Be My Baby (Mia, 미아, lit. Missing Child)
Director – Yoo Jong-seok – 2025 – South Korea– Cert. 15 tbc – 98m
**
A number of women, trapped in a web of deceit, futilely lie, cheat and scam their way towards hoped-for escape routes that don’t exist – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2026 which runsin cinemas from Monday, November 2nd to Tuesday, November 16th
An encounter between female hospital worker Seo-rim (Kang Hae-rim) and homeless person Soo-mi (Bae Gang-hee) takes place outside early on in this bleak thriller built around women on the margins of Korean society. One character is involved in an insurance scam which will pay out a vast sum of money if it comes off, but you’re never quite sure whether she is in fact the named policy holder or someone else entirely.
We are taken into a complex web of deceit in which most if not all the women interacting with one another are not in fact the people indicated by the names under which we initially encounter them. People are introduced by their name, yet before you know it the same name appears on someone else’s credit card, or a letter addressed to another person. Names frequently switch characters and characters switch names in a world where no one is who they at first appear to be, and identity theft is practised by everyone. Some of this happens so fast that in places the narrative becomes impossible to follow.
A prior familiarity with the actors in the cast would perhaps have made all the difference, but none of the cast were familiar to this writer. As names in the narrative become increasingly disengaged from the characters visible on the screen, keeping up with the plot turns into an ever more frustrating exercise. For English-speaking audiences, the cheap and cheerful translation into English for the subtitling scarcely helps.
Still, this is not without its bravura moments. Two people get out of their car only to have a woman get into it seconds later and drive away at breakneck speed in a desperate attempt to escape her dire current situation. Two backlit men appear out of the shadows to threaten people not expecting them. Drinks are laced with lethal powder, knives suddenly appear in hands bringing violence into play. There is a murder. And for the finale, two women try to outdrink one another until one of them finds an excuse to leave the table and walk away, presumably to beyond the horizon and freedom, leaving the other one stranded in a private, personal hell. Or perhaps she hasn’t escaped to freedom at all.
And private, personal hells are the spaces each of the characters here appears to occupy, futilely lying, cheating and scamming their way towards some possibility of a way out that probably doesn’t even exist. This is bolstered by masterful cinematography boasting much atmospheric use of light and shadow. As an uncompromising vision of the social underbelly, it pulls no punches.
This is a world in which you’d never want to find yourself. Alas, the narrative’s consistent obfuscation of who is actually who, and what each of them is actually up to, means that the audience, too, may wish to escape from this world well before the final credits roll.
With: Lee Tae-seon, Kim Seung-yun
Be My Baby plays in LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2026which runsin cinemas from Monday, November 2nd to Tuesday, November 16th.
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Trailer (no subtitles):
Trailer (LKFF 2026):