Dancer-sex worker in a Koreatown karaoke spot by night and nurse for her comatose father by day (a hospice is out of the question), Kasie (Tiffany Chu) puts out a call to her brother Carey (Teddy Lee) for help after the current co-caregiver up and quits. Carey arrives, and the tone quickly shifts from somber family drama to giddy, borderline incestuous first date. Next up, a slapstick gambol as estranged son wheels bedridden father through the streets, bed and all. It may look and feel like Hou-Hsiao Hsien (Millenium Mambo) and sound like Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love), but writer-director Justin Chon (Gook) doesn’t have what it takes to do all that paraphrasing and still make the film his own. Neither character is complex enough to warrant a character study, so Chon runs a zigzag interference. Confronting one’s emotions is hard; violence is easy. Any bets on how this climaxes? (For those hell-bent on a happy ending, a layer of sap’s been added to cushion the inevitable fall.) (2019) — Scott Marks
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