Where Leila’s Brothers was all shouting and drama in its portrayal of a dysfunctional family, Kim Se-in shows us the quiet bitterness of an intense mother-daughter relationship.

It’s as if we are being shown this family under a microscope, claustrophobic in its closeness. Mother Su-kyung (Lym Ji-ho) is vibrant and extroverted with her friends, joking about her temper and looking always for admiration and affirmation. Living in a small apartment with her sullen adult daughter Yi-jung (Yang Mal-bok), we soon see who she takes out her anger on.

She hits Yi-jung, humiliates her and orders her around like a maid. Yi-jung cowers and then cuts up her mothers expensive clothes in secret, her only way to retaliate. We watch as this dysfunction ripples out, to Yi-jung’s burgeoning friendship with coworker Soo-hee (Jeong Bo-ram) and Su-kyung’s flirtation with single parent Yong-yeol (Yang Heung-ju).

An incident starts a fracture – Su-kyung knocks Yi-jung down with her car and insists it was an accident although Yi-jung and the dash cam footage tell another story. Elements of this are revisited later and it underlines both the difficulty of showing clearly the evidence of abuse and of recognising it.

We can see that Su-kyung is a narcissist and Kim Se-in manages to give a depth to her character so that we begin to understand how she honestly can’t understand that what she does is wrong. Some key moments with Yong-yeol should be cathartic moments for her but her delusion is too ingrained and others reticent to call her on her behaviour.

At nearly 2.5 hours long and with a slow pace and introspective feel, it could have lost me but the performances of the two leads and the detail of their lives absorbed me. There is some very subtle dark humour and the contrast between mother and daughter – one all colour and fire, the other monochrome and sullen – muddies the roles of protagonist and antagonist. I was a bit disappointed with the ending, although it is very much in keeping with the mood of the film. In reality, when your mother is a narcissist, nobody wins.

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