SIFF 2017 Trailer: Come, Together (Keom, tugedeo)

South Korea | 2016 | 122 Minutes | Shin Dong-il

A bourgeois middle-class South Korean family is losing the rat race: Father is fired from his job of 18 years, Mother feels pressure at work to be a top salesperson, and Daughter struggles to get into college. But by following their dreams, maybe they can find a new definition of success.

For middle-aged white-collar worker Park Beom-gu, work is his whole identity as a human being. But when he's suddenly laid off by his employer after 18 years, cracks form in the Park family foundation in this tense drama by director Shin Dong-il (Host & Guest). Beom-gu is not alone in feeling the pressure: His wife, Mi-young, tries to take up the slack by throwing herself into her credit-card sales job, resorting to desperate and unethical tactics, while the couple's daughter, Ha-na, agonizes over her college entrance exams and a purgatorial college wait list. As the tension steadily rises, each Park is tempted to resort to increasingly desperate measures: Beom-gu becomes obsessed with noises coming from a neighbor's house; Mi-young's jealousy of a rival worker turns her office into a toxic work environment; Ha-na starts harboring fantasies of eliminating students ahead of her on the wait list. From this tableau of anxiety, director Shin lets each character's humanity and dignity emerge. Both a gripping family drama and sharp social commentary on today's ultra-competitive Korean society, Come, Together shows how working harder does not always lead to true happiness.