This mainstream Korean melodrama, based on a popular 2016 Chinese film, was reportedly completed before the pandemic and didn’t receive a proper release in Korea until last year. It chronicles the decades-long relationship between two women starting in adolescence, when the constitutionally dour Mi-so (Kim Da-mi) moves to Jeju Island with her single, fitfully employed mother. Despite their obvious differences in temperament, she makes friends with the relatively emotionally stable Hae-un (Jeon So-nee), and they become BFFs. Mi-so soon has to work to support herself after her mother takes off again, though she’s still in school, but director Min Yong-geun and co-writer Kang Hyun-joo indicate her self-destructive romanticism more with cultural signifiers, such as her lifelong obsession with Janis Joplin. As Hae-un is being groomed by her parents to get into a decent university and become a school teacher, Mi-so cultivates the kind of resentments that only an intense platonic love can engender, and the script exploits these differences to flesh out a psychological mystery that’s too ambitious for its own good.

Over the ensuing years, the setting moves to Seoul, where both women eventually end up, though not at the same time, and there are long passages in their lives when they are not in touch at all. At different points they share or trade off a boy (Byeon Woo-seok) of no real consequence and at some stage virtually switch places in terms of the way they approach the world as they reboot their lives following college, marriage, and giving birth, with Hae-un breaking free of her staid outlook and Mi-so gaining some kind of stability. But this swapping of fortunes is misleading in that it feels like cheating on the part of the filmmakers, who keep teasing the viewer with an unreliable narrator and odd little discrepancies that don’t make immediate sense but add up to something startling if not particularly plausible or, for that matter, affecting. 

The script doesn’t really matter that much, because what Soulmate has to sell is a relationship that transcends the overt cleverness of the plot. The two principal actors credibly grow into their characters as the movie progresses, but, more significantly, their chemistry as antagonistic forces covers a wide range of emotional territory without losing sight of the basic personalities that make those respective characters distinctive. There were stretches where I thought they would either destroy each other or become lovers in a true physical sense, with either possibility providing a more trenchant development of the relationship than what the movie actually does. True soulmates offer those kinds of possibilities.

In Korean. Opens Feb. 23 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Soulmate home page in Japanese

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