South Korean film “Sister Yoojung” is about a young woman who comes to realize that she has not been that close to a family member she should have supported and comforted more. While its story begins with a rather alarming incident, the movie calmly and sensitively observes its heroine’s emotional struggles along the story, and it surely earns the quiet tear and poignancy of its finale.

At first, we observe how things have been busy for Yoo-jung (Park Ye-young), who works as a night shift nurse at the cardiology department of some big general hospital. Mainly due to the demanding aspects of her occupation, she is always quite tired whenever she returns to an apartment where she lives along with her younger sister Gi-jung (Lee Ha-eun) and their aunt, and she is already asleep when her younger sister is about to go to her high school as usual early in the morning.

On one day, Yoo-jung receives an unexpected call from the local police, who notify to her that Gi-jung is arrested as the prime suspect of one disturbing incident at her school. After a dead infant, who was apparently abandoned not long after the birth, was found in one of the bathrooms in the school, the local police quickly embark on questioning a number of female students, and then Gi-jung confesses that she is the one responsible for the incident, though she is not even on the suspect list from the beginning.

Because both she and her aunt have not suspected anything from Gi-jung, Yoo-jung is shocked as much as her aunt, and that reminds her more of how she has not given much attention to her younger sister due to her busy work. Because their mother died not long after Gi-jung was born, Yoo-jung is supposed to be the one who should stand close to Gi-jung, but, as her aunt points out early in the story, nothing much has been exchanged between her and Gi-jung during last several months, so Yoo-jung feels more guilty about what happened to her younger sister.

However, to Yoo-jung’s frustration, Gi-jung remains silent and distant even when she is allowed to meet her older sister under the supervision of a detective assigned to her case. For being less punished for what she is accused of, she must tell more about how she became pregnant or what really happened on that horrible day, but she does not say anything except admitting her guilt, and Yoo-jung is surely at a loss about what to do for her younger sister. In the worst case, Gi-jung can be severely sentenced for infanticide, and the impending possibility of getting expelled from her school looks nothing compared to that.

Yoo-jung eventually searches for anyone who can tell anything to help her younger sister, and that person in question is Hee-jin (Kim Yi-kyeong), who has been Gi-jung’s best friend as shown from the occasional flashback scenes. It looks like Hee-jin knows something about what happened on that day, but she is also reluctant to tell anything to Yoo-jung, and that only makes Yoo-jung all the more frustrated.

Now this sounds like a typical mystery drama, but the movie takes its time as focusing more on the emotional conflicts among its three main characters, and it also pays some attention to a subplot involved with one of the patients handled by Yoo-jung at her workplace. This patient has been under a very risky circumstance due to her pregnancy, and her fragile emotional/physical condition leads to Yoo-jung realizing more of how emotionally vulnerable her younger sister has been due to her unwanted pregnancy and its devastating aftermath.

Although it eventually goes for some melodrama during its last act, the movie steadily sticks to its restrained storytelling approach as letting us have more understanding and empathy on both Yoo-jung and Gi-jung. At one point later in the story, Yoo-jung comes to learn that she must open her heart more to her younger sister as well as Hee-jin with some patience and consideration, and there is a touching moment when Yoo-jung becomes more honest to her younger sister on how much she has cared about her younger sister since they became orphaned since their mother’s death.

The movie certainly depends a lot on the good performances from its three main cast members, who are all believable in their respective characters’ inner struggles along the story. Park Ye-young did a subtle job of conveying to us the accumulating frustration and exasperation behind her character’s weary appearance, and that makes a dramatic contrast with when Yoo-jung comes to show more of herself to not only Gi-jung but also a few other characters around her. Lee Ha-eun ably suggests whatever is churning behind her character’s frustratingly elusive attitude, and Kim Yi-kyeong also holds her own place well between her two fellow cast members.

Overall, “Sister Yoojung” is a modest but engaging character drama which handles its sensitive main subject with enough care and consideration, and director/writer Chung Hae-il made a solid feature film debut here in this film. Even when the movie eventually arrives at its very last shot, there is still a lot of uncertainty around its main characters, but we get to know and understand them more besides observing a glimmer of hope and healing in the end, and that is more than enough in my inconsequential opinion.