Jina (Gong Seung-yeon) works at a call center in Seoul, handling complaints from credit card customers. That may sound like the job from hell, but it suits Jina just fine. In fact, she’s a model employee, always tactful, patient, and efficient, even when dealing with customers who are abusive or clearly demented (like the guy who thinks he has a time machine and worries about his card working in the alternative timelines of his imagination). It’s like she has some kind of switch to turn her feelings off and become a different person when at work, a person that has none of the natural reactions that any of us might have if we had to deal with difficult people—experienced only as disembodied voices—all day every day.
Or maybe there’s a different reason Jina can disengage so easily at work—because that’s the way she lives her life all the time. As we soon learn, she lives alone, has little to do with her widowed father (Park Jeong-hak), and avoids interacting with the people living in her apartment block. She subsists on convenience store meals, which she consumes while watching videos on her phone, and often falls asleep while watching TV.
Because Jina is so good at her job, she’s chosen by her supervisor (Kim Hannah) to train a new operator, Sujin (Jung Da-eun). Jina doesn’t want this responsibility, and is not very nice to this eager young woman, who has just moved to Seoul and truly wants to make good on her first job, but their interaction will later prove more meaningful than expected. As we learn more of Jina’s back story, it becomes clear how she got to where she is, and also why a rational young woman might choose solitude over the other life choices available to her.
Historically, Korea has been a family-oriented society, so the phenomenon of people living alone is fairly recent. But today it’s not at all rare: in 2021, 40% of Korean households consisted of a single person, a phenomenon described by the neologisms holojok and honjok. Gong Seung-yeon’s Aloners is the first feature film to explore what it means to be one of these living-alone people, and does so in a sensitive, understated, and slow-moving style.
In the process, Gong portrays an aspect of modern Korean life that you won’t find in K-pop sitcoms about golden children destined for glamorous futures and tasked with choosing from an array of improbably attractive romantic partners. This film, instead, is about imperfect people working jobs to survive, making compromises (or not) with other imperfect people, and generally just getting through life as best they can. It’s also got some really funny moments (case in point: the fate of Jina’s next-door neighbor, and the landlady’s reaction to it) that keep things from getting too lugubrious.
I must admit I’m automatically suspicious of films about loners, particularly female loners: they tend to assume that no one would live alone by choice, and that women without partners are just waiting for Mr. Right to show up and cure their cursed isolation. Take it from this part-Swede: solitude is not the same as loneliness, OK? And if marriage for women means giving up your career and subsuming your life to that of your husband, it’s not hard to understand why some women would opt for the single life.
To its credit, Aloners doesn’t fall into any of the usual traps, and it certainly doesn’t condemn Jina for her current state—instead, it encourages us to understand why she has chosen as she has. For the most part, Aloners succeeds, although you have to have some patience and attentiveness to detail to understand what it’s doing. | Sarah Boslaugh
Aloners is available for home streaming beginning June 9.
