Young Min Kim’s directorial feature, Dawning, looks at how a family deals with trauma and mental health. It follows Haejin Park (Kim Ellis), a trauma specialist, who comes to grips with the suicide of her father ten years ago. It’s a deeply unnerving horror film that shows the explicit nature of mental health and what trauma can do to a person, as well as the deep-rooted issues of family and diaspora. Sometimes it’s difficult to trust your memories and find closure with events that happened in the past.
The movie begins with the suicide of Haejin and her sister Soojin’s (Veronica Kim) father (Felix Park). Ten years later, Haejin finds herself grief-triggered by her patient, and she sees her father from across the building shooting himself. At home, things aren’t getting easier. Haejin is haunted by auditory and visual hallucinations, night terrors, and sleep paralysis demons. She decides to visit her family’s farm since she hasn’t seen her sister and mother for quite some time. Haejin’s mental state deteriorates and she decides to deal with her traumatic past once and for all.
Dawning is dedicated to the people who are grieving through painful trauma and death. The movie also looks at how resentment and abandonment can affect someone’s mental state. In one scene, as Haejin and Soojin catch up after a long time, the latter sister admits to feeling resentment and anger for Haejin leaving her behind. Soojin spent most of her life in isolation and helped her mother on the farm. The director sets up the scene to show the vulnerability of Soojin and Haejin’s guilt, but the dialogue builds the tension by slowly growing a wedge between the sisters. It’s a brilliantly written scene which strikes a chord with the viewer.
While the film works well on building tension and horror, the trajectory of the narrative grows weaker towards the end of the story. Dawning is unsettling, and the big twist, which is revealed at the end, takes so many detours. The twist is revealed in a non-linear structure, and the tone dramatically changes causing it to look like it’s two different movies. There is so much more to the story that the director could have discussed, and while the supernatural and horror elements worked well in this setting, it created more questions than answers.
Dawning fails to create a cohesive narrative with all of these elements. It abandons part of the themes and narratives to focus more on mental health and grief, which isn’t terrible, but the result is not entirely successful. However, Kim and Ellis portray heartbreaking performances with such complicated narrative material. The sheer talent on screen is deeply moving, emotional, and brings a poignant retrospective of grief and trauma. Dawning isn’t a perfectly executed film, but it conveys an important message on the importance of letting go of a dark past.
