Jin (Sim Su-bin) is a seventeen-year-old girl born and raised on a small island. Still carrying the light, translucent grace unique to childhood, she spends her summer amid the village’s quiet everyday life. Then one day, she is reunited with her childhood friend Dujae (Kim Eo-jin), who has returned to the island for his grandmother’s funeral. Arriving alone, Dujae remains silent about what he has gone through, and Jin becomes a delicate pillar of support for the utterly stranded, adrift boy. As an unspoken, subtle tension grows between them, the girl’s quiet world begins to secretly crack. The World Before is a film where a tingling sensation of suspense and fluttering excitement lingers in every trivial gesture: the slight lifting of a hemline, hesitant fidgeting, and watchful glances exchanged between a boy and a girl. It is an astonishing work in which no divide can be felt between eroticism and innocence, desire, compassion, and understanding. Watching the dizzying, faint time shared by the two friends stirs the viewer’s heart, and the moment the girl and boy awaken from that dreamlike first world as if shattered to pieces, the viewer’s heart collapses alongside them. As the latest work from director Yoon Dan-bi, who drew immense acclaim with Moving On, it is a singularly beautiful, sensual, and aching film. (HONG Eun-mi)