The Secret Life of a Call Centre Worker

Future debut of South Korean writer-director Hong Sung-eun’s debut film is Aloners, but it might have been called: “The Secret Life of a Call Centre Worker”. The protagonist is Jina, a young model employee, who works in a call center for a banking company. In the evening she returns to her small apartment for a dinner alone in front of the TV. Her life seems running smoothly until two episodes knock it out of its rut: her neighbor is found dead after a week and her mother dies, leaving a dubious will. In response Jina takes back the security camera that had been installed in her mother's house. Inventive at various levels, the film deals with loneliness, urban alienation, the elaboration of mourning and mental illness. Mixing genres, with a subtle humor, it keeps the attention tense, disclosing questions about modern life and young people. It is a movie so appropriate for our time, the time of covid, a time that forces us to reflect on social isolations, especially in big cities, where is common for young people to live in a sort of limbo, detach from reality. Also, we generally ask: Is it normal to wish to be alone? As we spend more time with colleagues than with family and friends, but colleagues often they don’t know anything about us. Like Jina: her private life is totally separate from her work, and she seems not to fit in both. Loneliness is a real problem of modern society. As British philosopher Jeremy Bentham devised a prison, called the panopticon, which would allow a supervisor to watch all the cells from a single point. The movie makes us see the modern call centre, as really an “electronic panopticon”. A psychological draining environment. Every action is logged, measured precisely to the second. The film is slow and not beyond a certain ponderousness, but the protagonist story’s is intriguing, and its authenticity grows so much thorough that one remains hooked from start to finish.