Park Ji-min

In Return to Seoul (2022), Park Ji-min’s Freddie pushes restaurant tables together and pours soju for strangers, behaving as though the evening is hers to arrange. She tells Tena, the guesthouse receptionist played by Guka Han, that in France people look one another in the eye when they drink. Park makes the insistence faintly aggressive, even when Freddie is apparently being sociable. We disliked her for much of the first hour, particularly when her apparent friendliness became an excuse to tell other people how to behave.

Her work with writer-director Davy Chou gives that abrasiveness somewhere to go. Freddie insists she has not come to Seoul to find anyone, then visits an adoption agency to ask it to send a telegram. Park makes both decisions convincing without smoothing away the contradiction. We can follow what Freddie does without expecting her to offer a tidy account of herself.

It was Park’s first screen performance, made after a year of helping Chou rewrite the lead role. Her contribution included challenging clichés about Asian women, which matters when Freddie is allowed to be so abrasive. There is nothing apologetic in the acting, and no little signal asking us to like her underneath it all. Her changes of mood never look rehearsed.

The later chapters of Return to Seoul are thinner than the first, and Park cannot entirely make up for that. She remains the reason to see it, particularly when Freddie’s face goes still and then hard in response to affection. We can see her trying not to feel anything, and the anger when that effort fails.

Her later credits include the television series La Maison (2024) and the films The Little Sister (2025), A Private Life (2025) and Love Me Tender (2025). We would not assume that Freddie supplies a template for those performances; one lead role gives us plenty to discuss without settling what kind of actor Park will be. Start with Return to Seoul, and an actor who does not make a difficult woman easier company just because she has the lead.