The Accordion Door (아코디언 도어)
Director – Son Kyeong-su – 2025 – South Korea – Cert. 12a tbc – 115m
*****
A boy loses his memories at age nine, wins prizes as a writer, and falls for the new girl at school who plays football – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2026 which runs in cinemas from Monday, November 2nd to Tuesday, November 16th
A high school drama of sorts, this starts and ends with the national youth essay competition on the subject of ‘waves’. The lad at the back of the class writes, “I was destined to be unremarkable anyway.” On his paper, he adds, am I a cloud? As a child in a flashback, Lee Ji-soo can barely master the simplest of concepts. His mother (Ok Ji-young) pays attention to him while his dad (Park Jong-hwan from Concrete Utopia, Eom Tae-hwa, 2023) is on his mobile phone.
The teenage Ji-soo (Moon Woo-jin) wipes his eyes and repeats, from the exercise he failed, “rain, river, ocean, clouds.” A cloud hovers near him, sprouts a tendril, and pokes him in the eye against a gentle guitar lament that turns into a thundering rock lament.
In the present, at the back of the class, Ji-soo adds on his paper, the day I went missing.
Although he wins prestigious prizes for his essay writing, he doesn’t interact with most other pupils and is widely written off. Like the protagonist of Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) He hides a lot in closets or stands outside classrooms where he can simply observe people.
His only friend is science nerd Oh Jong-yoon (Kim Geon from My Daughter is a Zombie, Pil Gam-sung, 2025, review coming soon) who is currently embarking on a project to launch a small hot air balloon into the atmosphere. On the first attempt, filmed by Ji-soo, it explodes before take off.
Ji-soo becomes obsessed with newly transferred girl student Jeong Hyeon-joo (Lee Jae-in), a keen footballer who wears a number one shirt. He imagines himself walking onto the pitch of a girls’ football match and picking up the ball, to be asked by her, “give it back”. “Give it back”, says his younger self, briefly inflating him with the compressed air gun until his head explodes, leaving a neckless shirt collar straight out of Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977), a Lynchian image bolstered by his mum pulling back the duvet to find a wet bed reminiscent of The Grandmother (David Lynch, 1970).
Her watches her practise football from the classroom window, he watches from behind an accordion door as she requests a sanitary pad from a teacher. She finds him, and is nice to him, telling him she’s read his work, her mother (Hwang Soon-mi) is a famous poet, and to ask if he needs anything.
He regularly leaves food for local street cat Cutty Sark, and on one occasion outside he and Jong-yoon find a pile of moving tendrils. Ji-soo picks one up and examines it while his friend recoils, horrified.
He spends more and more time with Hyeon-joo, often practising football with her, until the day when he falls into the river retrieving a ball. He becomes convinced that the tendril that has lived inside him since age nine, and is the source of both his writing talent and his lack of memories from before that date, has left him and entered her. And that might just be true, because even as he struggles with his writing which always came easily before, her footballing abilities go from mediocre to outstanding.
None of this is destined to end well, and ultimately he gets a black mark against his name in school when his attachment to Hyeon-joo takes an unexpectedly nasty turn.
By the end, he has left school and is applying for a job in a coffee shop. You’re a weird kid, says the lady boss. Yes, I am, he replies, at ease with himself in a way he wasn’t before.
Behind the accordion door, he half puts on a sweatshirt so that his head is hidden inside its form. Like a strange mutation…
The piece plays equally well as a slice of bizarre science fiction about possession by an alien being, a drama about a troubled child dealing badly with parental conflict, or an exploration into introversion and creativity. Each of those ideas resonates with the other, while the overall effect is captivating.
The Accordion Door plays in LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2026 which runs in cinemas from Monday, November 2nd to Tuesday, November 16th.
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Trailer (no subs, mostly music):
Trailer (LKFF 2026):