[News Culture] Park So-dam is returning to the big screen as the sharpest mind in a family with revenge on its itinerary.
In The Journey to Gyeongju, Park plays Yeong-ju, a former law student who has walked away from the bar exam and settled into a directionless life at home. She may spend her days watching cryptocurrency prices rise and fall, but when her family sets out on a dangerous mission, her legal instincts and strategic mind quickly take over.
The film follows Ok-sil and her three daughters as they travel to Gyeongju eight years after the youngest daughter, Gyeong-ju, never returned from a school trip. What looks like an ordinary family getaway is actually a carefully staged plan to settle an old score.
Yeong-ju is the second of Ok-sil’s four daughters and was once considered the family’s brightest hope. Now unemployed and seemingly adrift, she becomes the only person capable of turning her mother’s reckless idea into a workable operation.
She initially dismisses the plan as absurd. Once the family commits to it, however, she begins closing every loophole, constructing an alibi and anticipating what could go wrong.
That contrast gives Yeong-ju her edge. She is emotionally drained but mentally alert, approaching each crisis with hard facts and unsentimental logic. Her blunt responses also bring a bracing dose of humor to the family’s increasingly chaotic journey.
Park brings both restraint and bite to the role, allowing Yeong-ju’s exhaustion, intelligence and buried affection for her family to emerge without softening her tough exterior.
Director Kim Mi-jo said Park was the only actor she could imagine playing the fiercely independent and deeply isolated character.
“Yeong-ju is a loner who has learned to rely on herself,” Kim said. “Park So-dam’s analysis was so precise that she took command of the set. Watching her perform gave me chills.”
Park said the cast’s chemistry grew out of extensive conversations with the director and her co-stars.
“We talked so much that it began to feel as though we really had been a family in another life,” she said. “I felt like I was back at the beginning of my career. Every moment of acting was genuinely exciting.”
The Journey to Gyeongju opens in theaters on Aug. 26.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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