‘Dora’ Cannes Review: July Jung’s Overwrought Korean Melodrama Wastes a Strong Premise

Half coming-of-age drama, half melodramatic spiral, Dora is the kind of film that might have been torn apart in the Palme d’Or competition — and probably would have been. In the Official Selection’s main event, a film this overwrought and narratively unruly would have faced a rough press crowd and quite possibly a booing or two. Landing instead in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes, a section with more tolerance for risk, failure, and formal experimentation, it has a fighting chance of finding its audience — or at least of being dismissed more quietly.

The third feature from Korean director July Jung (A Girl at My Door), Dora follows a shy, anxious teenager who, after a nervous breakdown, retreats with her parents to a remote area outside Seoul in hopes of sorting through her considerable troubles. The most visible of these is a rash that has spread across her entire body, turning her skin into a kind of battlefield. At 140 minutes, the film packs in more narrative turns than most conventional dramas could sustain — and Dora is not always up to the weight.

Once the family settles in, everything unravels at once. Dora’s architect father has health problems of his own. Her mother keeps her distance. The neighboring family — a tormented painter, his Japanese-born wife, and their two intensely unpleasant children — brings its own catalog of dysfunction. What follows is a relentless accumulation of infatuations, mutual betrayals, acts of aggression, life-threatening situations, physical injury, and psychological damage inflicted by people who seem constitutionally unable to stop hurting each other.

Through all of it, Dora survives on limited resources — a teenager watching the world briefly rearrange itself into something bearable, a tentative romance included, before reverting to its ugliest shape. She is not, it should be said, an innocent bystander in any of this. When she runs out of other options, she proves she has absorbed the lessons in cruelty that surround her.

Dora is an overwrought, frequently exhausting film populated almost entirely by people who use, wound, and exploit one another at every available opportunity — God help you, those children. It has one real idea: the old, familiar notion that damaged people damage others, that cruelty becomes a language and a way of being. Jung stretches that idea across nearly two and a half hours of increasingly capricious plotting, and the film buckles under the strain.