Falling for a gentle 'Riceboy Sleeps' - review

Anthony Shim’s Riceboy Sleeps, which opens in theaters around the country on December 28, is a gentle, indie drama about a Korean single mother and her son who move to Canada and make a new life for themselves. 

While it features many familiar tropes from other immigration stories, the characters are so likable, and the actors’ performances are so natural that there is much to enjoy. Unlike so many films that start off strong and become less compelling as their stories unfold, Riceboy Sleeps grows increasingly interesting as it goes along, with the last third by far the most moving.

Korea has been coming into its own in recent years as an international entertainment powerhouse. The surprise 2020 Oscar win for the Korean movie Parasite paved the way for many Korean filmmakers to cross over to audiences abroad. 

Many television series from Korea have also become hits on streaming services, most notably Squid Game, and filmmakers of Korean descent living abroad have begun to make their mark. Celine Song’s recent film Past Lives and Lee Isaac Chung’s 2020 Minari both tell stories of the Korean immigrant experience to North America. 

Like Minari, which was set in the 1980s, Riceboy Sleeps is the story of a Korean family immigrating to North America in the 1990s – but the two movies are different in most ways. What Riceboy Sleeps really has going for it is the strong relationship at its core, between the fiercely determined mother, So-Young (Choi Seung-Yoon) and her son, Dong-Hyun (played by Dohyun Noel Hwang as a child and Ethan Hwang as a teen). 

Young actors are utterly believable, but Choi Seung-Yoon is the real star

We learn early on about the family’s backstory. So-Young was an orphan who learned to take care of herself so well that her son sees her as a kind of super-heroine. As a young university student, she met and married his father, who developed a mental illness and committed suicide. 

His family – very unfairly – blamed her for their son’s death and, with no one to keep her in Korea, she decided to move to Canada, where she hoped she could give her son a better life. Her factory job isn’t great, and she faces harassment from her white colleagues, but it is enough to support the two of them, and at home they have a lot of fun.

Predictably, it’s hard for Dong-Hyun at school, where the other kids taunt and bully him, and, in a scene we’ve seen many times in many contexts, his classmates make fun of the Korean food he brings for lunch. When they make fun of his name, his teacher suggests that he change it. Dong-Hyun thinks Michael Jordan would be a good idea, but his mother doesn’t agree, and he pretty much always does what she wants. 

This kind of exchange is typical of the knowing humor in the movie, those kinds of intense but good-natured arguments that take place between close and loving parents and children. 

Riceboy Sleeps is also very good at depicting the isolation of the characters. They move to Canada knowing no one, and other than one fellow Korean employee in the factory, whom So-Young befriends, they remain a universe of two. 

While many immigration stories contrast the loneliness of the immigrants in their new country with the close family they left behind, here So-Young is a double exile, with no one who cares about her in either country. 

But then there is a time jump of about 10 years and things have changed. Dong-Hyun is a resentful teen who bleaches his hair blond and hangs out with his friends, getting into typical teenage trouble. So-Young is engaged to her supervisor, who is played by the film’s director, a Korean born in Canada who is head-over-heels in love with her, and she now has a wider circle of friends. 

They might seem so contented that the story could get boring, but a deus ex machina intervenes to shake things up. As timeworn as this plot device used is, it sends the mother and son to Korea, to visit a family Dong-Hyun has never known, and this is the freshest and most engaging part of the movie. 

The entire cast is excellent, and the young actors are utterly believable in their scenes. But the real star of the movie is Choi Seung-Yoon, who gives a wonderful performance as the mother who is so strong-willed she can be annoying, but who is nevertheless very vulnerable. 

She has won awards in Canada and around the world for her performance, deservedly so. Anthony Shim, who had a long career as an actor before he became a director, has turned this semi-autobiographical story into an engaging film.