A 2024 survey, kept in its year

Recent articles, the notes write, say that running away and withdrawal among youth in crisis have fallen, while emotional strain has grown heavier. Depression and a sense of social isolation remain common, and those numbers are still rising. They set this beside the film Park Hwa-young. The writer went in with high hopes after hearing it had drawn notice at the Busan International Film Festival, and felt, from the first, an unease quite unlike that hope.

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family’s 2024 survey of users of support centres for youth in crisis is cited as the notes record it, not as a later official total: 27.7% had run away, down from three years earlier; 25.8% had withdrawn, nearly half what it had been. About a third of youth in crisis had felt depression in the past year, and self-harm or a suicide attempt was reported often enough. Family conflict was named as the cause by 69.5%, and more than 40% had met physical or verbal violence from a guardian — four in ten, they add, a sign that the home is no longer a safe place. The articles, they write, say the government planned to more than double dedicated counselling staff for high-risk youth and to place mental-health specialists in counselling centres nationwide. What is needed as much as that, the notes say, is a change in how society looks at these young people.

A rented room, and the word “mum”

Park Hwa-young, in their telling, has been abandoned by her family and is given no respect among her peers. She tries to protect herself inside a false family, and meets more violence and turning-away there. She lives without parents, alone in a rented room that other runaway youths pass through. She cooks ramyeon, does the washing, and plays mother again and again; the notes find the sight pitiful. She wanted belonging in her loneliness, and that feeling, they think, fastened her to the word “mum,” because her real mother had given her no love and no protection, only humiliation and hurt.

At the centre of those around her is Eun Mi-jeong. Hwa-young looks after her and tries, in every situation, to protect her. Mi-jeong knows this and spends that care lightly. She is slighted among trainee entertainers for being from Gangbuk, and her pride is repeatedly folded. Inside that, she tries in distorted ways to earn money and to be recognised. Hwa-young works to keep her from a wrong path; the effort is ignored or broken. Young-jae, Mi-jeong’s boyfriend, stands at the centre of the violence; what he does to Hwa-young, the notes say, makes the watcher flinch throughout.

An ending that does not undo the use

The ending, they write, was a tragedy. Mi-jeong tries a paid meeting to win Young-jae’s attention back. Hwa-young goes with her to a motel and is raped in her place. The scene felt to the writer not like a single incident but like the burst of exploitation, scorn, and turning-away that had already piled up. Young-jae, unable to contain his violence, kills a man, and he and Mi-jeong shift the crime wholly onto Hwa-young. The film, they say, draws this calmly; the watcher is left with anger and helplessness together.

Hwa-young turns herself in and comes back from prison. After release she meets Mi-jeong again, who acts as if nothing happened. Hwa-young still smiles at her and fits herself once more to the role of “mum.” That structure of use, the notes say, never changed. She swears, smokes, and snaps, and under it all is a thick loneliness, a wish to be connected and needed. A line they quote keeps returning — “What would you have done without me?” — which they hear not as pride but as a defence, a wish to feel necessary to someone. The film was too real, and too unpleasant, for the writer to speak easily afterward; and that unpleasantness, they felt, should not be avoided. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of the film Park Hwa-young, with the 2024 survey kept in that year’s window.

Last updated: 15 November 2026