Review for Boomerang Family

Introduction

You get married, raise a family, put the kids through school, through college, and eventually they leave home, find jobs, find love, and raise families of their own. It’s inevitable that one day the fledglings will fly the nest. You just don’t expect them to fly back again. Third Window Films’ February release is another Korean take on the dysfunctional family unit. It may not have the supernatural oddity of The Fox Family or the sheer macabre black humour of The Quiet Family, but Boomerang Family’s drama has no little social comment and black comedy of its own.


For one Korean matriarch who is coming to terms with a solitary old age, asking her younger son In-Mo over for dinner to ensure he’s feeding himself properly leads to more than she expected; for In-mo, a failed movie director, failed businessman, and failed husband was about to exit this life at his own hands when his mother’s phone call came. There comes a point where moving back into the family home on the pretext of a little chicken and porridge is a preferable option. He just wasn’t expecting his bully of an older brother Han-mo to be there, a career criminal who is at this point out of prison. Which is when their sister Min-kyeong, working on her second divorce moves back home with her bratty daughter Mi-yeon. The three siblings don’t get along, Mi-yeon falls instantly in hate with her uncles, and they’re now living in an apartment too small for them by far. But their doting mother ensures that there’s meat on the table for every meal.

Picture

Boomerang Family gets a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer on this disc. It’s NTSC, and progressively encoded for 24fps playback on compatible equipment. It’s not the greatest of transfers, as while the image is clear, colours are strong, and there is fair level of clarity, there are issues with aliasing and moiré on even moderately defined detail. There is a fair bit of content on the disc, pushing the total video run time to 3 hours, but that doesn’t account for what seems to be compression that’s a little too zealous.


My review check disc did have an issue at 1.14:28. Playback on my Panasonic Blu-ray player would freeze at that point, for some reason the time display would flash back to around 1.10, and playback would stick for about 10 seconds before resuming. On my Sony DVD player, playback sticks completely until you use frame advance to resume. The layer change actually occurs later at 1.21:44. It’s one of those annoying glitches, which hopefully is restricted to my review copy.

Sound

The sole audio option on this disc is the DD 2.0 Stereo track, which does the job in getting the all-important dialogue across. The optional English subtitles are accurately timed and free of typographical error.

Extras

The disc presents its content with animated menus.

On the disc, you’ll find the original Korean trailer, and a 7 minute making of featurette which is quite interesting, featuring comments from the director and cast interspersed with some behind the scenes footage.


What should have been the meat of the extra features, the 16 minute long Main Cast and Director Interview and the 43 minute Closing Gala and Q&A at London Korean Film Festival 2013 turned out to be not quite for me. These interviews are conducted in English, and rather than editing them so that the Korean replies are subtitled directly, they wait instead for the interpreter to supply the translation. This wouldn’t be a problem but the audio quality in these features is awful. I could barely understand what the native English speakers were saying, let alone those speaking in accented English, and ambient noise tended to drown or muffle everything anyway, particularly the interpreter. I just couldn’t persevere with these.

Finally you’ll find some weblinks on the disc.

Conclusion

It had to happen eventually. Throw enough darts at random and given enough time, one of them will hit the bull’s-eye. This would be the inverse of that situation though, as till now I’ve been able to find something to appreciate about every title that Third Window Films has released. The films that they curate have aspects that are worth preserving, promoting and distributing to as wide an audience as possible. That’s been true whether I’ve loved a film or loathed it. They’ve all offered something new to the medium, something different. I found Boomerang Family to be... mundane.


Boomerang Family starts off as a dark, comic soap opera, and somewhat incongruously for my liking, transforms into a dark, comic gangster movie for its conclusion. The soap opera bit works, the gangster movie not so much, but the key thing here is the dark comedy. The comedy has to click with the viewer, and alas I found Boomerang Family to be only sporadically funny, a little too repetitive with its toilet humour, and lacking a decent narrative flow for the more interesting stuff. It’s one of those films that come across as a collection of moments, where you recount the film as ‘Do you remember the bit where...?’ and fail to really engage with the film as a whole.


It doesn’t help that none of the characters are really that likeable. The whole point of the film of course is that they are generally obnoxious people, petty and vindictive, communicating through belittling and abuse, the message of the film being that despite all this, family comes first. But it really did feel like a soap opera to me, despite some of the more extreme and crude humour, and at times I felt that I was watching Eastenders with more in the way of fart gags. That was especially true at the halfway point of the film, where dirty laundry started to be aired, and all the pernicious little secrets of the family came out.


One key point of the film is that despite all their troubles, the matriarch of the family always manages to have meat on the table. This was emphasised at several points, even becomes a significant plot thread, but at one point in the film, in the background there is a TV report about a serial killer on the loose in the area, and middle school girls going missing. That’s a little foreshadowing of Mi-yeon’s arc later in the film, but I was seriously hoping at that point that the film would indeed take a macabre and truly darkly comic direction. Unfortunately that turned out not to be the case.


Boomerang Family is a film that I found to be decidedly average, which given that Third Window Films’ usual catalogue consists of the quirky and unique is a bit of a quirk in itself. But it’s not a quirk that I would make haste to revisit. The disc isn’t all that special either, with a transfer that is disappointing, even without the glitch that I encountered.