With six films opening in September — "Bigwang," "The Intern," "Assassin(s)," "Tazza: Song of Beelzebub," "Resurrection Man: The Red" and "Possible Love" — this year's Chuseok holiday box office is shaping up to be more crowded than ever. Picking a winner among titles that differ in genre and subject matter is a risky business, but one forecast seems safe: "The Intern" will be the warmest film of the bunch.
"The Intern" is based on the 2015 Hollywood film of the same name starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro. That version drew more than 3.61 million admissions in South Korea and, outside the United States, took in more at the Korean box office than in any other country. Remaking such a beloved title to fit Korean workplace culture and generational realities was never going to be easy, and the film bears clear traces of an effort to preserve the original as much as possible. Director Kim Do-young, who has emerged as a specialist in remakes through works such as "Kim Ji-young, Born 1982" and "What If We," is behind the camera.
The film opens as Ki-ho (Choi Min-sik), who spent 37 years making maps in the publishing industry, decides to return to work as a senior intern. After mandatory retirement and the death of his wife, Ki-ho parts one by one with everything familiar to him. He then spots a senior intern job posting at the fashion startup Wootutu, applies, and becomes a three-month intern reporting directly to Sun-woo (Han So-hee), the company's chief executive. A worker with 37 years of experience becomes the newest hire, and a young CEO with three years in the job becomes his boss. The established order of age, career and rank is turned upside down. How will the old-timer and the young boss find harmony in a workplace that feels like a battlefield?
Senior Interns Remain an Unfamiliar Future
What makes the Korean version of "The Intern" interesting is the presence of the senior intern. A demanding CEO, new hires and junior staff, and a senior intern in his 60s all occupy the same space. To be sure, the senior intern remains an unfamiliar figure in Korean offices today. But as life expectancy grows and an era arrives in which people must keep working past retirement age, it may be a scene we encounter before long.
In that sense, "The Intern" is less a film that transcribes the present than one that imagines the future — a future in which older and younger generations, rather than each fending for themselves, ultimately have no choice but to join hands. The film takes a relatively optimistic view of an age in which the old and the young are not rivals taking each other's places but people who must share what they have and live together.
Ki-ho has 37 years of experience. Sun-woo has a feel for reading a new era and youthful energy. Neither one lectures the other. Ki-ho teaches Sun-woo how to deal with the company and its people, while Sun-woo shows Ki-ho how to live in a changed world.
That is why their relationship feels warm. It is not a matter of erasing the generational gap but of acknowledging that gap and becoming necessary to each other within it.
Everyday Detail Falls Short of a Korean Office
The Small Joys and Sorrows of Office Life Are Missing
Another appeal of the Korean version is that it keeps the original's warmth and humor while sharpening the conflict. Sun-woo, a successful CEO who nonetheless doubts herself constantly and runs into trouble at home and at work, gives concrete shape to the anxiety a young leader carries.
Not every setting or scene reworked for a Korean context succeeds, however. The film presents itself as a portrait of the Korean office, yet the texture of Korean daily life does not come through as strongly as one might hope.
Lunch menus, snacks, office crushes — these seem trivial, but the film would have benefited from vivid detail about why they matter so much in a workplace, about those small joys and sorrows of office life. In particular, despite the premise of a fashion startup posting tens of billions of won in revenue three years after its founding, Wootutu's spaces and costumes do not fully evoke an actual young Korean startup. To tell a story about Korean workplace culture, small scenes — what people eat at lunch, whom they have coffee with, what they talk about at their desks — can generate more realistic empathy than sweeping conflicts or dramatic incidents.
The Energy and Warmth of Choi Min-sik and Han So-hee
Even so, the greatest strength of "The Intern" is acting that fits the roles perfectly. Choi Min-sik turns Ki-ho into a genuine grown-up. Rather than pressing his experience on younger colleagues, he quietly extends a hand when it is needed and, at times, offers a shoulder to lean on for a while. In the original, Robert De Niro played the part. For Choi, who has largely built his career on bold, commanding performances, this role is both a gamble and a transformation, since the original character was so widely loved for his gentleness. Even so, Choi is still Choi. With warmth etched into his lined face, a gaze deepened by wisdom, and the finely tuned instincts of a veteran of 37 years on the job, he builds a Ki-ho of his own. He is not simply an older intern but a convincing portrait of a senior intern — one who fills the gaps of a younger generation with experience and seasoning, and who perhaps we might wish to see in the future.
Han So-hee, for her part, adds dimension to Sun-woo, conveying the anxiety and loneliness beneath the shell of a successful CEO, sometimes energetically and sometimes with delicacy.
At first, the two can barely hold a conversation. But as they spend time together, they gradually come to understand each other's lives. And at some point they become indispensable to each other. The scene in which Ki-ho leads Sun-woo, after a grueling day, to a secret place where she can be alone and fully heal is the film's message in itself.
Perhaps this is the warmest imagining of the future that "The Intern" offers. In the near future, neither the old nor the young may be able to survive alone. Those who have experience but struggle with change, and those who are comfortable with change but lack experience, must fill in each other's gaps. An era is coming in which coexistence, not going it alone, is essential for survival.
Imagining that future, the film poses a question to its audience: Are we ready to live alongside a different generation? In the end, people learn from people and lean on people. And so "The Intern" arrives less as a film that mirrors reality than as a fable that lets us imagine, a little more warmly, the future we will someday meet. Opens on the 16th. Rated for ages 12 and over. 132 minutes.
