The World of Love Review (2025 London Film Festival)
The 2025 London Film Festival has presented dozens of movies that fall under similar themes. After a week of watching films, you begin to see the similarities between them, which don’t offer much variety. The festival recently had to offer After the Hunt, a movie that deals with the aftermath of sexual abuse, but unfortunately for some, it was a film that failed to send a message and instead felt more harmful in its presentation.
On the surface, The World of Love is a slice-of-life movie that’s set in a high school, which follows Lee Joo-in (Seo Su-bin), a student who’s obnoxiously loud, trying to figure out love and playfighting with her younger brother. It seems like the life of a normal student going about their day-to-day life, but the film has more to offer under the surface, which changes the perspective of how the audience views Jooin and also how the people in her life view her once her past comes to light.
Yoon Ga-eun spends a good portion of the movie highlighting her typical life and allowing her to feel like a character that’s energetic, bubbly and is trying to enjoy her time at school. With this structure it allows for Jooin’s reveal to be hard-hitting, as it’s a scene that packs a lot of emotion. From a character who makes jokes around serious topics and is a bit of a compulsive liar to a character who’s been revealed to have all this bottled-up trauma built up within her. It changes how you view the character once you learn what truth she’s been hiding and how she continues to live on despite what had previously happened to her.
Its structure elevates the movie and allows the audience to resonate with Jooin, and also fits with the message that the movie sends. Despite her path, Jooin doesn’t want to be defined by her past; she doesn’t want to allow it to hold her back from being able to live her life, and with the movie presenting itself in such a way, it allows for the audience to live in the shoes of the characters that surround her life, as you begin to perceive all her previous attitude under a different light once her past is revealed.
The World of Love isn’t a movie that’s telling its audience that you should be able to hold in all the pain you’ve gone through. It beautifully tells both sides of the story, with Jooin taking ownership of her past and refusing to let it be her only defining feature and also with a mysterious person who envies Jooin and struggles to live, having dealt with a similar background to Jooin. Gaeun perfectly encapsulates this by having these notes left around Jooin, which feel like attacks, which seem to accuse her of behaving a certain way for attention, but it all comes full circle in an ending that’s powerful, giving Jooin the space to process everything that has happened to her up until this very point and finally coming to an understanding of people similar to her and their feelings, which allows for her to come to terms with herself.
The World of Love is Seo Su-bin’s debut role, and she carries the movie naturally on her back with a performance that’s emotionally charged and raw. The Jooin we have at the start of the movie and by the end of the film feel like two different characters with how much development they go through in the film. The car wash scene midway through the film is the emotional turning point of the movie, where we witness Jooin go through an emotional breakdown, revealing all of the character’s hidden layers in a heartbreakingly devastating scene, as all of Jooin’s trauma is finally revealed and poured out to her mother (Chang Hyae-jin), a character who failed to protect her own daughter.
It’s not a movie that tells its audiences to bottle up their trauma, and neither is it a movie that tells its audiences to allow their trauma to define them. Gauen carefully shows the importance of both sides, treating the subject matter delicately and ending with a film that feels powerful with a magnetic debut performance from Seo Su-bin, which brings the movie together. Overall, The World of Love is a beautiful, touching coming-of-age story about self-reflection and is a film that will shine through to its younger audience who may be dealing with similar situations.
★★★★
Screening as part of the 2025 BFI London Film Festival on October 14th and 19th / Seo Su-bin, Chang Hyae-jin, Kim-Jeon-sik / Dir: Yoon Ga-eun / Barunson E&A
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