Kim Sung-yoon’s impressive directorial debut, Fragment, fills its audience with such heartbreaking hopelessness that you ache inside for these characters – a bleak gem of a film.
Jun-gang and Jun-hui are siblings living on their own with barely a penny to their name. They pretend everything is fine, but everything is far from it. You see, their father killed a couple, and they have been left struggling with the ramifications of it all. Across town, another teenager in Gi-su is also struggling, as his parents were the couple murdered that night. Racked with guilt, these children are set for a violent collision course.
Jun-gang has the weight of the world on his shoulders. Given some money to survive on with his sister, he not only has to try and finish school, but has a mountain of bills to pay and a landlady who wants her money. He is lost in a sea of anger and guilt, and he doesn’t know how to get back to shore.
Equally, Gi-su is lost and angry. He, similarly to Jun-gang, blames himself for the murder, and is living in a world of dreaded ‘what ifs. ‘ That anger is boiling within him, and eventually it is going to release itself. When the revelations come out on who committed the murder, Gi-su cannot contain his misplaced anger, and his only target is the grieving Jun-gang.
Magnificent despite its bleak tale, Fragment shows us just how poorly an already horrible situation can go without the right resources at hand to assist all of the sides involved. Kim Sung-yoon has made a beautiful, tragic miracle of a film that will pull at you from every conceivable way. The pacing and switch between the two stories is expertly done with such confidence that you would think that this was his tenth feature (it should be noted he is a veteran televison director).
As much as Fragment is an excellent character study of our two leads (or three, if we include Jun-hui), young people’s lives are being irrevocably damaged by one incident beyond their control. It is also a biting look at the failures within society and with governments on how we treat victims from both sides of such a tragedy. Neither of these two sides caused this, yet we see Jun-gang and Jun-hui living independently with no support other than some money given to them to sustain their lives and see how people cannot read the room in giving Gi-su the correct support he needs. Both sides are woefully mismanaged, and the community’s mismanagement worsens as the film progresses.
Jun-gang has not had the education or the means to carry out grown-up tasks such as paying bills and sorting out the rent. He is only 15 after all, and with his father not being named yet as the murderer, he is stuck in a cruel limbo. Supported by a teacher and a family member, he has no real help to assist him in caring for his sister. So when the news does come out, that hope for support only dissipates into a fantasy.
With Gi-su, he is being supported as best he can, but the sheer amount of support is rightfully overwhelming him. He just needs a minute to work out things in his muddled and distraught head. Still living alone and letting food people have made for him to rot, he can’t shake his trauma. Added to that, how people are treating him and then you have a young boy on the edge
It is the ostracism of Jun-gang and Jun-hui that hits you the hardest throughout Fragment. We see the victim’s side and are devastated for Gi-su, but our two siblings are as much victims of these events as anyone else; they are stuck with the knowledge of what a parent has done. They can’t escape that, and with a community all too keen to judge them as their fathers’ children (especially Jun-gang when his emotions get the best of him), it causes you to be paralysed in pity for the boy.
It would be remiss not to mention our three leads in Jun-gang (Oh Ja-hun), Gi-su (Moon Seong-Hyun), and Jun-hui (Kim Kyu-na), who are astounding, with incredibly mature performances from such young actors. Pain is etched on their faces throughout almost all of Fragment, with Kim Kyu-na’s turn all the most upsetting. The tension they bring to the screen as their characters’ emotions begin to crack under the pressure society has placed upon them, instead of letting them just grieve, is exceptional.
Fragment is a tragic and challenging film that explores grief in all its variances, but Christ, it is a phenomenal watch. Watch this the first second you can.
★★★★ 1/2
For more of our coverage of Fantasia International Film Festival 2025, please check out the reviews below!
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