General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

A Day (하루)

A Day (하루; also romanized Haroo or Ha-roo, and marketed as One Day or 원데이) is a 2017 South Korean time-loop thriller directed by Jo Sun-ho (조선호), in which a surgeon trapped in a repeating day tries to stop his daughter's death and joins forces with another man caught in the same loop.¹^•² It was Jo's feature directorial debut, produced by Line Film and distributed by CGV Arthouse, and it opened at number one at the Korean box office.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Release	June 15, 2017, South Korea; 90 minutes; rated 15 and older¹^•³
Director and writers	Jo Sun-ho (director and co-writer, with Lee Sang-hak); his feature debut¹^•⁵
Main cast	Kim Myung-min (Jun-young), Byun Yo-han (Min-chul), Yoo Jae-myung (Kang-sik), Jo Eun-hyung (Eun-jung), Shin Hye-sun (Mi-kyung)³
Box office	Opened first place with 77,974 admissions on day one; 1,129,609 total admissions and $6,733,515 gross on 781 screens⁴^•⁶
Budget	About 6.2 billion won, with a break-even point of 1.9 million admissions⁷
Filming	June 29 to September 29, 2016, beginning at Songdo Central Park in Incheon¹
Key crew	Cinematography Kim Ji-yong; music Mowg; editing Shin Min-kyeong⁸^•⁹
Reception	100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 7 reviews, average 8.5; screenplay award from the Korean Association of Film Critics²^•¹⁰

Spoilers

Plot

Kim Jun-young (Kim Myung-min) is a celebrated thoracic surgeon, called a "saint of war" for his humanitarian medical work, who has spent little time with his daughter Eun-jung (Jo Eun-hyung).³^•¹¹ On the day he returns to Korea to keep a birthday promise to her, he comes on the scene of a large traffic accident and finds his daughter dead among the victims.³ He then wakes to find himself two hours before the accident, and the same day repeats: however he intervenes, the outcome does not change, and he is forced to watch his daughter die again each day.²

Into his despair appears Lee Min-chul (Byun Yo-han), a private ambulance driver who lost his pregnant partner Mi-kyung (Shin Hye-sun) in the same crash and is living the identical repeating day.³^•¹² The two men, not the only people aware of the repeating day, join forces to alter its ending, but the deaths cannot be prevented.³^•²⁶ A mysterious third figure, the taxi driver Kang-sik (Yoo Jae-myung), whose son Haru died in an accident three years earlier, connects the men's pasts, and the film unfolds the secret of the loop through their intertwined histories.³^•¹²^•¹³

Development and production

Origin of the story. Jo Sun-ho worked for years as an assistant director on genre films including The Descendant of Hong Gil-dong (2009) and The Webtoon: Predicted Murder (2013) before directing.¹⁴ In 2012, while preparing his debut, he found an old memo reading "an endless day, a hellish day repeats," and began building a story from it.⁵ He said the starting point was the pairing of a man who loses a loved one every day with a man who must kill someone every day, and that the differentiating device was having a second person trapped in the loop alongside the protagonist.⁵^•¹⁵ He spent about two years writing the screenplay with Lee Sang-hak.⁵

Casting. Kim Myung-min, who plays Jun-young, recommended Byun Yo-han for Min-chul after the two worked together on the television drama Six Flying Dragons; Kim handed Byun the scenario himself.¹⁶^•¹⁷ Kim described the role as difficult because the subtle emotional shifts across each loop iteration had to be performed out of sequence, with scenes grouped by location within a fixed shooting period.⁷

Shooting. Filming began on June 29, 2016 at Songdo Central Park in Incheon and finished on September 29, 2016, after three months.¹^•¹⁸ Jo deliberately set the tragedy on a bright, cloudless summer day, reasoning that a peaceful everyday setting would make the catastrophe more painful; the crew worked through heat above 35 degrees Celsius.¹⁹ To keep the loop's causality consistent, the director and staff calculated each character's movements minute by minute.¹⁵ The score by Mowg runs against thriller convention, using bright, light music to heighten the contrast with the film's grim events.²⁰

