Minari

Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) has moved his wife and two children from California to a stretch of Arkansas in the 1980s, where a mobile home on wheels waits at the end of a dirt track. He wants to grow Korean vegetables and sell them to the Korean grocers in Dallas. Monica (Han Ye-ri) wanted a house with a foundation. Lee Isaac Chung, who wrote and directed, grew up in something like this, and the film has the feel of memory: the small things remembered exactly, the big things seen from a child’s height.

The child is David (Alan Kim), who has a heart murmur and orders not to run, and most of Minari is his. His parents spend their days at a hatchery sorting chicks, and Jacob explains to him that the males are no use and are thrown away, so a man must make himself useful. That is the whole of Jacob in one line, and Yeun plays it straight: proud, stubborn, and mostly wrong about water. Han Ye-ri gives Monica a tired watchfulness; she is the one counting the money. Their rows happen in the kitchen while David and Anne (Noel Kate Cho) fold paper aeroplanes with “Don’t fight” written on the wings and launch them down the hall.

Then the grandmother arrives. Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung) comes from Korea with chilli powder and dried anchovies in her luggage, swears at the wrestling on television, plays cards for money with the children and does not bake anything. David, who has been told on good authority what grandmothers are, is appalled. Youn plays her with no bid for our affection at all, which is why we gave it. The film is funniest when the two of them are stuck in a room together, and it is best when she takes him down to the creek and plants minari seeds along the bank, telling him it grows anywhere and that rich and poor eat it alike. It moved us more than we expected, and what did it was how little Chung does: no swell of music, no cut to a meaningful face, just an old woman crouched in the mud and a boy pretending not to be interested.

Lachlan Milne shoots the land in late afternoon light, the grass chest-high on the children, and keeps the camera low so the field and the sky both look too big for the people standing in them. Lee Yong-ok’s production design gives the trailer a set of wooden steps that sit loose on the grass, and Monica’s face on first seeing them saves the script a page. Emile Mosseri’s score is piano and a wordless voice that drifts in over the fields and stays out of the trailer, which is the right way round. Harry Yoon cuts slowly and holds on Jacob standing over a dry ditch long enough for us to work out exactly how much he has bet on it.

Will Patton’s Paul is the one figure who could have gone wrong. He prays over the crops, points out demons in the corners and hauls a cross along the road on Sundays, and Patton keeps him a real man rather than a local colour. The church the Yis attend is handled the same way: the congregation stare, a boy asks David why his face is flat, and nobody is a villain. Susanna Song dresses the family a shade too formally for a room full of shirtsleeves, and that is the scene.

Our reservation is the last half hour. After ninety minutes of letting things happen at the speed of weather, Chung stacks trouble in the field and trouble in the trailer on the same evening, and we will not say what. It is written to arrive on time, and you can feel the furniture being moved. Monica, who has been the sharpest pair of eyes in the film, is handed a speech to explain a decision we had already understood from her face. Most critics wave this through on the way to calling the film a classic. We think the first ninety minutes are as good as they say and the last twenty-five are merely good.

It is a 12 certificate and runs 115 minutes. See it with your parents if you still have them, or with children who will grumble about the subtitles and then go quiet the moment the grandmother sits down to cards.