A Normal Family and Normality

In a movie titled A Normal Family, one thing can be certain: the family is obligated to abnormality. Hur Jin-ho’s newest film, an adaptation of the Dutch novel The Dinner by Herman Koch, attests to this. The source material’s title explains why the film’s early marketing so heavily depends on the monthly family dinners between two brothers and their wives — though many of the film’s most memorable images have nothing to do with their dinner routines. These adult-only dinners — once a month at ridiculously expensive restaurants—come to reveal a disturbing ethical dilemma at the film’s center, one that their multi-household family must gamble their future unity on.

Screenwriters Park Eun-kyo and Park Joon-seok’s adaptation of Koch’s story leaves plenty of seeds to suggest that the Yang family is not and never has been a normal family. The aging matriarch struggling with dementia almost flippantly comments to one of the wives to be weary of her son’s violent streaks, a trait heretofore unwitnessed. The son of respected physician Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-gun) and the willingly gullible Yeon-kyung (Kim Hee-ae), Si-ho (Kim Jung-chul) squishes a beetle with glee and lacks in the friend department. Even earlier, in one of the film’s early scenes, Jae-gyu’s criminal defense attorney brother, Jae-wan (Sol Kyung-gu), has no problem imagining complex stories for his clients to use to excuse their crimes. Something doesn’t just feel off with this family; something is off.

Continue reading at In Review Online.