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The Journals of Musan Reviews, Ratings, Credits, and More at Metacritic
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The Journals of Musan
The Journals of Musan Image
Metascore
56 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 6 Critics What's this?

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  • Summary: Jeon Seung-chul, a North Korean defector, leaves a resettlement in South Korea and takes up residence in a dilapidated home on the outskirts of Seoul. He finds employment putting up advertisement posters, but yearns for human contact. Instead, he befriends a stray dog.

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 6
  2. Mixed: 3 out of 6
  3. Negative: 0 out of 6
  1. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Staff (Not credited)
    Aug 15, 2011
    80
    Jeon is played to perfection by the director himself. The spare script effectively funnels audience attention into him, who is never less than engaging.
  2. Slant Magazine
    Reviewed by: Kenji Fujishima
    Aug 15, 2011
    75
    If The Journals of Musan indicates anything, it's that people, for the most part, either can't or simply aren't willing to comprehend the circumstances behind others' actions.
  3. Time Out New York
    Reviewed by: David Fear
    Aug 16, 2011
    60
    An attempt to detail the plight of North Koreans in their new homeland, The Journals of Musan doesn't soft-pedal the hardship; Park, however, apparently felt obligated to stack the deck against the film's passive protagonist to a ridiculous degree.

See all 6 Critic Reviews

User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1 out of 1
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 1
  3. Negative: 0 out of 1
  1. emdashm
    9
    Saw this for free at MOMA last Friday, and it's the best Korean drama I've seen in awhile! Also glad to finally see a worthwhile emerging Korean director get some recognition after disappointments by leading veterans in the past few years. At heart, the film dealt with some serious contemporary cultural issues regarding Korea's backhanded discrimination of its own in the treatment of North Korean refugees living in Seoul, as well as the overzealous yet superficial adoption of Christianity and the consequences and experience of living in a super-collectivist cult-ure. Some of the tricks used to engage western audiences and evoke empathy (the dog, religious hymns in the singing room, for example) were cheap but effective; likewise, amateur-ish lens when filming chase scenes and perspective shots. Overall, the level of detail and character sketches/development made for great drama. Among the best and most subtle are scenes at the close of the film, wherein the "love interest" is reduced to just another blind follower, implicitly unworthy of the tragic hero's redemption.… Expand
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