South Korean independent film “A Wild Roomer” surprised me in one unexpected way or another. While it mostly feels dry and detached in terms of mood, character, and storytelling, the movie often catches us off guard with a series of offbeat moments, and you may be a bit amazed due to how it organically arrives at its last very scene even though it seems to be aimlessly wandering here and there along with its earnestly ordinary hero.

At first, we get to know how a young male bachelor named Gi-hong (Park Gi-hong) has earned his modest living in and around Seoul. He is a plain carpenter who has been doing one small interior work after another, and the early part of the movie quickly establishes his current status. He and several other workers including a close friend of his have worked on a little place inside one building which will be used by a young piano teacher, and the opening scene shows him and his friend entering the space at one night and then sleeping there because they are quite drunk and do not want to be late for the last day of their work.

Gi-hong has resided in a little neighborhood outside Seoul, and the movie gradually depicts how he lives right next to his landlord couple. He lives in an additional house which is incidentally connected with the main house on the second floor, and his landlord, who has been unemployed for some unspecified reason, is often eager to have some drinking time with Gi-hong. While he does not seem to be really enjoying spending time with his landlord, Gi-hong is not particularly annoyed at least, and the landlord’s wife has no problem with that because her husband has someone to hang around with during her frequent absence.

In fact, her husband later confides to Gi-hong that she married him not because of loving him, and we naturally cannot help but wonder more about their rather ambiguous marital relationship – and how Gi-hong has been allowed into their daily life. Do they need Gi-hong merely for some extra income for them? Or do they actually need someone like him, who can easily fill some void between them without much disruption?

Anyway, Gi-hong’s rather uneventful daily life is suddenly disrupted when he belatedly discovers what happened to his van. There is a big dent on the roof of his vehicle, and it soon turns out that somebody jumped upon the van at that night when Gi-hong and his friend went into the building for sleeping there. As a matter of fact, there was a little strange thing noticed by his friend around that time, and this strongly suggests that there was someone else in the building besides them.

After checking the surveillance camera of his van, Gi-hong becomes quite convinced that this mysterious person caused the damage to his van as getting out the building via a bathroom window, but he does not have any idea on who the hell this mysterious figure is. Although this mysterious figure happened to be detected by the surveillance camera of the van around that time, the rather faint video image only shows that this mysterious figure is a young woman who may be one of those homeless delinquents out there, and that is the only clue for him for now.

Instead of letting itself driven by this little mystery, the screenplay by writer/director/co-producer/editor Lee Jeong-hong, who makes a feature film debut here after making several acclaimed short films, simply strolls along with its hero as he continues his daily life as usual, and it occasionally throws oddly interesting moments as deftly balancing itself between low-key comedy and unadorned realistic drama. In case of a part involved with Gi-hong’s family, it seems rather redundant at first, but we get to know more about his distant relationship with his family, and there are also several interesting visual moments including the one showing two figures riding bicycles in the middle of one dark night.

Around the point where its third act begins, the movie makes a little unexpected left turn via the accidental encounter between Gi-hong and a certain supporting character. As this character gets more involved with not only Gi-hong but also a few other characters around him, we come to wonder more about what is exactly going on among them, but the movie wisely does not clarify their situation much even when it eventually comes to its very last shot. Regardless of how you can interpret the circumstance surrounding Gi-hong, we can sense at least that now Gi-hong has several matters to handle in his life besides his work while another usual day of his is beginning.

I was not so surprised to learn later that most of the performers in the film are actually non-professional ones without any previous acting experience. Park Gi-hong, who is incidentally a close friend of the director, and several main cast members around him are quite natural in their unpretentious acting, and their characters are imbued with enough life and personality to interest us. While Park is subtly engaging as the humble center of the film, Ahn Joo-kin, Choi Kyung-joon, Lee Gi-bbeum, Lee So-jung, and Chun Gil are also solid in their respective supporting roles, and Ahn is particularly amusing whenever his landlord character tries to spend more time with Gi-hong in any possible way.

Overall, “A Wild Roomer”, which won several awards when it was shown at the Busan International Film Festival in last year, is one of more interesting South Korean films of this year, and I guess I can have some expectation on whatever will come next from its director, who clearly demonstrates here that he is a talented filmmaker who really knows how to interest and engage us. Sure, it will require some patience at first due to its slow narrative pacing and elusive tone, but it will draw you more into the story and characters once you accept what and how it is about, so I sincerely recommend you to give it a chance someday.