Have you ever felt the keen, foretelling sense that a story will leave an impact on you? A few months ago, when scrolling through my timeline, I believe I found one that did. Flashing across the screen were edits, pictures, and posts of excitement centred around the 2023 film Soulmate.
Based on what I saw, the film seemed to revolve around two best friends and the journey of their lives together throughout the course of adulthood and their evolving relationship. From the beautiful, vividly coloured visuals to the sentimentality of the story, I highly anticipated its release as much as everyone else.
After finally making up my mind to watch it in November, I was left with many reflections. I plan to explore these in the following review.
A quick disclaimer: in order to dive into my thoughts related to the plot, I will be spilling some spoilers of the film. You’ve been warned!
For context, the film Soulmate, directed by Min Yong-geun, is based on the 2016 film with the same title. The 2023 film follows two protagonists: Mi-so, who is adventurous and bold, and Ha-eun, who is ambitious and reserved. The two girls meet at 11-years-old, and quickly become friends, who spend endless hours together both in and out of school. They stay attached at the hip until their late teens, when a misunderstanding and severe case of miscommunication cause a forever-altering strain on their relationship.
Soulmate (2023) contains themes of lasting friendship and the complexities of adolescence and adulthood, which the colour grading, scenery, and filming style achieve stunningly. Both girls grow up together on Jeju Island, where scenes of them as children and young teenagers show them exploring and spending time together amongst nature. These scenes further establish the carefree, joyous atmosphere they grew up in.
Many of these scenes are lush with colour, with a warmth to them that allows nostalgia to seep through each frame. These cinematic choices succeed in framing their childhood and teenage years in an idyllic light before the complications of adulthood and growing apart rise to the surface. This contrast is further defined by the more muted tones found in several of the scenes where they are either estranged from each other, or when melancholy is present.
Certain scenes share a hazy, dreamlike effect to them, which allows the viewer to become encompassed in the memory of the characters’ friendship. This also contributes to the nostalgic feeling of the film and the strength of the narrative.
The themes of adulthood and friendship are also conveyed through the characters’ constant returning to each other. Both Mi-so and Ha-eun have individual goals in mind — Mi-so desires to live freely through travel and painting, while Ha-eun is intent on fulfilling her father’s dream of her becoming a teacher, willing to discard her passion for art.
After Mi-so moves away from Jeju Island, the two friends are separated but constantly keep in contact. In her letters, Mi-so chooses to lie about her worldly travels, for, in reality, she is struggling financially. The contrast between the harsh realities of adulthood and her romantic daydreams as a teenager was definitely a relatable and authentic plotline.
Now, as women, the two best friends continue to reunite. Whether it be in bursts of rage and resentment or tender offers of help and catching up, they are always drawn back to each other.
I thought that this film brilliantly showcased how Mi-so and Ha-eun were able to find a lot of their self-identity within their friendship. As they have been with each other since childhood, they feel that they know each other in a way that surpasses the level of other interpersonal relationships and, therefore, can understand and care for one another unlike anyone else.
I could personally relate to this aspect of the film. Most of my close friends have known me since elementary or high school, and because we have been through so many experiences together, growing up side by side, I can almost trust their knowledge and perception of me more than my own.
Just as any soulmates do, Mi-so and Ha-eun swiftly enter one another’s lives repeatedly, as though neither of them had ever left. There is a connection between them that never ceases to exist, whether they are apart or together, against each other or on the same side.
The film has a scattered timeline, switching between the past, with the girls’ blossoming friendship and the fluctuation of their pain and reignited comfort with each other, and the present, where Mi-so is in her thirties and reminiscing about their bond through Ha-eun’s blog posts.
In addition to this, the film also plays tricks on viewers by including scenes that are fabricated from the characters’ imagination, then later revealing what really occurred in that moment. Early on in the film, when Mi-so is alone with Jin-woo, Ha-eun’s partner, they kiss. However, closer to the ending, it’s revealed that Mi-so never kissed Jin-woo and rejected him. The scene of them kissing is most likely a product of Ha-eun’s imagination, fear, or secret resentment of Mi-so.
I quite liked this format since it made the film intriguing and really honed in the element of perspective and judgement, which is heightened through the characters’ lies and lack of vulnerability with each other. Many of the characters’ fears and desires were exhibited through lies, imaginings, and false scenarios, so I think it was an interesting way of indirectly portraying their insecurities. However, I could tell from confused Reddit posts that some people found the misleading scenes difficult to understand, which is completely fair, considering some of the plotlines that are split between imagined and real depictions rely on inferring.
One criticism of this film is against the first incident that triggers Mi-so and Ha-eun’s estrangement. After Jin-woo (Ha-eun’s partner) attempts to kiss Mi-so, she kicks him away. Due to this incident, she abruptly leaves Jeju Island to live in the city. The suddenness of her actions could be attested to many things — her guilt over him having made a pass at her, her own attraction to him, and/or her inability to share with Ha-eun what happened in order to keep their friendship intact. However, it’s the first of many events that causes conflict, and it all started with Jin-woo.
In popular media, there tends to be several cases of female friendships being destroyed by a man who has romantic intentions and/or behaviours with each of them. From shows that Gen Z grew up watching, like Girl Meets World, to early 2010s rom-coms, like Something Borrowed, there is a definite trope of two best friends either being torn apart or pushed into competition with each other because of a guy who cannot make up his mind over which person he wants to pursue more.
And it’s a trope that, in my opinion, has become quite overdone. In media, friendships between women do not always need to hinge and crumble under the weight of a man whom they’ve barely known. There exists a wide array of complex reasons and events that could lead to a fictional friendship’s demise — ones that are a lot more interesting and convincing, too.
In fact, in a scene near Soulmate’s ending, Ha-eun and Mi-so share a revealing conversation about their friendship, where both women admit they hate each other. I wish that this, along with other grievances in their friendship, had been explored more deeply. But, perhaps that is the entire point of the film — Ha-eun and Mi-so could have resolved and communicated about these problems, but their fears and inability to be completely open about their jealousy, bitterness and contempt prevented them from doing so. The fragility of their friendship teaches a lesson of the care and openness that friendship requires in order to be sustained for years.
After finally watching and processing this film, I felt myself welling with emotion, itching to talk to my friends and be more intentional about making time for them. Soulmate possesses a structure in its story akin to a romance film, which emphasizes the significance and beauty of a true friendship. The truth is, I think it’s easy to forget that friends can be our soulmates too — as friends are people we form everlasting bonds with that are never completely severed and can always be used as a rope to guide us back to sentimental moments with each other.
Soulmate, as a whole, showcases this idea without hesitation. The film’s plot ensures that viewers leave the experience wondering why they’ve gone so long without seeing their most cherished, beloved friends as anything less than soulmates whom they share their own love stories with. For that’s what Soulmate is — a story of Mi-so and Ha-eun, who refuse to live a life that is separated by distance and forgetting, and that keeps their friendship alive in their memories forever.