SON SUK-KU AND MOON CHOI IN BEDFORD PARK (DIR. STEPHANIE AHN)
STEPHANIE AHN: BEDFORD PARK (2026) - MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL
Late-blooming romance of two bruised immigrants' children
This is a sweeping portrait of second generation Korean Americans - it feels sometimes as if it wants to be more epic than it has room for - seen through the point of view of a thirty-something man and woman, both with complicated histories, who begin as hostile - their cars bump into each other - and winds up as a romance. The Bronx location named in the title has no literal connection. After the car accident where Aubrey (Moon Choi) and Eli (Son Suk-ku) meet, Audrey moves back from Brooklyn to live with her aging immigrant parents in the New Jersey suburbs. Eli lives in a rougher area of New Jersey where he works as a local mall security guard. Aubrey is a physical therapist. The meet cute was the minor car accident and then a fight over a fruit basket brought to Eli's to placate him and make him settle outside of insurance. He rejects the fruit and she rubs it all over the facade and window of his house.
Later their backgrounds emerge. Aubrey has an alcoholic dad (Kim Eung-soo) who is a bitter failure in America who in Korea wore a suit and tie and was somebody. Her mother (Won Mi-kyung) is plain spoken and harsh. Aubrey has abused herself and had so many miscarriages it's doubtful she can have a baby. Eli was adopted by a non-Korean family, and though Korean was his first language his Korean is shaky now. He was a wrestling champion of generational impact in high school, and when he goes back there he is greeted as a hero (and actor Son Suk-ku is a gnarly athlete). In person now, though, he seems imploded, bitter, possibly dangerous.
The movie was filmed on location in New Jersey towns such as Englewood, Paterson, Passaic, Secaucus, and Fort Lee: it relishes its gritty ordinariness and its protagonists' tentativeness and unfulfilledness. Their time to start really living is past due.
Though Aubrey's sexual history has been unfortunate, she is sexual. Eli seems like a chained beast, powerful but repressed. When they come together it feels sexy, and then for a while it doesn't, and then eventually (spoiler alert) they go out to dinner and dance to a swooningly romantic Motown tune or two, and then Aubrey goes home with Eli.
I have respect for Stephanie Ahn's ability to depict the second generation Korean American experience and milieu in these parts of New Jersey. If one thinks of James Gray's debut film Little Odessa and its portrait of the Brooklyn Russian community, this is nothing like that, no Koreatown scene, only a powerful sense of conflict with immigrant Korean parents with whom Aubrey is intensely at odds, yet back to living with them and feeling and being treated like a child, then another Korean American alienated in the opposite way, cast out of any Korean community.
Ahn doesn't offer much of a payoff: it's all in the development, some of which is arguably going into distracting subplots, like Aubrey's pregnancies and miscarriages and Eli's pull to the south and toxic relatives. But I haven't conveyed how sexy and cool these two actors are and how interesting they are, separate and together.
Bedford Park, 117 mins., premiered at Sundance Jan. 2026 and has just been featured at TIFF. Screened as part of Mill Valley. U.S. theatrical release on September 22, 2026, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. Metacritic rating: 69.