, Italy and the United States. Each of these films tracks closely to Koch’s overarching structure, unreliable narrators and the central crime coming to light through numerous flashbacks over dinner. But the strictly linear South Korean version expands the story in ambitious ways that attempt to further flesh out the novel’s themes of keeping up appearances at the cost of truly knowing one’s family. 

One of the kids is Hye-yoon (Hong Ye-ji), the popular and seemingly well-adjusted daughter of a prominent attorney, who often tutors her awkward, loner cousin, the middle-class boy Si-ho (Kim Jung-chul). The two are diametrically opposed archetypes who get along surprisingly well — certainly better than their parents. Hye-yoon’s father, Jae-wan (Sul Kyung-gu), is a rich defense lawyer married to his image-obsessed second wife Ji Su (Claudia Kim), Hye-yoon’s stepmother. Meanwhile, Si-ho’s father, Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-gun), is a modestly earning doctor married to an older woman, Yeon-kyung (Kim Hee-ae), whose insecurities cause her to lash out at Ji Su whenever they meet.

The brothers’ contrasting ideologies are established during a road-rage skirmish that leaves a man dead and his young daughter in critical condition. Jae-wan is hired to defend the spoiled 20-something responsible for the accident; Jae-gyu is tasked with saving the life of the infant girl. Having these characters on similar-but-opposing sides of this case opens up intriguing narrative possibilities — the materialistic lawyer versus his seemingly altruistic brother — but the film instead uses this scenario to introduce each character’s worldview before forcing it into conflict with itself, when the complications of navigating legality and morality come charging homeward.

In streamlining the novel’s structure, Hur ends up taking a considerable amount of time to illuminate its central drama around the assault video. “A Normal Family” features inciting incident after incident, and only feels like it arrives at something resembling a second act (of a traditional three-act structure) well past its midpoint. This leaves little room in its 116 minutes to explore the class animus between the brothers — a key premise in mainstream Korean media that feels left on the cutting room floor — let alone the escalating outcomes of the families’ drastic decision-making. 

The film is kept on track by its six lead performances. Hong and Kim are tasked with creating secret emotional worlds and hidden inner lives while facing screens we never really see. When we do spend time with the children, there’s a disconnect between what’s observed about them (by their parents) and how they actually behave, a discrepancy that forms the backbones of the parents’ ignorance and inability to look beyond themselves. It’s as though their children belong to a completely different movie, albeit one Hur refuses to access. As the adults agonize over weighty decisions, the tech-numbed cousins are lost in their own stories of unchecked rage and un-feeling sociopathy, which they never share with their parents, who seldom think to ask. The teens’ real selves only come to light when the parents catch fleeting glimpses of them via hidden security footage and nanny cams, capturing both action and dialogue that was never meant for outside eyes and ears.  

Although the film gestures toward online radicalization, and the internet’s role in violent, anti-social and even bigoted behavior, it keeps these forces at an arm’s length, remaining tethered to the parents’ distant point of view to a fault. Like “Adolescence,” the film is about adults forced to reckon with their own role in raising killers, painting a portrait of how modern parenthood is ill-equipped for a fast-changing digital landscape and its profound effects on the adolescent psyche. But the Netflix miniseries is arguably more successful because its tech-naïve parents are at least forced to confront how little they know and understand their potentially monstrous children. While “A Normal Family” features fleeting hints of this self-awareness and the anxiety it generates, Hur seems to be accepting of a troubling new status quo. Either that, or he is so baffled by it that, like the film’s parents, he balks at even trying to understand it.