Kwak Kyoung-yun

Hear Me: Our Summer (2024) drops you right into the sticky, sun-soaked world of four friends teetering on the edge of adulthood, all tangled up in that delicious mess of late-teen summer uncertainty. Kwak Kyoung-yun takes you through long, lazy days that blur into neon-lit nights, with music blaring from busted speakers and secrets spilled like cheap beer. The story isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but honestly, it nails that feeling of being seventeen and thinking every little thing is life or death, even if it’s just deciding whether to send that risky text. The group—Jihoon, Sunwoo, Minji, and Haeun—bounce between rooftop parties, empty classrooms, and the riverbank where they’ve been goofing off since they were kids, all the while pretending the end of summer isn’t looming like a storm cloud. There’s a love triangle, obviously (wouldn’t be a proper coming-of-age flick without one), but it’s handled with enough awkward charm and genuine chemistry that you actually root for all of them. Parents are mostly background noise—shouting through doors, nagging over dinner, barely glimpsed as the teens sneak out for another midnight adventure. It’s not all light and breezy, though—the movie digs into anxieties about the future, the ache of growing apart, and that bittersweet nostalgia that hits even before anything’s actually over. The cinematography’s got this dreamy, washed-out look, like memories you’re not quite sure are real. Hear Me: Our Summer isn’t trying to be profound, but it ends up saying a lot about how the best summers are never as simple as you remember.