Minari Review

Chung's semi-autobiographical film about a Korean American family farming in 1980s Arkansas is quiet enough that the stakes are easy to miss until suddenly they are not. Jacob has bet the family savings on fifty acres and a crop no distributor has asked for, and Steven Yeun plays him as a man whose stubbornness is indistinguishable from love. Han Ye-ri has the harder role and gets less credit for it: Monica is right about almost everything and gets to enjoy none of it.

Youn Yuh-jung's grandmother arrives as comic relief and then quietly becomes the engine of the film, and the scene where she is judged for not being a real grandmother is the funniest and the saddest thing here. Lachlan Milne shoots the trailer, the creek and the fields in warm, unshowy natural light that never romanticizes the labor. The water dowsing argument and Paul's cross-carrying are the sort of specific details invented stories rarely risk. It ends on a disaster and a harvest at the same time, and refuses to say which one the family is left holding.