Alan Kim and Steven Yeun in Minari

MINARI
Directed by Lee Isaac Chung
Certificate: PG
☆☆☆☆

CRAVING new lives, fulfilling dreams – for the Yi family, who we meet as they pull up in a dark field with their worldly goods in the back of a truck, the morning will bring with it the chance to begin again.

But while a belief in a better tomorrow may nourish for the day, unfulfilled ambitions, if set high, can be toxic. Lee Isaac Chung’s majestic family drama has a clash of faith and reality at its heart.

Jacob and Monica (Steven Yeun and Yeri Han) have moved to a patch in the Arkansas outback. Jacob has been working on a meat processing line for 10 years, sexing chickens, and now plans to raise traditional Korean crops to supply the growing Korean communities.

He has faith in earthy practical problem solving, and believes obstacles are there to be overcome. With bundles of enthusiasm, he sets about ploughing and planting, his eyes shining with prospects.

Monica is not convinced – the leaking mobile home they move into is an inauspicious start, and as she watches her husband’s steps to cultivate crops, her doubts grow. The church in town, which she brings her family to visit, only makes her feel more cut off.

Her suggestions to a fellow Korean worker that they set up a Korean church is met with a comment that the Koreans in the town moved here from California to get away from their countrymen, not to socialise with them on a Sunday. It enforces her sense of isolation, made worse by the constant nagging fear her son (Alan S Kim) will need emergency care for his heart condition – and that the nearest hospital is an hour’s drive away.

Things get more complicated in the confines of the trailer when Monica’s mother Soonja (Yuh-jung Youn) comes from Korea to live with them. Soonja offers a film-stealing turn as the matriarch – and while this film has a dramatic narrative, it is also smart, funny and kind, a lot of which flows through Grandmother.

Chung has littered this film with brilliant characters – each has an endearing role to play, even those given the occasional bit part, such as an evangelical neighbour who helps plant and hoe, while speaking in tongues and exorcising the earth from a range of perceived historical blemishes.

Original, warm, tragic and fat with meaning, Chung has made a downplayed yet uplifting, realistic yet magical, masterpiece.