
Los Angeles' Korean spas serve as meeting place and bridge between past and future for generations of immigrant families; Spa Night explores one Korean-American family's dreams and realities as each struggles with the overlap of personal desire, disillusionment, and sense of tradition.... (Full plot summary below)
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Los Angeles' Korean spas serve as meeting place and bridge between past and future for generations of immigrant families; Spa Night explores one Korean-American family's dreams and realities as each struggles with the overlap of personal desire, disillusionment, and sense of tradition.
Leave your thoughts about Spa Night.
| The PlaylistAndy CrumpBeautifully executed, and marks an impressive debut from Ahn. |
| New York TimesStephen HoldenThe film is a contemplation of the loneliness, tension and anxiety of outsiders pursuing a piece of the American dream. |
| Film ExperienceNathaniel RogersSeo is quite moving in the role toward the latter half but coming of age stories are often hard pressed to feel new or revelatory, even with uncommon (for movies) cultural trappings. |
| The Film StageDan SchindelIts choice of main character and setting does indeed set it apart from the rest of its ilk, if only marginally so. |
| RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleySpa Night takes too much time to portray David's achingly slow and incomplete coming-out process, but its focus on the interior maelstrom of a teenager is extremely insightful |
| SF WeeklySherilyn ConnellyComing out as queer is always a difficult process, as is making an interesting movie about coming out in 2016, but Andrew Ahn's meditative Spa Night pulls it off. |
| NewcityRay PrideAhn and cinematographer Ki Jin Kim work with levels of color and quiet stylization that gently nudge the film into sweet moments of cinematic subjectivity. |
| Village VoiceSam WeisbergThere have been upbeat coming-out films (But I'm a Cheerleader) and tragic, infuriating ones (Boys Don't Cry, Brokeback Mountain). Andrew Ahn's Spa Night is executed on a significantly smaller scale, a deliberately anticlimactic one, which makes it all the more doleful. |
| GuardianNigel M. SmithDespite its setting and Korean American cast, Spa Night unfurls in a largely expected manner, with David struggling to embrace his identity because of his strict religious upbringing, while trying to make his family proud. He’s portrayed so opaquely that’s it’s difficult to connect with his dilemma. |
| indieWireKate ErblandThe beautifully lensed drama is, like its protagonist, compelled and often obsessed by the human shape and form, and Ahn’s film artfully uses the physical to tell a mostly standard issue coming-of-age story with style. |