Release and box office

A Day opened in South Korea on June 15, 2017 on 781 screens.⁶ It took first place at the daily box office on its opening day with 77,974 admissions, ending the nine-day run of The Mummy at number one, a result Korean media noted as an uncommon win for a domestic film against Hollywood releases.⁴ It went on to 1,129,609 total admissions and a gross of $6,733,515, against a production budget of about 6.2 billion won.⁶^•⁷

The film circulated widely on the festival circuit in 2017: it premiered at the Busan International Film Festival and later screened at Sitges, Fantasia in Montreal, and L'Étrange Festival in Paris, where it was described as a thriller take on Groundhog Day that plays with the genre's rules.¹⁰^•²¹^•²² It was later made available on streaming services including Netflix, Apple TV, and Viu in various markets.²³^•²⁴

Reception

Critical response. On the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer the film holds 100% from 7 reviews with an average rating of 8.5.² Wendy Ide, senior international critic for Screen, reviewing at the Macao festival, called it an "ambitiously high concept thriller" with a baffling timeline that deft editing mostly keeps coherent, praising the action sequences while criticizing an overbearing score and some strident performances.⁹ Korean critics were more divided: Cine21's three reviewers scored it between 4 and 5 out of 10, and a Star News review found the mystery resolved by showing rather than letting the audience deduce.³^•²⁵ The Korean Association of Film Critics gave the film its screenplay award that year.¹⁰

The time-loop device. Korean coverage emphasized how rarely the loop structure had been used in domestic cinema, citing precedents such as Groundhog Day, Source Code, and Edge of Tomorrow.²⁵^•¹³ Jo argued that the loop is a tool rather than the point: the film's core, in his account and in Kim Myung-min's, is family love, the story of three men trying to save the people they lost.¹⁵^•⁷ The two leads embody contrasting responses to the same trap, Jun-young working the problem intellectually while Min-chul throws himself bodily at it, a contrast the director used to drive the film's pace.⁷^•¹⁶

References

A Day (Movie), AsianWiki
하루, Apple TV
하루 (A Day) 상세정보, Cine21
'하루', 개봉 첫날 '미이라' 잡고 박스오피스 1위, Star News via Daum
[[people] <하루> 조선호 감독, Cine21](https://cine21.com/news/view/?mag_id=87455)
A Day (2017), Korean Film Council (KOFIC) database
[[인터뷰] '하루' 김명민이 전하는 상실 속 가족의 소중함, bnt News via Daum](https://v.daum.net/v/20170617115009533)
A Day on Moviebuff.com
'A Day': Macao Review, Screen Daily
하루 (A Day), Cinematheque
[[엑's 인터뷰] '하루' 김명민 "내 자신에게 관대하기 싫다", Xports News](https://www.xportsnews.com/article/863838)
2016 그리스도인의 영화이야기 (film summary of A Day)
또 다른 '시간물' <하루> 마지막 장면만큼은 잊을 수 없었다, OhmyStar
한국 영화 인터뷰: 조선호 감독, Korean Rods bulletin
[[인터뷰] 조선호 감독이 말하는 #'하루' #김명민 #타임루프, Sports Khan](https://sports.khan.co.kr/article/201706191803003)
[[인터뷰] '하루' 변요한 "'후회 전문' 캐릭터? 누구나 선택과 후회 속에 산다", Aju Economy](https://www.ajunews.com/view/20170622145128663)
[[fn★인터뷰①] 서른 두 살 변요한, 고민 끝에 탄생한 '하루', Financial News via Daum](https://v.daum.net/v/20170611152932840)
2017년, 김명민X변요한의 끝나지 않는 <하루>가 시작된다, MBC News
하루 A Day production note, KoreaFilm
철저히 계산된 촬영&음악…'하루' 제작 비하인드 공개, Sports Donga
[[인터뷰] '하루' 변요한, Brunch](https://brunch.co.kr/%40slist/639)
A day (Ha-roo), L'Étrange Festival 2017
하루, Netflix
Sinopsis A Day, Viu
'하루', 호기심만 가득했던 타임 루프 이야기, Star News
A Day (2017)

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2015–2019 films › Thriller and mystery films › Titles symbols to E

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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