Though Hae-mi is a captivating storyteller and tenacious pantomime, Ben and his snooty friends scorn her earnest attempts at living out her creative dreams. But when Jong-su discloses that he’s a writer, they interpret this aspect of his identity as some index of social capital. Some film reviewers have noted that Jong-su is only a writer by name; there’s no evidence to the contrary, as he spends only a fraction of his screen time at a keyboard. Yet Jong-su’s status as a writer is crucial to his character. When Ben suggests Jong-su write a story about Ben’s life, and when a lawyer advises Jong-su to write a novel about his father, Jong-su rejects these advances. Instead, he writes on his own terms, feverishly drafting a petition in a last-ditch attempt to rescue his father from jail.

Jong-su’s act of writing suggests that the burden of protecting a home from political and economic change ultimately supersedes his aspiration to use writing as an act of imagination. Even as he lacks the stability, resources, and connections to turn his novel-writing fantasy into reality, the film, as a work of expression and documentation, picks up where he leaves off. Like the directors Wong Kar-Wai and Edward Yang, who have trained an impressionistic eye on politically tumultuous Hong Kong in the 1960s and the post-industrial Taiwan of the 1980s, respectively, Lee (a former novelist) applies a similarly patient, artistic gaze that takes in extreme class stratifications in present-day South Korea.

By the end of the film, Jong-su has sold his family’s last calf. His petition fails to rescue his father. But if Jong-su has forfeited his livelihood and lost the relationships most familiar to him, Hae-mi’s sense of shelter and stability is even more fraught, in large part because Hae-mi is a woman. She is no Rachel Chu, who, in Crazy Rich Asians, can ultimately maintain a loving relationship with her immigrant mother, keep her tenured professorship in New York, and marry into Singapore’s upper echelons. Rather, Hae-mi severs her ties with her Paju family and flits from gig to dead-end gig. She has likely squandered her life savings traveling overseas, and her boyfriend, Ben, may be a serial killer. Her eventual disappearance can possibly be read as her final hurrah as a pantomime, her defiant magnum opus in a cruel world. But it’s also tragic: When Jong-su notifies Hae-mi’s loved ones, they are unsurprised, and suggest that she must have run away to escape her crippling debt. No missing-persons report is ever filed.

Read: One way that “Crazy Rich Asians” is a step backward

Jong-su may care immensely about Hae-mi, but their friendship is bookended by the devastating harm he inflicts on her in formative moments. During childhood, he calls her ugly, driving her to shell out for plastic surgery years later. Then, right before her disappearance, Jong-su calls her a whore for dancing topless. In between these cruelties, he unleashes his frustrations of maternal absence—loss of mother, loss of motherland—by invading Hae-mi’s space (initially while cat-sitting), even masturbating under her window while gazing out at Seoul’s iconic Namsan Tower. “There is no country for women,” Hae-mi’s female coworker laments, drawing attention to the fact that the women are expected to alter their identity, body, and space to fulfill others’ needs.