TIFF 51: Stephanie Ahn’s “Bedford Park” is an unrelenting actors’ showcase

by Cláudio Alves

Social realism is a preferred style for many directors in the American indie scene. However, one must be careful when indulging in its rawness, or else accusations of making misery porn may come about. There’s also the way such projects can devolve into something more akin to an acting exercise than a story proper, built upon and uniquely sustained by performers willing to portray degradation for the camera, breaking apart for our viewing pleasure if not our elucidation. Despite putative good intentions, Stephanie Ahn’s debut feature, Bedford Park, is a good example of these pitfalls, exploring the attrition cum companionship cum romance of two thirtysomething second-generation Korean-Americans played by Moon Choi and Son Sukku.

Her Audrey and his Eli go through it and then some in a diasporic bit of melodrama that, at times, feels like it’s aimlessly piling on misfortunes so that it can gawk at how its leads will articulate them through committed performances. Is there more to it? Hard to say…

Bedford Park welcomes you without much preamble, no gentleness either. Audrey sits heavily in the Boston subway, browsing the dating apps with a bored indolence that masks her true determination. Smash cut to a sexual encounter, a BDSM session where she’s tied to the bed, her underwear cut off with scissors by a dom who’s far softer than the film he’s in. Then comes the doctor’s office, where we learn Audrey is pregnant and has a history of miscarriages. This latest pregnancy, presumably resulting from that earlier encounter, is bound to be another one. Her reaction is hard to read, but Audrey isn’t the easiest to pin down. 

At work, as a palliative care physical therapist, she’s ribbed for being too nice by jokey colleagues, though her boss is stern, decidedly unpersuaded by her supposed charms, convinced of her wrongness. Indeed, she’s suspended for three weeks for a bad attitude. Later, at lunch with her brother who’s going back to rehab, none of her niceness is in evidence, and we might see what that cretinous higher-up of hers might also perceive. Audrey is a no-nonsense, cutting woman who expects the worst from everyone, an automatic response born of countless losses in a life that seems too short to encompass so much pain.

Eli’s introduction isn’t nearly as caustic. He’s a good neighbor in a poor neighborhood, though there’s no pretense of warmth to his behavior with his fellow man, which, in its own way, warms us to him. Arriving late to class, surrounded by younger folks, he sticks out like hunky sore thumb while the teacher prattles on about self-worth. Smash cut to him hooking up with one of the other students, someone who’s quick to say some racist shit in the afterglow of an orgasm that took a comedic roommate’s interruptions to get there. On the road, a car crashes into his, and the driver is none other than Audrey’s mother. Like so, their worlds collide.

There’s no cuteness in the cinematic cosmos Ahn conceived for Bedford Park, much less meet-cutes. And, heavens, what a meet-ugly Audrey and Eli have, two assholes crashing together like a pair of freight trains heading into each other. The mother wants to kill him with kindness by bringing a fruit basket, hopefully convincing Eli not to claim any damages. He’s not having it, though, openly rude and dismissive, throwing them out with little care, understanding the elder woman’s outraged Korean but refusing to respond in the same idiom. He’s American through and through, to her great consternation. And Audrey? She’s furious like a storm, smearing the unwanted fruit all over his windows.

It’s still better than their next encounter, when the stormy physical therapist comes a-knocking with the police report that decided in her mom’s favor. Alas, whatever gloating could manifest doesn’t really, because no sooner has she thrown the papers in his face, she’s bleeding. A miscarriage, another one, and in a most inhospitable place. This is a nightmare where everything that could go wrong does. Also, it’s just the first act, really, the setup of Bedford Park’s two-hour traumatic pile-on. There’s an almost comical quality to it. Still, while her characters might indulge in gallows’ humor, Ahn isn’t so keen on joining them, preserving a tonal balance that leans toward mirthless torpidity. 

