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Aloners Is a Poignant, Scant Portrait of Modern Individualism

By Brianna Zigler  |  June 7, 2023 | 3:17pm
Movies Reviews Hong Sung-eun
Aloners Is a Poignant, Scant Portrait of Modern Individualism

Jina (Gong Seung-yeon) is a loner—if the title of the film, Aloners, was any indication. Though the pluralization is a bit misleading. Jina is the only character in Hong Sung-eun’s directorial debut who seems allergic to others’ company. The top employee at her credit card call center job, Jina bristles at all other human interaction. This includes her father (Park Jeong-hak), who cheated on and divorced her recently deceased mother two decades prior, but fell back into her mother’s good graces in the past few years. Jina spends most of her time in her cavernous bedroom, the only furnished portion of her otherwise completely barren apartment, with the television on. She eats lunch alone with her headphones in; most of the time she’s out in public, those little white buds are cocooned in her ears. When her boss instructs her to train a new caller—or else—Jina can’t comprehend anything she’d like to do less. 

For the bulk of Aloners—a breezy, 90-minute character study initially released in South Korea in 2021—Jina remains so frigidly misanthropic and anti-social that she’s hard to latch onto as our protagonist. In spite of the given reasoning behind her detachment—her move from home, her mother’s death, the pandemic—she is so removedly cruel to others that she is nearly impossible to empathize with, and navigating the film alongside her is mostly maddening. Watching the film, it’s hard not to scream at Jina to just be nice to the people around her, but I suppose that partly speaks to the masterful performance given by Gong. Gong, while aggravating, is subtle and brilliant. And Hong’s direction, coupled with the cinematography from Youngki Choi and production design by Kim Do-eun, produces a world that is as colorless and bleak as Jina’s attitude.

And when Jina’s overly-friendly neighbor turns up dead in his apartment, crushed by a stack of porno magazines and rotted for a week, Jina is rattled but remains mostly unfazed—at first. Though still reclusive, she begins more regularly monitoring her widowed father on a live feed from a wireless camera she installed in her parents’ home. Her interactions with the eager trainee at her job, Sujin (Jung Da-eun), become even more cold and avoidant, as if lashing out against Sujin’s friendly disposition due to insecurity and resentment from the isolated lifestyle she created for herself. 

As revealed by her father, once Jina moved out and away from her mother, their contact became increasingly strained. It was likely a contributing factor to her mother transferring Jina’s inheritance over to her father, only giving Jina more reason to distance herself from her family. But like The Tell-Tale Heart, her neighbor’s death slowly begins to unravel Jina. Her glacial personality dips in temperature at such a rapid pace that it can’t do anything but burst and shatter.

After Jina discovers that her neighbor has been dead for a week, his landlord scolds her viciously for not noticing. The woman chalks Jina’s negligence up to the general self-centeredness of the younger generation. The social commentary of Aloners never gets much deeper than that. That sort of “young people on their phones these days…” look at the modern world marks Hong’s screenplay throughout. Jina’s arc arrives at a place where her ultimate breakdown and emotional catharsis is genuinely affecting, but Aloners never escapes the mostly surface-level commentary that it coasts on for its majority. This superficiality is coupled with the sole puzzling alternative for community posed to Jina: Religion. Jina’s father urges her to join his Christian church, which we see him (through Jina’s hidden camera feed) joyfully engaged with in his home. Meanwhile, Jina’s new neighbor holds a spiritual gathering to comfort the soul of the deceased neighbor, where participants cross themselves. This seemingly binary offering—solitude or religion—only enhances Aloners’ shallowness.

Loneliness is pervasive. It’s been nurtured by the spread of online spaces and strengthened in the aftermath of the pandemic lockdowns, resulting in a world still riddled with COVID that remains inaccessible for compromised groups. In America, armed residents are more frequently taking to violence, riled up by suspicion of a dreaded Other; it’s more imperative now than ever that we look out for one another. Instead of exploring the varying shades of nuance in the spread of the isolation and loneliness that can be felt from New York City to Seoul, Aloners instead puts the bulk of this cultural onus on youth and technology. This narrow view lends itself to a familiar thematic ham-fistedness in spite of its otherwise poignant and deeply felt minimalism. For a directorial debut, Aloners showcases Hong Sung-eun as an exciting new voice—hopefully next go around she’ll give us a little more to chew on.

Director: Hong Sung-eun
Writer: Hong Sung-eun
Starring: Gong Seung-yeon, Jung Da-eun, Seo Hyun-woo, Park Jeong-hak, Kim Hannah
Release Date: June 9, 2023

Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.

 
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