Runaway From Home: Looking for My Wife

Sort by "view count" for "Korean movies with English subtitles" and the two most popular YouTube videos are Healing Mate ("starring the two beautiful ladies...") and a sketchy untitled movie with a thumbnail of an Asian woman discontentedly nursing a grown man who may or may not be Korean. The first has 16 million views; the second, 14 million. I couldn't bring myself to watch either. The third most popular video with 10 million views however is definitely legit. It's the Daniel Henney vehicle Seducing Mr. Perfect , a rom-com which I've already seen, albeit years ago. What doesn't show up on that first page of search results is Runaway From Home, an absolutely delightful buddy comedy that's racked up a respectable 1.4 million views on YouTube and a less respectable 5.5 score on IMDb. Credit its visibility issues to poor tags and sloppy mislabeling — Run Away — and its low rating to poor taste in general. (Those 32 IMDb voters are hereby scolded!)

Perhaps the IMDb users simply didn't watch the entire film. Written and directed by Lee Ha, Runaway From Home may seem slight at first: Two slackers — a radio personality and a wannabe movie director — end up on a road trip when the former discovers the wife he's about to dump has already dumped him and disappeared. But where did she go? (Hence the alt title: Looking for My Wife.) The flummoxed husband (Ji Jin-hee) enlists the help of his friend (Yang Ik-joon) as the two decide to find her by tracking down her most meaningful old acquaintances sourced through an old flip-phone previously owned by the now-missing wife (Kim Gyu-ri). This device facilitates their meeting a series of zany characters including a weepy psychic (Kim Yeo-jin), a severe Ponzi-schemer (Ok Go-woon), and a pickpocket brother-in-law (Lee Mun-shik). Each new encounter leads the two pals to learn a little more about themselves and deepen their shared commitment to each other. In true Korean movie fashion, the Hollywood ending never occurs. What does instead is incredibly moving and makes Runaway From Home a runaway favorite for me.

Bewitching Attraction: Femme Fatale in Eco-Academia

Maneater Cho Eun-suk (Moon So-ri) has sex on the brain, so much so that you may wonder how she has time to keep up with her professorial duties and her environmental activism. Maybe she's wearily let those go. She's certainly acting as though her expertise can take a back seat to her insatiable carnal desires: With career advancement in her mind only in part, she bonks a married TV producer (Park Won-sang) and a graphic novelist (Ji Jin-hee) even as a department full of lascivious male colleagues are looking for a way to get their sweaty hands on her pencil-skirted ass. Though the movie itself may have a misogynist streak, you feel like its lead character couldn't give a damn. She's past judgment!

Be that as it may, one of her cohorts (played by Yoo Seung-mok) confounded by her amorality is driven by jealous desperation to dig into Cho's past until he discovers that her warped psychosexual development is rooted in a middle school incident involving three boys and one untimely death. This is as much as I've pieced together. Her cohort may know more. I'm not so sure. I do have a sense that Lee Ha's convoluted plot intends layers I can't fathom but I maintain that the two greatest pleasures of Bewitching Attraction lie well outside his nutty narrative.

The first is compositional. Lee knows how to create a picture, something established early on with his magnificent group portrait of a priest and a gaggle of nuns on the coast. Those photo-worthy moments — the conversation under umbrellas, the drunk encounter in the hallway, the nude face-off in bed — keep coming throughout Bewitching Attraction so that you almost feel as though Lee's written a story simply to connect the pictures in his head. The movie's second pull is performative. Moon, the same actress who blew me away in Oasis, lives up to this movie's title by managing to slink with a limp and play nude scenes in such a way that the men's shirtlessness feels as revealing as her own. She's never less than fascinating. You can understand why the men want her character, why the director wanted Moon and why Moon wanted the part, given how much she's made of it.