South Korean independent film “Concerning My Daughter” tries two different things together. On one side, it is a typical queer drama about one mother trying to deal with her lesbian daughter who suddenly comes with her lover. On the other side, it is also a harrowing story about aging and death as closely observing the mother’s struggle to do the right thing for a senile old lady under her care. Although these two stories seem to be simply rolling in parallel without much interaction between them, the movie handles both of its two stories with equal care and sensitivity, and it is moving to observe how these two stories eventually converge around the end of the movie.

In the beginning, we see how things have often been difficult for its unnamed heroine, who is simply listed as “Mom” in the end credits. She is a plain ordinary middle-aged widow who has earned her small living via working as one of the caregivers at a local facility for old people, and we see her paying a lot of attention to one particular old lady. While she was once a prominent public figure for founding some well-known charity foundation, this old lady has been going through the later stage of Alzheimer’s disease, and our heroine cares a lot about her mainly because there has not been anyone to visit her except the occasional visits from a few folks from that charity foundation.

And then there comes an unexpected change into our heroine’s daily life. When her daughter, who has taught at some local college, soon has to leave her current residence due to some financial problem, she suggests to her daughter that she should move back into their family residence where she has lived alone for years since her husband’s death, but she is caught off guard to see that the daughter brings in a young woman who has been her lover for 7 years.

Because she has been well aware of her daughter’s homosexuality, the mother is not shocked or enraged at all, but we soon begin to sense the considerable awkwardness among the three people in the house. Still believing that her daughter’s homosexuality is a temporary thing, the mother prefers to face her daughter’s lover as less as possible, but her daughter’s lover tries her best for being nice and courteous to her lover’s mother, though there is always a cold sense of disapproval whenever the mother comes across her daughter’s lover inside or outside the house.

However, as a woman who still cares a lot about her daughter’s welfare, the mother comes to know more about what her daughter and her daughter’s lover have to deal with everyday, and we accordingly get some glimpses on how homophobic the South Korean society can possibly be. When a fellow professor of the daughter was fired by their college just for being a lesbian, the daughter boldly comes forward to protest along with a number of supporters, and the mother happens to witness her daughter’s latest struggle at one point.

However, this does not change much the mother’s prejudice against homosexuality. Having watched how her favorite patient and many other old ladies miserably spend the remaining few days of their lives alone without no one to be around them, the mother has been afraid of her daughter tumbling into such a dire circumstance someday, but she still cannot accept that her daughter’s lover will be the one who may stand by her daughter, even after she comes to have a bit of honest conversation with her daughter’s lover.

Never overlooking the irony of its heroine’s refusal to give her daughter and her daughter’s lover the same compassion and empathy she has given to her favorite patient, the screenplay by director/writer Lee Mi-rang, which is based on the novel of the same name by Kim Hye-jin, patiently builds up the story and characters via a series of small episodic moments, which let us get to know more about the mother and several other main characters around her. In case of our heroine’s favorite patient, she is a rather distant figure due to her worsening medical condition, but we also come to understand more of why our heroine’s tries to do a lot more for this helpless old lady than she is supposed to do as a mere employee, and we naturally come to care more about her following efforts along the story.

Although it feels a bit contrived as heading to the eventual resolution of its narrative, the movie is still carried well by another good performance from Oh Min-ae. While looking much more restrained here compared to her flamboyant turn in “Missing Yoon” (2022), Oh did a good job of presenting her character’s complex human sides, and it is poignant to see how her character is changed a bit around the end of the story while readying to move forward for whatever may come next for her life.

The three other main cast members in the film are effective in their respective parts. While Heo Jin brings a bit of life and personality to her increasingly senile character, Lim Se-mi and Ha Yoon-kyung flawlessly embody the strong romantic relationship between their characters right from their first scene in the movie, and you may come to root for them more as watching they struggle along the story in one way or another.

On the whole, “Concerning My Daughter” is an engaging queer drama film to be appreciated for its strong points, Considering how the South Korean society has been quite callous and ignorant about the civil rights of sexual minority people for many years (My city government actually defunded a local film festival just for trying to screen it in public, for example), it surely deserves some more attention in public, and I hope it can actually give a moment of empathy and understanding to many parents of LGBTQ kids out there.