Gina Kim attracted international attention with the various installments of her video diaries in which she obsessively documents her relationship to enclosed domestic spaces and her eating disorders. Kim's narrative feature debut goes one step further in exploring her narcissistic/solipsistic relationship to the female body.
There are hardly any strangers in the house that Gina built - her female protagonists, acutely aware of their physical desires and bodily functions are totally aloof. However, the sense of despair and loneliness is gradually replaced by an inner peace and strength.
The film comprises two parts that complement each other, and are secretly connected: the absentee lover of the first woman, Gah-in, who lives in California, is the husband of the second woman, Do-Hee, who leaves and returns to the Korea of her childhood, where she knows virtually no-one. Prone to eating disorders, Gah-in can't leave her apartment in the countryside, while Do-Hee, without a place to go, wanders from motel to motel, once with a strange man (sex takes place off-screen), mostly alone, unsure if she should take an abortion pill and striking an awkward friendship with an a-sexual bar-tender.
Kim's rigorous mise en scene matches the unflinching singularity of her vision and offers a compelling, albeit disturbing vista on what Lacanian psychoanalyst Michele Montrelay describes as "the woman's relationship to her body, a relationship simultaneously narcissistic and erotic. For the woman enjoys her body as she would the body of another"
—Berenice Reynaud (www.sensesofcinema.com)