There Are No Words (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for rituals of death or mourning
Take a Drink: for old photographs
Take a Drink: for lies admitted to
Take a Drink: for contradictions
Do a Shot: when it looks like Dad may have been mixed up in some serious business
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
While everyone is well aware of the autocratic nature of life in North Korea, it’s less known that its neighbor to the South only emerged from its own decades of life under the rule of a military dictatorship in 1987.
There Are No Words is an autobiographical documentary in which Canadian filmmaker Min Sook Lee delves into her family’s past- particularly her mother’s suicide and her father’s potentially sordid pre-immigration history.
A Toast
The first thing Min Sook’s 90-year-old father does when asked to take part in a documentary about his life and their family is to nonchalantly ask, “can I lie?” He’s not against telling the truth, or at least his version of it, but he’s pretty open that telling the full truth is going to change some history as the family knows it about himself.
It turns out that Dad was an old KCIA spy tasked with rooting out Communists during the days of South Korea’s military dictatorship, and as Min Sook delves further into it, the investigation becomes a mix of both the personal and the political. While it’s never clear whether he took part in the most notorious of that agency’s actions, from the assassination of a President to widespread anti-Democratic violence on student protestors several times in the 1980s, it’s fairly obvious he was a man used to using force and coercion.
Whether that authoritarian bent is what would eventually push her mother to jump off of their 24-story apartment building is never directly asked, but in talking to others about this woman she never felt she knew, a portrait of a once vivacious girl who’d become the stoic-seeming, quiet woman who did this emerges. There are no easy answers to familial history that is this painful.
Beer Two
This is some dark and traumatic shit, and probably merits any degree of trigger warning one would give these days. More frustrating, perhaps, is how this story resists closure (and real life often does). In the end, it still feels like Min Sook (and we) come no closer to knowing her mother, or understanding her choices.
Verdict
There Are No Words is a brave and unvarnished investigation by filmmaker Min Sook Lee into her family’s histories and traumas.
