Bedford Park (베드포드 파크)
Director – Stephanie Ahn – 2026 – US – Cert. 18 tbc – 121m
****1/2
Two second generation Korean-Americans, adrift from the culture of their ancestral homeland, find solace in one another – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2026 which runsin cinemas from Monday, November 2nd to Tuesday, November 16th
It emerges only in the final minutes of this tale set in New Jersey tale that its two central, Korean-American protagonists, thrown together by chance, both grew up in the same area of Brooklyn, the eponymous Bedford Park. Between them, they occupy two very different worlds, yet the deep connection they experience suggests something in common.
When her mother (Won Mi-kyung) asks the 36-year-old what she saw in “that man”, the younger woman replies with disarming candour, he gave me room to breathe.
We first meet Audrey Park (Moon Choi from Deliver Us From Evil, Hong Won-chan, 2020; Okja, Bong Joon Ho, 2017) indulging in a one night bondage stand with a character we never see again.
She works as a physio, getting into a row with her boss over cuts to services vital to her patients, and being suspended for three weeks after bluntly swearing at him.
She visits her gynaecologist who asks why Audrey keeps putting herself through the trauma of miscarriage when her chances of a healthy birth are only about 5%.
She briefly meets up with her brother Henry (Aaron Yoo), who is trying to sort himself out after giving up on a prestigious position in Chicago, which his mother, eager to impress her social circle, still proudly proclaims him as holding down.
She attempts to sort out her mother’s car accident insurance claim by going round to the other party’s home unannounced. Again, she gets involved in a filthy row after first removing her mother from the situation.
The other person in the car insurance row is Eli (Son Sokku), who has changed his phone as a way to cut himself off from not only his parents but also everything about his previous way of life. Currently without a car, he must get to his security guard job on a shopping mall using the notoriously unreliable public transport system.
Not that Audrey gets on well with her own parents. Her father (Kim Eung-soo from A Good Lawyer’s Wife, Im Sang-soo, 2003) is drunk most of the time, and the sort of drunk who insists her daughter have a drink with him even if she really doesn’t want to because (although he’s ignorant of the fact) she’s had a miscarriage earlier that day. Her mother dresses in smart, well-to-do ladies clothes in which Audrey wouldn’t be seen dead in her everyday life, and would like her to marry a nice, well off, Korean young man like Edward (Simon Kim).
Audrey and Eli initially bond in the middle of the row – he keeps shutting his door on her, and she keeps walking away then coming back and beating on his door with additional demands, the last of which is an urgent request for feminine products because she’s bleeding below the waist. He manages to scavenge some pads from neighbours, and ends up driving her in her car to the hospital.
Off work for three weeks, she offers to drive him around since she has wheels. He is unaware of her photographing him with her old, analogue Nikon at the mall. She turns up at his place of an evening rather than face one of her mother’s prearranged dates with a potential marriage candidate.
There are flashes of his past life too – his white stepbrother Jay (Jefferson White from Civil War, Alex Garland, 2024; Hellboy: The Crooked Man, Brian Taylor, 2023; Eileen, William Oldroyd, 2023) who wants him to come back and work for his dad (you never find out exactly what the job entails – it feels like it probably isn’t entirely within the law), the distant, down at heel white adoptive mother (Cindy Hogan) with whom he finally agrees to meet up.
Otherwise, he attends college, subsequently indulging in athletic sex with a girl who gives him the come on in class, and who he later fails to prosecute for shoplifting at the mall.
It all adds up to a bleak portrait of people a generation or two on from those who’ve left their Korean homeland, who now find themselves ruthless and adrift in American culture. The performances are fantastic, really getting under your skin, even if the film feels like it underwent major creative changes during what must have been a lengthy editing process. The narrative continuity zings around a lot, making it sometimes tough for the viewer to link one scene to the next. Nevertheless, the proceedings have about them a convincing, lived-in feel.
Bedford Park plays in LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2026which runsin cinemas from Monday, November 2nd to Tuesday, November 16th.
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Trailer (LKFF 2026):