Aloners

Jina (Gong Seung-yeon) is the top employee at a call center, but despite talking to customers all day, she has shut out the world beyond her headset; she lives alone, eats alone, sleeps alone, and her cell phone is her constant companion. When one day she's tasked with training a friendly and naive new hire (Jung Da-eun), her icy armor is threatened. At the same time, she must navigate an incessantly ingratiating new neighbor, and increasingly urgent phone calls from her father, leaving Jina teetering on the edge of an existential crisis, forcing her to confront why she has isolated herself all these years. Riffing on the Korean 'honjok' - a phenomenon of young people who live alone and skirt social interaction - to examine the personal traumas of loss and alienation, this subtly poetic directorial debut is a "stirring portrait of the cages we build for ourselves and questions how and when we may want to be free of them," (Ms. Magazine).