Boomerang Family is a South Korean dramatic comedy, or a So-Ko Dram-Com (Too much? Too much), based upon 2010 novel Ageing Family, charting the misadventures of a motley menagerie of maudlin misfits (too much. This has all become too much) and begins with the attempted suicide of its protagonist. Comparisons to Little Miss Sunshine are well founded as, during the film’s running time, the family slips further into darkness and despair.
However, unlike LMS, Boomerang Family skews very, very strange. Elderly relatives are suspected of whoring themselves for grocery meat, uncles are found pleasuring themselves with their nieces underwear on their heads, and somewhere towards the end of the film, it becomes, for some reason, a bloody crime drama. Little Miss Guncrime? Shut up, Adam.
In fact, as it progresses, the film shifts in tone so much that the escalation of sex and violence threatens to upend all of goodwill generated by the sweet well-observed family comedy that comes before it. It’s hard to know where asian culture shock ends and weird grotesquery starts, but the balance feels like it takes a sharp turning at Fifth and Fucked Up.
Because, crucially, it’s a well-made film. The characters are well-drawn in their broken, individually dismal ways; a suicidal director reduced to directing pornos called Rosy Milf and Titanic Melons (I laughed at Rosy Milf for far, far longer than I should have – about twelve minutes); a double divorcee about to embark on marriage number three; her stroppy teenage daughter; a ex-jailbird brick-wielding farting manchild of an older brother. But together, their family dynamic convinces. The dinner scenes, the bickering, the quiet connective tissue moments between the big scenes, are sweetly scripted and well-performed. It creates a picture of a family that is quirky, yes, for the comedy, but ultimately recognisable.
There’s warmth here, which makes it all the more problematic when things go a bit, well… rapey in places and the entire last act turns into Reservoir Dogs on a dime. It doesn’t feel like a betrayal of everything that’s come before, but there was, for me at least, a crucial break in empathy. What was once a strange but relatable family So-Ko Dram-Com (sod it, I’m sticking with it), became simply strange, deadening an admittedly very sweet plot development in the film’s closing moments.
I would recommend it though. It sweet, well-intention and bizarre enough to satisfying South Korean culture tourists. It’s just a shame that the family tends to split to its weird component parts by the end. It was once so well-knit.
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