Why Hasn’t the World Stopped? — Korean Director Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine
Nothing has happened, and yet the boundary has already made itself visible.
The first shot of Secret Sunshine is the sky seen from inside a car window. It is the sky seen by a child forced to keep his eyes open. The edge of the car window cuts the sky into a small piece. The sky is there, but behind glass, he can never touch it. However vast the sky may be, it has nothing to do with him.
Later, the child dies.
The child’s mother sits in a police car, unable to get out and identify the body. She looks out from inside the car window. The same composition returns. Here, Lee Chang-dong does something exceptionally cruel: he overlays the mother’s eyes with the child’s eyes. It is not that they see the same sky, but that this sky, silent and vast, has witnessed both their life and death.
There is no wailing. The world does not stop. The child dies, and the sky does not change. The dim clothing shop opens as usual; the women gather at the beauty salon to gossip as usual; the garage owner appears as usual with his excessive kindness. Sunlight does not stop falling because of a mother’s grief.
From here, Lee Chang-dong opens the boundary of our imagination of cruelty: disaster does not happen in an abnormal place. It happens in an ordinary small town. A town with pharmacies, churches, markets, cram schools, noodle shops, and garages.
At this moment, I am standing in Miryang, the town in the film. A barefoot old woman sits on gray limestone tiles, selling black, overripe melons. The pink, green, and bright yellow signs hanging along the street are louder than her hawking voice. Dense, tangled electrical wires droop between buildings, cutting across empty streets. There is no foreshadowing of tragedy here, only an emptiness overexposed by sunlight.
Yes, what is frightening about Secret Sunshine is not darkness, but the fact that it has warmth, order, and an ordinariness so complete that one can neither affirm nor deny anything about it. Where the sunlight is most intense, shadows flourish.
Shin-ae moves with her son to the hometown of her dead husband, trying to merge into this small town like secret sunshine. Lee Chang-dong’s frontal shots of her face often reveal her dark fissures. At the beauty salon, she hears others speaking ill of her. The face in the mirror suppresses rage, struggling to hold the steady shape of a human being. At the landlord’s house, she sits at the piano and plays a broken piece of music. The camera films her face, humiliated and isolated. In prison, the criminal says joyfully that God has already forgiven him. The camera again stares at her face. What that face bears is not only shock, but also the anger and defeat of having her last remaining power taken away.
Shin-ae had believed that forgiveness was the last card she held.
After her son’s death, religion gives her a position: she is no longer merely a humble victim. She can make a choice higher than hatred. She can become the merciful one who forgives. This allows her to hold a certain sacred power again.
But the criminal says that God has already forgiven him.
That sentence turns her trump card into waste paper. What Shin-ae truly cannot bear is not that the criminal shows no remorse, but that God has bypassed her. She has not yet forgiven him, and yet he has already been saved. Religion had promised to give her pain a place to rest; in the end, it also gives the perpetrator’s sin a place to rest. Faith is no longer comfort. It becomes a second injury.
Glass appears repeatedly in Secret Sunshine: car windows, the beauty salon mirror, the glass door of the garage, the prison visitation window, the windows at church gatherings. Shin-ae is always looking through glass, yet unable to reach the sky, justice, love, or salvation.
Religion is the same. It is like a pane of transparent glass. It lets one see light, lets one believe another world exists, lets one believe that suffering will eventually be soothed. And yet the glass has not disappeared at all. The more Shin-ae relies on an external faith, the more she relies on a language of happiness, forgiveness, and grace, the less able she is to truly touch her inner reality.
So she begins to destroy.
She steals, seduces the pastor, attacks the prayer gathering. She looks at the sky with contempt: “Are You watching?” That is not a prayer, but an interrogation. She wants to drag the God wrapped in church, hymns, and absolution back to the scene of her suffering, and to the battlefield where she obtains the privilege of action through degrading herself.
Obedience is useless. Provocation is useless too. So she throws a stone—
The glass cracks, but does not shatter.
A child dies, and the world does not stop. A mother cracks open, and there is no way for her to recover. Lee Chang-dong had already written this condition of life in his early short story “Fire and Ash.” In the story, a father who has lost his child watches spring arrive as usual, watches pollen continue to drift, watches the streets remain crowded as usual. Every day, the television reports new events. The world keeps producing new disasters and new deaths.
These two works point toward an unbearable fact: the death of one child is not enough to make the world stop. Under such cruel conditions, reason begins to fail, and the body takes over everything. In Secret Sunshine, Shin-ae screams, cannot sleep, goes mad, and vomits. “Fire and Ash” also dwells on the father’s inflammation, pain, nausea, and vomiting. The child’s death lodges in the body like a foreign object, impossible to digest.
But there is an important difference between the two works. “Fire and Ash” was completed in 1987, during the era of South Korea’s democratization movement. In the story, university students set themselves on fire in protest; those burning bodies are connected to history, ideals, and the possibility of changing the world. At the end of the story, the student engulfed in flames pierces through death and becomes a mythic figure rising upward, prophesying a certain spiritual transcendence.
Secret Sunshine no longer believes in this. There is no revolution. No historical narrative. No sublime ideal. No myth of salvation. If “Fire and Ash” still tries to give death meaning, then Secret Sunshine says this: death has no meaning at all. The death of a child cannot change the world. The world will not become more sacred because of it. This makes Secret Sunshine colder than “Fire and Ash.” It leaves behind a lucidly living person who has received no salvation, who cannot forgive from the heart, but who, after every affirmation and negation of life has disappeared, chooses to go on living.
And so, in Secret Sunshine, the back of someone stripped of all support becomes especially radiant.
When Shin-ae collapses, Lee Chang-dong does not film her face. After the child disappears, we see her back as she squats by the roadside and cries. After registering the child’s death, we see her curled up by the street, coughing uncontrollably. When church members enter her home to pray for her, and a living loach leads her into complete collapse, the camera watches her back as it convulses violently.
A face shown directly gives pain a finite outline. It is the pain hidden on the other side of the back—the absent face—that stirs our boundless imagination. And the back keeps making us aware: we are looking at her, but we cannot reach her.
The frontal face is a social mask. The back is the ruin and collapse that society still has no way to contain.
These two form the subtle and precise camera language of Secret Sunshine. Shin-ae’s face often appears in moments when she is being watched, examined, required to respond to the world. Her back appears when language fails. There is no confession there, no explanation possible, no intention to trim down the vast chaos. There is only a body on the verge of collapse, unable to stand steadily before the world.
At the end of the film, Shin-ae leaves the psychiatric hospital and goes to the beauty salon for a haircut, only to encounter the criminal’s daughter. She cannot remain seated there. She returns home, picks up a pair of scissors, and goes into the yard. The garage owner holds a mirror for her. The mirror is still glass, but in this moment it is no longer merely a surface separating her from the world. It becomes a tool, allowing her to see herself and bear herself. Her back is turned to us. But in the mirror, there is her face.
This time, the face and the back meet. She has not forgiven. She has not come to believe in God again. She is simply trimming, with her own hands, those things on her body that have grown too long, too tangled, and can no longer be left to grow unchecked.
Hair falls.
Like sunlight falling. The final shot gazes at the strands of hair on the ground, gazes at the soil illuminated by sunlight. It is not sacred light. It simply makes no distinctions, falling on an ordinary corner.
Lee Chang-dong does not answer the question: if neither death nor living has meaning, what are we to do? He lets Shin-ae sit in the yard and cut her own hair. The action is small. So small it is almost still. But more than any grand salvation, it comes closer to the true tremor of life.
Originally published in UNITAS magazine.