Metrograph

The debut feature from Jeong, one of a handful of female directors to break into the South Korean film industry, focuses on five young women, recent high school graduates living in the industrial port city of Incheon and facing a precarious future together, in addition to having to handle the practical exigencies of caring for the feline that they’ve communally adopted. Bae, whose Tae-hee makes ends meet with shifts at her family’s sauna and occasional work as a typist for a cerebral palsy-afflicted poet, anchors an exceedingly fine ensemble cast in Jeong’s moving drama of fraying friendships and economic uncertainty, also one of the first films to acknowledge the increasingly central role of text messaging in 21st-century communication and find a way to integrate this new, faceless form of “keeping in touch” into a filmed narrative.