Return to Seoul (Retour à Séoul) — 2022
Freddie, a 25-year-old French woman adopted from South Korea, returns to Seoul for the first time in search of her biological parents and a connection to her origins. As she navigates a country she barely knows and a language she cannot speak, her journey takes unpredictable turns. Over several years, her search becomes a larger exploration of identity, belonging, and the shifting meaning of home.
Narrative Score
Full Plot & Ending Explained
Intro
Freddie, also known as Frédérique Benoît, is a 25-year-old French woman adopted from South Korea and raised in France, who arrives in Seoul by accident after a canceled trip to Tokyo. She immediately throws herself into the city, befriends hotel desk clerk Tena, and begins moving through Seoul as a stranger trying to understand a place tied to her own origins.
Turning Point 1
Freddie quickly bonds with Tena, who speaks French, and goes out drinking and socializing with locals, including a man she meets at a restaurant and sleeps with that first night. Through Tena and one of her friends, Freddie learns she must go through the Hammond Adoption Center if she wants any information about her biological parents, though she insists she is not really searching for them.
Turning Point 2
Despite her denial, Freddie visits the adoption agency and sends telegrams to her birth parents. The agency tells her they cannot reveal details directly, but can forward messages; her mother does not respond, while her father does. Freddie then travels with Tena to Gunsan for an awkward reunion with her biological father, who is emotional, apologetic, and overwhelmed, and she agrees to stay with his family for three nights.
Turning Point 3
At her father’s home, Freddie is surrounded by his family and by the pressure of his regret and hope, but she cannot settle into the role they want for her. Back in Seoul, her father begins sending repeated drunken calls and text messages, begging her to stay in Korea and promising her a new life; Freddie finds his attention suffocating and tells Tena she wants it to stop.
Turning Point 4
Frustrated and emotionally raw, Freddie lashes out at several people around her. She cruelly mocks the man she slept with on her first night, then tries to kiss Tena, only to be rejected and told that she is “a very sad person.” Later, when Freddie returns to her hotel with a DJ she has met at a bar, her drunken father arrives, scolds her for ignoring him, and scares the DJ away; when Tena appears and tries to intervene, Freddie’s father grabs Freddie’s arm, and she screams at him not to touch her before walking out.
Turning Point 5
Two years later, Freddie is still in Seoul, now older and more settled in appearance but no less restless. She goes on a date with André, a weapons dealer, and tells him it is her birthday, confessing that every year she wonders whether her mother thinks of her; this shows that her search for belonging has not ended, even if it has changed form.
Ending
Five years after the beginning of her Korean journey, Freddie meets her biological father again and is brought into a more intimate, melancholy family setting centered on his piano playing and the fragile possibility of reconciliation. Rather than a clean emotional resolution, the film ends with Freddie still suspended between identities, having come closer to her origins but never fully finding the stable home or answer she has been chasing.
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