The Apartment With Two Women

Winner of multiple awards at the Busan International Film Festival, including Actress of the Year and the prestigious New Currents Award, The Apartment With Two Women is an electrifying portrait of familial rupture.

Brash and over-confident, middle-aged single parent Su-kyung doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body. Withdrawn and emotionally fragile, her twentysomething daughter Yi-jung craves the love and affection her mother has never given her. Living on top of one another in a tiny apartment is not healthy for either woman, but when Su-kyung hits Yi-jung with her car – accidentally, insists the former; deliberately, suspects the latter – the scene is set for a reckoning, of sorts.

Kim Se-in’s extraordinary debut is a truly visceral depiction of a mother–daughter bond that never quite stuck. As the flame-haired, self-involved Su-kyung, Yang Mal-bok (Contestant #453 in Squid Game) is mercilessly impressive, but it’s the disquieting intensity of newcomer Im Jee-ho as the put-upon progeny that wowed Busan’s judges. Tempering the film’s darker corners with even darker humour, Kim has crafted a furious study of abuse and dependency practically boiling over with its characters’ pent-up resentments. Also scooping up the New Currents Audience Award at Busan, The Apartment With Two Women demands attention.

“Sensational … An electric dysfunctional family drama.” – Screen Rant