Her formal approach is basic, verging on the perfunctory, and as sullen as the leads. At times, it feels deliberately ugly, color-graded to the hues of a faded bruise on ashen skin, diffuse, dirty lighting, and that shapelessness in mise-en-scène one comes to expect from films wanting to be read as authentic. While one wouldn’t dare to question the authenticity of Ahn’s observations of her own community, what ends up on screen doesn’t convince as engaging drama, insightful character study, nor a particularly meritorious piece of an audiovisual art form. Then again, this punitive unpleasantness might very well be the point of it all, misguided as that might be.

Early in Bedford Park, that lecture about self-worth suggests we’re victims of low self-esteem because we refuse to realize what we’re worth, as cogs in the machine, as laborers, as people. But the truth is that this story isn’t interested in exploring that awareness. It prefers to mire in its negative reflection until it becomes a film primarily about self-loathing. Everyone in it with any particular narrative relevance – and there are way too many narrative threads that accumulate and are then left unresolved – is ashamed of themselves, on some fundamental level. Ashamed of and toward the ones they love, their family, friends, their situation and circumstance. 

In this spiraling mindset, a cinematic shadowiness emerges through Ahn’s devices, and showing affection becomes the one crack of light. But even then, the crux of the matter ends up being how different people, all of them broken in their own distinct ways, have conflicting ways of extending, accepting, and recognizing such affection, often expressed across boundary lines, if not chasms, of culture, gender, and generations. It’s not enough to combat the shamefulness that grips every character and refuses to let go, though it provides an avenue for the storytelling to force an optimistic end. Has Bedford Park earned it? Or has it just forced false hope out of desperation?

All in all, the film remains an unrelenting experience whose value, at least for this viewer, lies almost exclusively in its cast. Choi and Son are quite marvelous, especially when the script’s contrivances take a step back, and the film merely observes them negotiate how to exist around one another. Choi, in particular, has an off-hand, endlessly fascinating, mannered stiltedness to her performance that provides an abrasive note to contradict the naturalism which the film’s form conditions us to expect. Even when the script seems to want to pathologize Audrey’s unorthodox sexual practices or her relationship to motherhood, the characterization Choi presents slips away from clichéd conclusions. 

Through her work, we get to intimately understand rather than clinically observe a woman’s self-destructive tendencies, her self-harm. Because sometimes, the sting of cutting yourself open is kinder than the feeling of life cutting you apart against your will. Son never gets as revealing, nor are his choices as surprising. He’s still excellent, making a dance scene in the middle of this Korean-Bostonian clusterfuck of a would-be romance into something to contemplate long after the end credits have scrolled and the screen is left empty as these characters feel. The way his body melts without losing its permanent tension, the shadow of ever-present caution, is a thing of beauty.

There are other good performances to account for, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering all those subplots branching out from the main pair. The first among equals is Kim Eung-soo as Audrey’s father. Back in Korea, the patriarch wore a business suit and earned respect. In America, he worked at a grocery store, enduring the prejudice of those who looked down on him. Feeling beaten down by life, drowning his sorrows in soju and the burn of his own fury, he’s spent decades letting it all out on a dutiful wife who took the abuse like it was her fated purpose and children who witnessed it. Bedford Park has complicated feelings for him, alright, understanding yet not excusing the man’s role in cycles of generational trauma that must be broken if anyone truly expects to heal. 

Kim bears the weight of all these thematic responsibilities, perhaps even the film’s most valuable thesis, without falling into the leads’ saturnine bleakness. Instead, he’s full of bluster, so loud and purposefully heightened that we can see how his daughter’s behavior evolved from him yet metastasized into something uniquely hers. The actor’s willingness to go big, to alienate and maybe betray the miserable naturalism on display elsewhere to a higher degree than Choi is incredible and why he’s such a needed disruption to Bedford Park. He’s a random blotch of paint in a mural that makes the whole thing work when you focus on it, the dissonant note that makes this song of the diaspora worth listening to with rapt attention.

Bedford Park had its world premiere in the US Dramatic Competition of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, winning a Special Jury Award for Best Debut. Now it plays in TIFF’s Discovery section, and it’ll have a theatrical release later in 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.