Makgeolriga alryeojulgeoya

Dung-choon (Na-eun Park) is very stressed with all her many studies at school, and at home where her mother Yeong-jin (Kim Hae-won) is anxious for her while at the same time being obsessed with a podcast about a semi-guru called Hye-jin (Park Hyo-ju). When Dung-choon finds a bottle of rice wine, she is surprised to see bubbles forming on the liquid - bubbles that seem to correspond to MORSE code! But she cannot seem to translate the bubbles if indeed that is what is happening, until she starts taking a course in the Persian language - and suddenly she can translate the bubbles, first into MORSE code, then into Persian and finally into Korean. But what do the bubbles want, and why do they keep instructing her to do strange things?

There's a lot going on in this film, from parental and sibling relations to how a bright but awkward kid is treated by the other kids who see her as weird. I won't give away the secrets of the plot, but I will say that I can't think of a more dead-pan lead that I've seen in recent films - Na-eun Park is pretty much blank-faced in all circumstances, which makes it hard to identify with her. Which, actually, is kind of the point, I think. An interesting film, but it didn't quite do it for me, although the visuals were compelling.