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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NEXT SOHEE IS KOREAN CINEMA AT ITS BLEAK AND BRILLIANT BEST  
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Kap Seol
December 2, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]


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_ Behind South Korea’s economic growth, there’s a system that
grinds workers to the bone at every stage of the life cycle, from high
school students to retirees. The film Next Sohee dramatizes the impact
of that system to devastating effect. _

Still from Next Sohee. , (Zurty Studios, Echelon Studios, Solaire
Partners)

 

Not so long ago, K-movies and TV dramas were considered cool, even
thought-provoking. That was before their breakthrough into the global
mainstream, when ideas were typed into laptops in corner coffeehouses
in Seoul by young directors and writers, rather than processed as if
they were spreadsheet entries by CFOs or CFAs in cushy offices in
Hollywood.

It was also when these South Korean artists abhorred clichés. Big
money, both at home and from Hollywood, has probably quenched their
thirst for fame and wealth, but the price was the loss of edginess.
K-films have become trimmed and reprocessed through the Hollywood
machine.

It is no wonder that season 2 of _Squid Game_, while more expensive to
make and more aggressively marketed_,_ cannot even be compared with
its first season for intensity and intrigue. It is no coincidence
either that Bong Joon-ho’s first big Hollywood studio film, _Mickey
17_, was a cliché-loaded flop. It all felt like kimchi marinated with
corn syrup instead of coarse salt.

Both _Squid Game_ and _Parasite_ found global acclaim for their
criticism of capitalist inequality. Of course, there are many rooms in
the house of mass art, even for harsh and satirical views on
capitalism, so long as they remain in the safe realm of depicting a
desperate, middle-aged man’s attempts to claw his way back up after
a precipitous fall in class status and dignity. I often quipped to
myself that they were an inequality painkiller for middle-class,
middle-aged insecurity.

Bucking this trend is _Next Sohee_, an independent film written and
directed in 2022 by Jung Joo-ri — also known as July Jung — who is
one of a few young female directors in South Korea’s film scene.
_Next Sohee_ serves late capitalism on a cold plate, raw and fresh. It
is a strong narrative about working-class children who are even denied
access to the bottom rungs of the social ladder that the protagonists
of _Squid Game_ or _Parasite_ at least had the chance to hold on to.

The Good Chaebol

For this, the film earned recognition at international film festivals
from Tokyo to Paris and had a limited theatrical release in Europe. In
the United States, _Next Sohee_ went straight to streaming this year.
It is now available for free on Tubi and Roku.

_Next Sohee _is based on the 2016 suicide of Hong Soo-yeon, who
plunged to her death in an icy reservoir after four months of
harassment and wage theft during her externship at LB Hunet, a
call-center subcontractor of LG U+, the telecom unit of the LG
conglomerate. Globally known for its durable home appliances, LG is
usually regarded as a “good chaebol” — a family-owned industrial
conglomerate — because it has largely stayed free of the corruption
and corporate malfeasance scandals that routinely tarnish the
reputation of other chaebols such as Samsung or Hyundai.

Then again, perhaps LG could keep its hands clean because it has
ruthlessly outsourced dirty jobs to subcontractors like LB Hunet,
where Hong was part of a customer retention team ominously called
“Save.” Of course, LG was not alone in this practice.

All corporations, small or large, have benefited from a new policy
introduced by the conservative government of Lee Myung-bak in the
early 2010s, which was ostensibly meant to reduce youth unemployment.
Lee, a former Hyundai CEO, prettified the statistics by pushing as
many vocational high school students as possible into workplace
externships, thereby lowering the youth unemployment rate on paper.

Each school district was assigned to externship quotas, which were
then passed down to vocational schools. Kids were farmed through
workplaces regardless of their interests, skill sets, or basic safety
considerations. The government tied financial aid and subsidies for
each district and each school to the achievement of their annual
quotas.

While the government keeps no official data, a Catholic publication
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profiled seven students, including Hong, who ended their own lives or
died on the job during the period of 2011 to 2021. In a nutshell, the
youth employment program, which was advertised as an emulation of
Germany’s apprenticeship model, turned out to be a free-market
Stakhanovite campaign that pitted districts and schools against one
another for unattainable placement targets within a fixed budget. The
policy still remains in place.

Spreadsheet Saga

_Next Sohee_ is about the silent violence of ubiquitous spreadsheets.
Sohee found herself crushed under a giant spreadsheet posted on the
call-center wall — a grid that assigns retention targets to externs,
showing in real time how their potential incentives shrink each week
over unmet targets.

Spreadsheets were pinned on the walls of principals and district
supervisors, quantifying young students in grids. Sohee’s death
should be a rounding error that could still result in funding cuts for
her school and district.

Having been trained as a pet caretaker, the seventeen-year-old was
entirely unprepared for a call center staffed entirely by teenage
girls like her. She was told to answer every call with “We love you,
sir/madam” (rendered as “Thank you for calling us” in the
English-language subtitles).

Sohee’s task was to coax, placate, or deliberately mislead
already-discontented customers into keeping their service (subtitled
as “dissuasion” not “retention”). After a series of runarounds
and repeated calls, customers just hurled expletives at her, with a
side order of perverts trying to twist the conversation into
obscenity.

When she finally met her retention target, after hours of unpaid
overtime and a great deal of emotional strain, her supervisor withheld
her incentive pay anyway. Sohee could not just walk away: she feared
the penalty and humiliation back at her school and the reaction of her
parents, who had lost any meaningful way to communicate with their
only child.

In her debut film role, Kim Si-eun inhabits the character of Sohee,
with her puppy-eyed innocence, anger, and frustration. Bae Doona, who
may already be familiar to English-speaking audiences from _Cloud
Atlas_ and _Sense8_, plays the police detective who investigated
Sohee’s death in defiance of her supervisor. Bae previously played
the lead in Jung’s debut feature, _A Girl at My Door_
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_a rare LGBTQ film in South Korea.

The subtitles are less than perfect. But that shouldn’t deter you
from watching a genuine cinematic gem that should rank highly on
left-wing movie lists.

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Contributors

Kap Seol is a Korean writer and researcher based in New York. His
writings have appeared in Labor Notes, In These Times, Business
Insider, and other publications. In 2019, his exposé for Korean
independent daily Kyunghyang revealed an imposter who falsely claimed
to be a US military intelligence specialist posted to the South Korean
city of Gwangju during a popular uprising in 1980.

 

 

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* South Korea
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* exploitation
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* class warfare
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* capitalism
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* free market ideology
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