The World of Love

Directed by Yoon Ga-eun, The World of Love follows a high schooler (Seo Su-bin’s Jooin) as she’s forced to face her traumatic past after a fellow student stirs up old feelings. It’s potentially gripping subject matter that’s slowly-but-surely squandered by Yoon, as the filmmaker, armed with her own screenplay, delivers an often unreasonably (and astonishingly) deliberate endeavor that does, for the most part, meander to an egregious extent, and it’s clear, certainly, that the let’s-get-on-with-it-already vibe eventually renders the picture’s positive attributes, including an authentic, lived-in feel, completely moot – with, in addition, The World of Love’s problems compounded by Yoon’s headscratching decision to delay the reveal of Jooin’s aforementioned trauma (ie the mystery diminishes the impact of key sequences, eg an emotional carwash ride). The padded-out runtime paves the way for a midsection rife with extraneous tangents and digressions, while the anticlimactic closing stretch, which feels pretty much endless, ensures that the whole thing ends on as lackluster a note as one could envision – thus confirming The World of Love’s place as a well-intentioned misfire that could only have worked at maybe half the length.

* out of ****