Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

House of Hummingbird Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 3, 2020

Thornton Wilder is one of those great literary names of yesteryear whose fame may have arguably dimmed somewhat in an ADHD age that can sometimes be focusing on the latest shiny object. But Wilder, aside from being one of the relatively few people to win three Pulitzer Prizes (two for plays, one for a novel), has contributed several works that many film lovers will probably still recognize, with Hello, Dolly! (a musicalization of Wilder’s straight play The Matchmaker) and Our Town probably topping the list (trivia fans may know that Our Town was itself musicalized for television, and gave star Frank Sinatra one of his signature hits, “Love and Marriage”, which younger fans may recognize as the theme music to Married with Children). But Wilder’s sole Pulitzer for fiction writing (as opposed to playwriting) came for a 1927 tome which has actually been adapted three times for film, in 1929, 1944 and 2004. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (the link points to the 2004 version, currently the only one in our database) told the (fictional) story of the collapse of a rope bridge in Peru in 1714, and its underlying premise concerned a Franciscan friar who, in attempting to make sense of the tragedy, started investigating the stories of those who perished in the bridge’s failure. All three of the film versions kept that underlying premise, more or less, anyway, but focused on the story of one character in particular, a fictionalized version of a real life Peruvian singer and actress who did not in fact lose her life in the disaster (even if at least some of the films portray it as a close call). But the context of how such an epochal event affects those who witness it certainly was part and parcel of the cinematic adaptations, and there’s something at least somewhat similar at hand in House of Hummingbird, a quasi-autobiographical film from South Korean writer and director Kim Bora. House of Hummingbird is a rather languid coming of age story involving a girl named Eun-hee (Park Ji-hoo), who is a teenager in Seoul in 1994 when the city was shocked by the devastating collapse of the Seongsu Bridge.

If a bridge collapse is in a way the entire raison d'être for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, it's treated more as something of a climactic plot point in House of Hummingbird. The film instead spends most of its running time documenting the at times pretty troubled life of Eun-hee, though it's notable that Kim does not really wallow in some of the sadness afflicting the teenager, and instead tends to present a reasonably full picture of the girl's triumphs and tragedies. Eun-hee initially seems like an unhappy youngster on any number of levels, barely getting by at school (and with a penchant toward drawing while the teachers are talking), and with a pretty chaotic home life that includes warring, and occasionally physically abusive to each other, parents (Lee Seung-Yeon and Jeong In-gi), a pretty wild sister named Su-hee (Park Su-yeon), and an intermittently mean brother named Dae-hoon (Sohn Sang-yeon), who seems to be following in his father's footsteps of domineering bluster.

Part of the "balance" that Kim brings to the tale is evident in the way the story segues from girls more or less teasing Eun-hee in one of the classrooms to a rather engaging introduction of Eun-hee with a nascent boyfriend named Ji-wan (Jeong Yoon-seo). And despite some background bullying by the other girls, it does turn out that Eun-hee has at least one close friend at school, Ji-suk (Park Seo-yoon). And similarly despite the fact that her parents are often too busy with their rice business to really offer any kind of emotional support, Eun-hee soon strikes up a rather sweet friendship with a teacher named Young-ji (Sae-byuk Kim), who takes the time to get to know Eun-hee and offer her both words of encouragement and an underlying emotional stability that her home life really doesn't provide for her.

Teen angst runs rampant throughout this piece, and there is some potent subtext about the Korean emphasis on schooling and success, as well as some interesting sidebars about the rapid urbanization of Seoul. But what may strike Westerners in particular is how positively tamped down the emotions are throughout this piece. This includes a subplot involving a potential health scare for Eun-hee, where her family is (mostly) weirdly stoic, and not just to "protect" Eun-hee from any fear she may be feeling. Even later, after the bridge collapse, when different characters have either been delivered or sacrificed, reactions by various characters are (again, mostly) virtually emotionless, which may actually undercut some of the visceral intensity that was evidently aimed for.

House of Hummingbird Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

House of Hummingbird is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The closing credits include the Red logo, and while this doesn't really offer a lot of opportunity for "wow" visuals, the presentation is typically very sharp and well detailed, with a natural, if often kind of intentionally drab looking, palette. Scenes of Eun-hee's family's apartment offer good fine detail on things like fabrics and even the texture of the walls, and the outdoor material shows no problems in resolving potentially tricky elements like dense foliage. Several uses of supposed television broadcasts have an understandably more ragged look. Kim likes to utilize midrange shots and close-ups almost all of the time, and that can help to elevate already commendable fine detail levels. Some of the karaoke material, which is pretty dark, doesn't have a surplus of shadow detail, but still looks surprisingly good, all things considered.

House of Hummingbird Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Much like the video component, House of Hummingbird's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track in the original Korean isn't particularly "showy", but it offers sterling fidelity and some good, if at times subtle, surround activity, especially when the film is outside, where ambient environmental sounds can help to populate the side and rear channels. But there's even some appealing immersion in ostensibly quieter, more cloistered, surroundings, as in the several scenes that take place either in Eun-hee's family's apartment, Eun-hee's classrooms, or even the doctor's office she visits. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout this problem free presentation.

House of Hummingbird Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailers

  Teaser (1080p; 00:38)

  
  

  Berlin Trailer (1080p; 1:34)

  
  

  Trailer (1080p; 1:27)

Note: As tends to be the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the supplements have been authored to follow one another automatically (so that clicking on Teaser under Trailers is essentially a Play All button). After the Trailer for this film plays, the disc has been authored to automatically move on to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other Well Go USA releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

House of Hummingbird Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

House of Hummingbird may arguably be perceived by some as being too long (it clocks in at over two hours), and the weird if evidently "accurate" lack of emotion shown by almost all of these characters under at times pretty harrowing circumstances may be an unavoidable distancing factor, but for those with patience and who want a rather bracing idea of what growing up in Seoul in the mid-nineties might have been like, the film has some definite power. Performances are excellent, again with an understanding that histrionics tend to be brief and are often cut away from, as if even Kim herself couldn't bear to see them. Technical merits are solid. Recommended.