Although religious faith only plays a part in Lee Chang-dong’s new film—his first after a tenure as South Korean Minister of Culture after making 2002’s excellent Oasis—one has to be impressed by the way he and actress Jeon Do-yeon approach one of the hardest possible things to express in cinema—conversion. They do it not through some remarkable conceit or technical expression, but rather they provide perhaps the most vital of all interpretive aspects—context. Secret Sunshine, one might say, is a study of that context, a study of denial. It builds innocuously enough, with widowed mother Shin-ae (Jeon) moving with her young son Jun (Seon Jeong-yeob) from Seoul to Miyang, his father’s hometown whose name in Chinese translates to the film’s title. The reason for the move, like the games the mother and son play that verge on casually masochistic—Jun plays dead and pretends to have gone missing—are quietly disconcerting, all hinting with that wonderful kind of overt subtlety found in melodramas at the possibly unhealthy way Shin-ae and her boy are coping with—or masking over—tremendous grief and loss. These hints are superbly communicated naturalistically in little things and small mannerisms, unfolding at a gradual, leisurely pace as the family settles into the small town, the mother both irritating some of the locals as well as making new friends, and generally keeping both the town and the audience guessing as to who Shin-ae really is behind the veneer of her family’s new life.

It is really only when another tragedy strikes and the film takes a sharp turn from naturalism to pure melodrama and Shin-ae miraculously finds solace in the local Christian community that these previous idiosyncrasies of her and Jun reveal themselves to be disturbing manifestations of denial. Now out in the open for the audience to see, what could have been viewed as healthy behavior before the tragedy or as an honest conversion after have been re-contextualized as the actions of a deeply unstable person. Since the death of the father and its immediate repercussions have only trickled into the film when Lee picks up the story with Jun and Shin-ae’s car broken down on the outskirts of Miyang, it is Shin-ae’s frantic grief colliding with Christianity that takes the brunt of the film’s melodramatic impact. But, again, it is not religion that the film is interested in, but rather in Shin-ae’s seemingly unending process of dealing with compound grief. Constantly in the background and doggedly devoted to the town’s new female resident despite her increasing neurosis is modest mechanic Kim (Song Kang-ho), who seems to think at first that his mere presence around Shin-ae will produce romantic results. Like the way Lee develops Shin-ae’s character, initial perception of our heroine’s psychology—that Shin-ae simply doesn’t like Kim—gradually reveals itself to be a kind of a behavioral blindness, a covering up that allows her to function without dependency in the world. Pushing the film from naturalism to melodrama and even towards dark satire, Shin-ae takes her denial to the very edge of sanity, and for the most part the film follows ably along, in awe of her strength and perseverance.

If I have not talked much about Secret Sunshine’s style it is because Lee Chang-dong puts it almost entirely at the service of his actors. To capture Jeon Do-yeon’s brilliant, classically melodramatic performance—somehow believably running the gamut from the first act’s quotidian, observational style performance all the way to violent hysterics—and Song’s shrugging, low-key comedic relief which helps ground Jeon’s histrionics, Lee uses nimble Steadicam photography and the unexpected size of the Cinemascope frame to capture emotional size of this personal story of the dismayingly cyclical path someone can take into the depths of denial. Lee translates mental stability and spiritual peace into less grandiose aims, as Shin-ae struggles to find a way to rationally live her day-to-day life in society after severe trauma. The path taken and the emotions expressed get more excessive as Shin-ae piles up the grief, and while Lee’s melodrama seems honest for most of the film, by the end the script takes her behavior to an unfortunately clichéd extreme. Despite this structural misstep, the most devastating aspect of the story is not these later, excessive moments but rather an earlier one which finally completely opens our eyes to Shin-ae’s guarded process of recovery, where she is stripped of the self-denying defensive mechanism she relies so much on. Through it all lingers hopeful Kim (in a modest, patient, and very funny performance by Song), a possible savior for Shin-ae if she can remove the layers of denial that keep her stable. But Kim also contains the disturbing threat that Secret Sunshine shows existing in every step of life, that this potential relief—like playing games with one’s son, like romance, like the devotion to a loved one’s memory, like religion—is just another lie covering up deep pain. Through his determination to take Shin-ae through this oft-extreme journey and direct it in such a flawless, unshowy manner, Lee tackles his brutal melodrama with a sobriety that lends the film a heartrending realism that is honest and true despite its considerable excesses.