Review of Soulmate / 소울메이트, directed by Min Yong-eun

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

Something I also used this time for, and was really happy to do, was to sit down and slowly cross off movies and books on my to-watch and to-read lists. I will never ever get through all of them in my lifetime because of the sheer amount of content I want to consume, but I’ve slowly made peace with that.

Being unemployed means though that I have some more time to actually sit down and watch these movies or read these books, which ties into my blog, as I end up writing about a good chunk of them on here. Not everything I watch/read/do I put on the Internet as a digital archive, but I put quite a bit on here.

I discovered during this time that TUBI has a lot of free Korean movies, which excites me because usually some Korean movies are hard to find. I tend to watch some on planes that I literally never see again with English subtitles in my life, and although my Korean is pretty good, I still don’t happen to understand everything entirely being said on-screen.

I watched Soulmate when I was browsing through TUBI’s Korean selections because the synopsis really stood out to me. Any movie that seems like it’s about girlhood is right up my alley when it comes to genre and the kinds of stories I like to read/watch/write about, so this really seemed perfect at the time.

Let’s get into the review! I can ramble a lot, so let’s keep it short.

The story of two girls, how they met, and fourteen years of friendship in a single movie.

This is a movie that takes place across multiple different timelines. In the present day, we meet Mi-so, specifically without the presence of Ha-eun, and she’s meeting up with their old friend and crush from high school Jin-woo—more on that history later. They ask about Ha-eun, who is a talented artist and could one day be famous.

It’s through Mi-so’s interactions in the present day that we learn eventually that Ha-eun has passed away. While Mi-so left their small little lives in a more rural part of Korea to pursue more opportunities, Ha-eun never left.

In the past flashbacks we see how they met in school, then quickly became inseparable after some time together. The title Soulmates truly does refer to these two and not their romantic relationships, as we see how they complete each other’s lives and experiences in a way that no one else could replicate.

Not even Jin-woo who, in the flashbacks, we see both girls really like. By the time they’re teenagers they’re crushing hard on this boy, but then Ha-eun ends up pursuing the relationship with Jin-woo more heavily, especially once Mi-so leaves for the city.

In the present day Jin-woo is asking about Ha-eun here and there, but Mi-so is keeping it a secret from him that Ha-eun has passed away. She also refuses to tell the gallery curator that Ha-eun has passed away, as it would impact the work that she’s trying to complete. Ha-eun left behind an incomplete painting of Mi-so and Mi-so herself is now trying to finish the painting.

Meanwhile, in the past, Ha-eun decided after Mi-so left that she, too, needs to leave. She ends up going to see the world, but there’s a big catch during this time: she’s pregnant. She still treks along the world’s path, sending postcards to Mi-so in every new location to prove she’s alive and thriving. I present this like it’s the truth way things ended: however, the way the movie presents this is that it might not be real and just in Mi-so’s mind of what Ha-eun did before dying.

It’s kind of ambiguous and I could see some struggling to interpret it, but to me I wasn’t fully convinced that Ha-eun did end up going to see the world beyond what they already knew and Busan. She was someone who largely did what was expected of her and wouldn’t go way outside of her comfort zone—hence why she may have ended up with Jin-woo in the first place.

Eventually she does give birth, but then passes away after having her daughter. Mi-so decides to adopt the girl and raise her as her own, then bestows the girl the name of her mother. I interpreted all of this, as well as Mi-so trying to finish the painting and doing other activities, as a way to keep Ha-eun alive through memory.

Overall Thoughts

I came into this movie with little to no expectations about what it could give me as a form of entertainment, then found myself really interested and entertained by it. Not only is the cinematography whimsical and pleasant to watch at times, but I genuinely was really invested in these two characters.

While it was a bit predictable about what was going to happen in this story, the journey of getting there is definitely what makes this movie worth it. It’s a movie about two girls, now women, and their relationship as they grow older and it evolves. They go through moments of jealousy and anger, but their bond is unbreakable.

I think we need more stories like this in the end—but will we get more of them? I prefer House of Hummingbird, which is a similar Korean girlhood movie, but I think this movie is fairly solid on its own. Watch it if you can find it and get the chance to do so! I think it’s worth it.

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