Poetry

Lee Chang-dong wrote this screenplay to run parallel structures simultaneously, an aging woman's early-stage dementia and her discovery that her grandson took part in a group assault, forcing two unrelated crises to comment on each other without colliding directly in plot terms. Mija's poetry class assignments function as a structural device, giving natural checkpoints where she is asked to notice beauty even as the narrative forces her toward an ugly truth she must act on. Lee withholds the direct confrontation scenes a conventional script would treat as mandatory, showing instead the aftermath and evasion around the crime, keeping moral judgment implicit rather than dramatized through argument. The final structural move, cutting away from Mija before her poem is finished and letting her voice carry over into the world she has been observing, ties the poetic assignment directly to the moral resolution rather than treating it as a subplot. Dialogue throughout is sparse and indirect, with characters talking around the crime rather than naming it, mirroring communal denial. This is valuable for writers building a climax that is deliberately withheld rather than staged.

What to watch for

Watch how the closing poem is read partly in Mija's voice and partly folded into images of the girl whose death she failed to fully reckon with.

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