The World of Us (DVD) (Korea Version) DVD Region 3

The film begins with the everyday activity of picking teams for dodgeball in gym class. The camera rests tenderly on 10-year-old Sun's (Choi Soo In) face as her expression gradually changes from hesitant anticipation to resigned disappointment. Names are called one by one until she is, once again, the last person left. This quietly impactful opening scene – and a similar scene later in the film that echoes it – is simply designed, and yet so immediately telling of what's amiss. From the audience's eyes, Sun is a normal friendly child who tries at school and takes care of her little brother at home. But, for whatever reason, she has become that one kid in the class with no friends, the awkward outcast bullied by a bratty classmate and her cluster of friends.

Sun's lonely world opens up when she meets new girl in town Jia (Seol Hye In) during the summer, and they become immediate best friends. The two come from clearly different family and economic backgrounds. Jia lives in a big house and has ample spending money, but her parents aren't around. Sun's family is financially strapped and her father drinks too much, but they're an otherwise loud, loving and nagging bunch squeezed into a small space. The two latch onto each other over a preciously bright summer, but when school starts, the friendship falls apart. Jia, realizing Sun's ostracized status, chooses to join the mean girl's clique instead, though her position in the clique also soon becomes unsafe.

Unlike many other Korean films on bullying, there are no critically serious or sensational elements at work, no deaths or physical violence, just the "regular" kind of fighting, mocking, befriending and snubbing among kids that adults overlook. The girls struggle to protect their pride and friendships, and impulsively lash out against each other with mean-spirited words. They show signs of remorse and moments of kindness one day, and then backtrack to snide stubbornness the next. All of these interactions play out in naturalistic manner, and the film very effectively conveys the hopeful and hurtful feelings of the girls.

With The World of Us, Yoon Ga Eun presents a genuinely empathetic and perceptive look into the complex inner world and interactions of children – not a movie for children but about children. Yoon even reminds of Kore-eda Hirokazu in the way her film so completely immerses into the children's world from their perspectives. At the same time, by underlining the social pressures, emotional neediness, class awareness and passive aggression that the girls deal with, The World of Us shows that a child's world isn't too different from that of an adult.