technocracy786 Undoubtedly, this movie has excellent acting performances by the actors. I do not undermine that.But if you are like me and do not like abrupt endings, such that the director wants you to interpret the endings or speculate them on your own: do NOT watch this movie. To me, its like being lost in space. Or being like cheated by a broker.Korean movies are good generally, but I can't believe I wasted around 2-3 hours for such an awful ending. Really nice if you want to see some good cinematography or acting. But the plot is terrible. I could write the whole plot in less than a two or three lines over here. But for those who would still like to watch, I do not want to spoil it.

Multipleh The Secret Sunshine is a throughly modern film. It serves as an example of what American movies are missing these days. The acting is good although not great. The cinematography serves the story. The plot is solid and uncliched. The Secret Sunshine isn't just about religion it is many things. It deals with several issues of modern life in 144 minutes-death, psychology, the role of women, the role of family, money and etc. The movie seems sterile at times but has tight intriguing moments and transformations at times that it feels fresh and is therefore modern. American filmmakers should take note. It's okay to take risks and not overly simplify all the issues.

mtharter I just read all 16 reviews of this movie and I feel like no one hit the point at all. I'm writing now, worried that perhaps my culture shock will come off in the wrong way. I hope it doesn't. I am profoundly affected by this movie and in need of some catharsis. In the same way as movies like "Happiness" by Todd Solondz or "Punch Drunk Love" by P.T. Anderson depict characters that just keep getting more and more awkward and inward, lonely and depraved--through some nameless self-loathing and bad-luck in the first instance, and from the abuse of a family of overbearing sisters and a dreary, compartmentalized business in the second instance--I see this movie as depicting the fundamental grotesquery of modern society. I have now spoiled three movies. All three are about big cities, where life moves fast and no one cares about anyone.So here is my catharsis. To a person in trauma, this is the world. The woman in this movie was free and fun, with a song to her voice and a playful nature with her child Jun. When a sick man takes her child for ransom and then kills her, she is broken.Now this is how I see it, without the good-Christian bad-Christian banter. No one in the world comforted her. Surely not the man following her around looking for a wife in a widowed woman who outlived her child. I find it sickly disturbing that no review saw him as an unwanted opportunist. The church, whether witting or unwitting in this case, served the same function. With no one to comfort her, she took the fast and necessarily false comforts of a group of strangers and adopted a somewhat schizophrenic supernatural farce, always present underneath the eyes in the incredible acting. If spirituality has a place, certainly it is not to *replace* the true empathic care of an *actual person*.These systems, the gossiping women, the possesivist patriarchy, the sexual repression, the evangelical trap, the commodification and plastification of the world. All these were the abusers of a woman who could not find solace. She prays, she hopes, she witnesses more evil, she battles God in passive-aggressive schizophrenia, she commits suicide, she fails. And she gives up.Into the arms of a man that she doesn't love of care about.So, it's Korean film. I haven't built up any prejudice against Milyang, Korea or the evangelical church. If people can't grieve properly, civilization eats them up. All over the world. Society makes us cold and beats us down everywhere. Remember that being human happened before all this did, when you think of God. And then remember your Nature.Sick, twisted, life. Please, people. Love each other. Grieve and let grieve. Or the world will eat up the weak and empower the evil.I gave the movie a 5, because if you are watching closely, there is a foreboding warning about allowing yourself to be mechanized into any sort of order: capitalist, religious, socio-normative. That is what this movie was about. Look again

Chris Knipp The most interesting thing about Miryang (Secret Sunshine) is the actors. Jeon Do-yeon, as Lee Shin-ae, the main character, is a woman with a young son whose husband has died in a tragic accident, and who leaves Seoul to live in Miryang, which was his home town, with her young son. Jeon's face is very changeable. She is girlish, flirtatious, elegant, aged and sad, desperate and joyous, with it and terribly isolated by turns, and it's all in her face. The film also stars Song Kang-ho as Kim, a man who meets her when her car breaks down coming into Miryang, who happens to run a garage in town, and who follows her around all the time thereafter, despite her apparent lack of interest in his attentions. Song is the biggest star in Korea right now, renowned for his work with Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; Memories of Murder and The Host). And yet here he plays a throwaway character, almost a forgotten man. But of course he makes him interesting and curiously appealing. He is the essential ballast to keep Jeon's character from floating away.Lee Shin-ae is a piano teacher. She comes to the new town, which is a neutral place, a kind of poor-man's Seoul, a town "just like anywhere else," as Kim says (just as he is in a way just like anyone else). Her little boy is sprightly, as little boys are, but plainly damaged and withdrawn at times too. His father used to snore, and when he misses him he lies awake, pretending to snore. He goes to school, and Shin-ae meets parents and students and shopkeepers. There is a sense of place in the film, even though the place is in a sense "anywhere." People speak in the local dialect, and everyone knows everything, and Shin-ae's Seoul origin is immediately noticed. Is life really harsher here, away from the big city and its sophistication? Shin-ae seems not to realize the danger she is in.Something terrible happens. And Shin-ae doesn't necessarily deal with it in the best possible way. But it happens and she must face the consequences. But she can't. She goes to pieces. A perpetrator is caught, but that's no consolation. Eventually she becomes so despairing, she relents and goes to a born-again Christian meeting an acquaintance has been pressing her to attend. She finds peace and release with this. But when she decides not only to forgive the perpetrator but to go to the prison to tell him so, that experience is full of ironies and it destroys her all over again. She becomes embittered and desperate and she no longer finds solace in religion. And it gets worse than that.Jeon Do-yeon gives her all in this extremely demanding and protean role. Lee Chang-dong may be a very good director. If an actor of the stature of Song Kang-ho expresses enormous admiration for him, that is convincing. According to Scott Foundas of LA Weekly, Lee's first three films, Green Fish (1997), Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis (2002) have marked him out as "one of the leading figures of his country's recent cinematic renaissance." But this is not as successful a film as those of other Korean directors whose work I've seen, such as Yong Sang-Soo, Bong Joon-ho, and the prodigiously, almost perversely gifted Park Chan-wook. It may indeed begin as Foundas says as a kind of "Asiatic Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" and then "abruptly and without warning" turns into "something of a thriller, and some time after that a nearly Bressonian study in human suffering." But that progression not only seems random and indigestible; the film sags and loses its momentum toward the end and then simply fizzles out, with no sense of an ending. There are also weaknesses in the action. Shin-ae takes foolish chances with her son, and makes bad choices all along. If she is destined for madness like Betty in Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue, which might explain her peculiar and mistaken choices, that isn't something that is properly developed. This is an interesting film, certainly a disturbing one, but one that leaves one doubtful and dissatisfied, after putting one through an emotional wringer.An official selection of the New York Film Festival presented at Lincoln Center, 2007—an event that has done right by Korean filmmakers in the recent past.