South Korean independent film “Heritage” is often frustratingly slow and opaque in my humble opinion. Mainly revolving around two different young persons in each own desperation, the movie attempts to make some point on the generational/social divides in the South Korean society, but the result is too bland and tedious as failing to make its main characters engaging enough to hold our attention.

I must confess that it is often hard to understand whatever is exchanged between its two main characters. Yes, it is clear that one of these two people really needs some help, but this figure remains a distant cipher to the end of the story to our frustration, and we cannot discern much of what the other main figure in the story really sees from him.

In the beginning, we are introduced to a lad named Jin-hyun (Yoon Hyeok-jin), who has worked in some local social service center located somewhere in Seoul. He has been handling a younger dude named Young-jin (Ahn Eun-son), and we come to gather that Young-jin was exempted from the mandatory military service and then has to do his conscription as a temporary employee at the center in exchange for that.

Anyway, Young-jin has often annoyed Jin-hyun and his department because he is frequently late for work, and then Jin-hyun happens to discover what Young-jin has been hiding behind his quiet passive appearance. Young-jin was recently kicked out of his house by his father for a rather unspecified reason, and there is no one around him to help him. As a result, he has spent many sleepless nights under the concrete highway bridge near to the social service center, and that is the main reason why he has been often late for his work.

Probably because of feeling sorry for Young-jin, Jin-hyun takes him to a little apartment where he has lived alone by himself. He is going to let Young-jin stay in his residence for a while at least before finding any possible way to support Young-jin more, but the social service center is not so willing to do anything more for Young-jin due to those regulations, and Young-jin becomes more burdensome for Jin-hyun as he continues to stay at Jin-hyun’s residence.

Meanwhile, the movie also pays some attention to what is going on between Jin-hyun and an old lady who frequently comes to the social service center. Just like Young-jin, this old lady needs more support and assistance from the center, but, again, Jin-hyun only gets more frustrated while not being able to help her, and he becomes quite exasperated as he later finds himself sandwiched between her and his uncaring supervisor.

Around that narrative point, we are supposed to get to know more Jin-hyun and several other characters in the story, but the screenplay by director/writer Lee Jong-su, who incidentally made a feature film debut here, does not flesh out its story and characters more to interest us. While we only get a bit of background information on Jin-hyun’s past, the movie does not specify much of Young-jin’s life on the whole, and it also does not even delve much into his thoughts and feelings except when it occasionally shows the video clips shot by his little video camera.

Most of all, whatever is happening between Jin-hyun and Young-jin is not particularly interesting. While Jin-hyun talks and talks, Young-jin merely exists right next to him as showing a bit of response from time to time, and the movie even makes a sort of statement when Jin-hyun talks about why he often watched movies some time ago. At one point, he says watching movies is like looking into the lives of others, but I must say that looking into the lives of him and others around him was not a very interesting experience for me because the movie simply observes them while not doing that much for any understanding or empathy. While there are several flashbacks for showing more of its main characters along the story, these flashback scenes only end up feeling quite contrived and superficial, and we still watch these main characters from the distance without much care.

In case of the three principal cast members in the film, they merely fill their respective spots as required while not having anything else to do besides that. Yoon Hyeok-jin did a good job of conveying to us the accumulating frustration behind his character’s phlegmatic appearance, but he is also often limited by his bland character, and the same thing can be said about Ahn Eun-soo, who gets stuck with a thankless task of looking dispirited and unresponsive throughout the film. In contrast, Na Ho-sook has a couple of relatively showy moments as the aforementioned old lady, and we come to have some understanding on her character’s growing desperation even when she happens to lash out at Jin-hyun later in the story.

In conclusion, “Heritage” bored and frustrated me due to its glacial narrative pacing and barebone narrative, and I felt more annoyed by the ending, which looks like tacked on the preceding scene without much dramatic effect. As another gloomy social drama about the dark sides of the South Korean society, it does not bring anything particular new to the territory, and I can only hope that the director will soon move onto better things to come.