By now it seems like basic human nature to desire a certain level of attractiveness, especially as technology continues to advance in ways that allow people to alter themselves in any way they can imagine. Of course, none of us are exempt from changes brought on by the passage of time. Kim Kiduk's Time explores this very topic of fighting tooth and nail against the inevitable, following a young woman's extreme attempt at keeping her crumbling relationship alive. It's a take on the importance of physical beauty and how it definitely has its place in finding romance, with an overarching hollowness in a relationship based on superficiality.

Time opens with Sehhee (Park Jiyeon) on her way to the coffee shop she and her boyfriend Jiwoo (Ha Jungwoo) frequent, just in time to see him ogle the waitress. Sehhee instantly begins accusing him of looking at other women, and again when Jiwoo exchanges information with a woman who dinged his car outside. She flies into a screaming fit and storms out, after which a confused Jiwoo is told, “She must love you very much, I envy you.” Later that night, the discussion begins again, where despite Jiwoo's meager reassurances, Sehhee is more than convinced he's tired of her and she apologizes for having such a boring face. 

The next day, Jiwoo finds that Sehhee's phone number is no longer in service, her apartment is empty, and her coworkers aren't aware she's moved, leaving Jiwoo reeling from her disappearance. In the months following, Jiwoo joins group dates with his friends and meets other women, none of whom he’s much interested in. Eventually, there's a new waitress, also named Sehhee (Sung Hyunah), who Jiwoo starts seeing, though she rouses thoughts of his old girlfriend and he subsequently struggles to move forward in this new relationship.

Spoiler alert: they're the same person, and Sehhee's master plan is going just as intended, but she finds herself hurting no less than she was before. After undergoing drastic surgery to change her face completely with the intent of attracting Jiwoo all over again, she can't help but spiral with awareness that he is attracted to the new her, and thereby rejecting the old—when all the while Jiwoo can't get thoughts of her (his old girlfriend, as far as he's concerned) out of his head, so Sehhee feels rejected as her new self as well.

From the beginning, it's clear the relationship is doomed. Likely not due to anything either of them did, but Sehhee's insecurities get the better of her, and there was really nothing Jiwoo could have said to convince her otherwise. But relationships run their course, and this one isn't a story about a transcendental love that overcomes adversity—this is a story of a codependent love that's become more of a burden on both parties than any kind of comfort, but fear of letting go keeps them in a chokehold. What remains is bogged down by obsession with physical attractiveness.

It’s worth mentioning that Sehhee is beautiful in both versions of herself, so much so that her plastic surgeon tries to talk her out of it, and the issue is less that Jiwoo has a wildly wandering eye and more that Sehhee assumes he does. Ironically, the one woman he sees during his dating spell that he’s at all interested in seeing again is the one who speaks with awareness that she’s not as cute as her friends—Jiwoo isn’t quite the dog Sehhee makes him out to be. The onus for everything that happens is entirely on Sehhee and her combative paranoia, which is actually my biggest qualm with this movie.

With respect to how Kim Kiduk’s movies (that I’ve seen) aren’t gentle in their depictions of women or the way they’re treated by men, this one is almost cartoonishly one-sided. There’s so little empathy in Sehhee’s writing that she’s framed as totally insane to the point where she comes out of it with nothing more than an identity crisis—which, I guess, might be the point. A thing I liked about it, however, is that pivotal moments are each marked by a visit either to the coffee shop or a sculpture park. The latter of which makes its way into their photos together and stands as a visual representation of better times being immortalized in the places they happened, and the photos they inhabit.

Edited by Cara Musashi