South Korean film “Journeys in Math and Genetics” is so formulaic from the beginning to the end that I hardly cared about its story and characters during my viewing. While this is certainly intended to be an earnest coming-of-age drama, I could only feel instead how trite and mechanical it is in many aspects, and I must confess that I rolled my eyes a lot whenever it clumsily attempts to bring some depth to the story and characters.

In my humble opinion, one of the main problems of the film is the failure in conveying to us the considerable intelligence of its adolescent hero Hyeong-joo (Jung Da-min), who is supposed to be your average math prodigy kid. Although he makes a lot of personal reflections based on many different mathematical stuffs throughout the story, but we never get any clear sense of how smart he really is, and I must tell you that I was particularly disappointed to see his room, which only has some unspecific books besides a big board vaguely filled with whatever he is studying on. 

Above all, Hyeong-joo is too bland and colorless to hold our attention. Although he looks like a fairly promising actor, Jung Da-min is unfortunately not allowed to bring any sense of life or personality to his role, and he is only demanded to look distant and disaffected on the whole unless he delivers those supposedly intelligent but ultimately banal comments such as “Numbers never lie”.

Anyway, the main conflict of the story begins with the sudden death of Hyeong-joo’s mother. Because the cause of her death is some rare genetic illness, Hyeong-joo naturally becomes anxious about his future life, and he wants to be sure about whether his risk of that genetic illness is relatively less compared to his mother. Eventually, he decides to request a DNA test on him and his parents without telling anything to his father at all, but, what do you know, he is only notified later that he is not actually the biological son of his father.

 While struggling to process this unexpected revelation, Hyeong-joo does what is logical in his viewpoint. First, he examines those old diaries left by his mother, and, with some unofficial help from his hacker friend, he comes to focus on three highly possible candidate figures, each of whom were closely involved with her mother around the time when he was conceived. In addition, he also discovered another hidden fact about his father, which further confirms that his father is not indeed his biological father.    

As Hyeong-joo embarks on preparing for his little private search, the movie shows more of how he is often distant to his flawed but loving family. While having been quite devastated by his wife’s unexpected death for a while, Hyeong-joo’s father is now ready to keep going as before, but he and his son remain distant to each other despite his sincere attempts for getting closer to his son. In case of Hyeong-joo’s aunt and younger sister, they are relatively less tolerant of his aloof attitude, but they sincerely support him like his father nonetheless, and they are all certainly proud of him.

And there is also Hyeong-joo’s plucky girlfriend, who looks quite talented in her field of interest as much as her boyfriend. Even though Hyeong-joo wants to do his little private search alone by himself, his girlfriend insists that she should accompany him, and Hyeong-joo reluctantly lets her join his search for his biological father.

It is not much of a spoiler to tell you that Hyeong-joo comes to learn much more about his mother than expected during his journey, but what is revealed along the journey is not particularly surprising as the story takes one predictable turn after another. For instance, those three candidates surely have each own stuff to impart to our young hero, but their supposedly important scenes are riddled with platitudes to bore you, and they remain to be more or less than plot elements to decorate our young hero’s journey. Around the narrative point where Hyeong-joo’s father goes after his son after belatedly coming to learn about his son’s little private project, we already have a pretty clear idea on the eventual conclusion for Hyeong-joo’s journey, and the movie does not go further than our expectation even during its very predictable finale.

Around Jung, several main cast members try to enliven the movie in one way or another, and they mostly acquit themselves well despite being stuck with their underdeveloped supporting roles from the start. As Hyeong-joo’s good-natured father, Kwak Min-gyu generates some amusement whenever his character is rather clueless about Hyeong-joo, and Kim Se-won often outshines Jung with her lively appearance.    

Overall, “Journeys in Math and Genetics” is too flat and generic to recommend, and it is also regrettably two or three steps from director Choi Chang-hwan’s solid previous film “The Layover” (2023). Yes, I am a guy who has not been that interested in mathematics for years, I can tell you at least that the movie is not intelligent enough for what it is trying to do with all those mathematical stuffs, and now I want to recommend you recent South Korean film “In Our Prime” (2022) instead. That film did a better job of presenting mathematics on the screen as a crucial part of its predictable but fairly engaging drama, and I assure you that you will get much more entertainment from it.