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SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW

MYDEAR: beyond the familiar story of coming of age.

MYDEAR · 2023

A source-led reading of MYDEAR as speculative cinema: coming of age, transformation, documented consensus, and the counterpoint that shifts the conclusion.

THE FILM EDITORIAL DESKAugust 31, 2026319 WORDS
01

THEMATIC CENTER

coming of age
02

NARRATIVE PRESSURE

transformation
03

FORM

speculative cinema
04

RECORD ANCHORS

ga-eul · hearing-impaired · college

The record for MYDEAR yields three coordinates specific to its premise—ga-eul, hearing-impaired, and college. That vocabulary places coming of age at the center and gives transformation its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.

MYDEAR brings coming of age into contact with transformation through speculative cinema. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: Bold, full-scale entertainment made for the big screen, with an energy that never leaves emotion behind.

MYDEAR (2023) arrives with the coordinates of a drame film situated in 2020s cinema. The record credits Kim So-hee with the direction and places Jeon Do-hee and Kim Min-chul in the foreground. With an unusually compact form, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.

Read as speculative cinema, the film carries the pressure of transformation. Growing up appears less as a single threshold than as a series of renunciations, experiments, and borrowed stories before finding one's own measure. The most precise critical test is therefore the concrete consequences of change rather than its announcement alone. An intimate work benefits from being watched without demanding a demonstration in every scene. Its rhythm may be the rhythm of trust: the time required for an ordinary gesture to reveal the conflict it has carried.

The counterpoint asks what the adult must unlearn, rather than only what the young character still needs to acquire. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of coming of age, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. This view reverses scale: the quietest gesture may contain the film's largest rupture.

THE VERDICT, REFRAMED

The twist: measure movement in what a character can finally no longer hide. Here, coming of age changes meaning under the pressure of transformation.

THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT

In 2027, Ga-eul, a hearing-impaired college student, learns about the app MYDEAR and becomes immersed in conversations with an AI presence. The app’s features easily help her overcome her disability, and the AI is affectionate and considerate, like a boyfriend.

Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.
Year
2023
Runtime
25 min
Direction
Kim So-hee · Jeon Do-hee
Performers
Jeon Do-hee · Kim Min-chul · Park Yoon-hee · Seol Jun-su · Hwang Jeong-won