General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Next Sohee (다음 소희)

Next Sohee (다음 소희, Da-eum So-hee) is a 2022 South Korean drama film directed and written by July Jung, in which a high school student dies after an exploitative call-center internship and a detective investigates the chain of institutional failures behind her death.¹ It premiered as the closing film of the Critics' Week section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the first Korean film selected for that slot, and opened in South Korean theaters on February 8, 2023.²^•³^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	다음 소희 (Da-eum So-hee), meaning roughly "the next Sohee"
Director and writer	July Jung (정주리, Jung Joo-ri), her second feature after A Girl at My Door (2014)¹^•⁴
Premiere	Closing film, Cannes Film Festival Critics' Week, May 2022; first Korean film in that position²^•³
South Korean release	February 8, 2023; 137 minutes; rated 15+¹^•⁵
Lead cast	Kim Si-eun as Sohee; Bae Doona as Detective Oh Yoo-jin¹
Basis	The 2017 death of an 18-year-old vocational school intern at a telecom call center in Jeonju⁶
South Korean box office	119,174 admissions, about $840,575 gross⁵
Critical reception	94% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 18 reviews⁷

Spoilers

Plot and structure

Sohee (Kim Si-eun) is an eighteen-year-old student at a vocational high school in Jeonju who loves dance and is talented in her veterinary-track studies. Near graduation she begins a school-arranged field internship at a call center that handles customer retention for a major telecom company; the employer she is told is a full subsidiary is in fact a subcontractor.⁸^•⁶ The work is measured by per-call metrics such as dissuasion and cancellation rates, and the young interns, all women, are pushed toward targets while paid only a fraction of a normal wage.⁸^•⁴

The film runs in two parts. The first follows Sohee's descent under the pressure of the job; her team manager Jun-ho (Sim Hee-seop), himself set strict targets and guilt-ridden over the interns' treatment, dies by suicide in the car park, leaving a note that reads as a whistleblowing account of sham employment contracts and deferred payments. After Sohee also takes her own life, the film shifts to a procedural: Detective Oh Yoo-jin (Bae Doona) investigates the death and confronts the responsible parties one by one, the subcontractor, the school, and the district office that incentivizes schools to place interns, and comes to suspect criminal negligence behind an ostensibly open-and-shut case.⁸^•⁴

Real-life basis

The film is based on a true event. In January 2017, an 18-year-old vocational high school student working as a customer-service intern at the LG Uplus call center in Jeonju died by suicide.⁶ Director July Jung said she first learned of the case through the SBS investigative program That We Want to Know and was struck by the question of why a high school student was working in a call center at all and why the school sent her there; she has said she wanted the film to expose structural problems in Korean society rather than tell a single incident.⁹^•⁶ Jung did not meet the family or the person concerned before writing the screenplay, but visited the father of Hong Su-yeon, the young woman on whom the story is based, once the script was finished.⁹ Details of the workplace, including real-time performance pressure, monitoring, and the name tag Sohee always wears, were drawn from reporting on the case.⁶

Production and release

Filming began on January 16, 2022.¹⁰ The film was produced by Twin Plus Partners and Crank-Up Film, with Kim Dong-ha and Kim Ji-yeon producing, and was shot by cinematographer Kim Il-yeon with music by Jang Young-gyu.²^•¹ Bae Doona, who had worked with Jung on A Girl at My Door (2014), accepted the role immediately after reading the script.¹⁰^•¹¹

After its Cannes premiere in May 2022, the film screened at the Busan International Film Festival in October 2022 before its South Korean theatrical release on February 8, 2023.¹²^•¹ It later received a limited US theatrical release on June 12, 2025, and streams in the United States on services including The Roku Channel, Tubi, Plex, and YouTube Free, with digital purchase on Amazon Video, Fandango at Home, and the Apple TV Store.⁷^•¹³

Reception and awards

The Cannes screening drew a long standing ovation, and the festival called the film "shocking yet impossible to take one's eyes off."⁶^•¹⁴ Critics singled out the first half's depiction of call-center drudgery; Arjun Sajip, writing in Sight & Sound, praised its visual concision while judging the second half's confrontational denouement less cinematically inventive.⁸ The film holds 94% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and 7.2/10 on IMDb.⁷^•¹³

Its awards included Best Director for Jung at the 2022 Fantasia International Film Festival, where it also placed second in the audience vote for Best Asian Film, and three prizes at the 42nd Amiens International Film Festival in 2023, including the Audience Award.¹⁵^•⁵ At the 59th Baeksang Arts Awards in 2023, Kim Si-eun won Best New Actress and Jung won the screenplay award, and the film received the GUCCI Impact Award.¹² It also shared the Jury Prize at the Reims Polar thriller festival in France.¹⁶

Social impact

The film's release fed into Korean policy debate. An amendment to the Vocational Education and Training Promotion Act, informally called the "Next Sohee prevention law," passed the National Assembly's plenary session in late March 2023 after having stalled in committee; it extends Labor Standards Act coverage to workplace harassment and assault protections for interns and allows fines of up to 10 million won against training firms that subject field interns to assault, threats, or confinement.¹²^•⁹ Reviewers have connected the film's themes to South Korea's having the highest suicide rate among OECD countries and to the over-representation of young women in exploitative work, while noting that its critique of education valued only as job training travels beyond Korea.⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2020 to 2022

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?