Spa Night (2016)

There 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.

The film is a contemplation of the loneliness, tension and anxiety of outsiders pursuing a piece of the American dream.

Neither obtuse nor obvious, Spa Night finds the perfect balance in communication. It shows enough, but not too much; it articulates its ideas, but it doesn’t asphyxiate the audience with them.

It recombines elements of the emigrant saga and the coming-of-age story into a searching, fresh-faced portrait.

Though it leaves too many narrative blanks unfilled, Spa Night is a promising debut from a filmmaker with a lot of insight into the different guises that immigrants and their offspring wear as they make their way through the world.