Dear Public Diary ,
Every once in a while, you discover a movie or a series you never expected to be good. Nothing pulls you toward it except a random poster passing by on social media, a moment of boredom strong enough to make you try anything. You don’t expect depth, or meaning, or even to remember it the next day. And then, without warning, it stays with you. Not because it is loud or visually overwhelming, not because of a brilliant plot or breathtaking cinematography, but because it is quiet. Calm. Gentle. The kind of story that slips into your thoughts and refuses to leave, making you think, and then think again, and then question things you thought you had already understood about your life.
That was my experience with the Korean movie Our Season. It didn’t try to impress me. It didn’t rush me. It simply sat beside me and spoke in a soft voice, and somehow that voice reached places inside me that noise never could.
The story follows a mother who is given an impossible gift: a short return to the world of the living, just for one season, just to spend time with her daughter. The daughter, frozen in grief since her mother’s death, has abandoned her career and her life, choosing instead to remain in the space where guilt lives. She punishes herself quietly for not being there enough, for not loving properly, for not knowing how to show care in time. Their reunion is not dramatic. There are no emotional explosions or perfectly timed confessions. There is awkwardness, distance, silence. There is love that doesn’t know how to speak anymore. And that is what makes it real.
The movie focuses on the relationship between mothers and daughters, a relationship that feels unlike any other. It is intimate and fragile, filled with expectations, misunderstandings, and emotions that never quite find the right language. Our Season captures this bond in a painfully honest way: the lack of communication, the ignored words, the things both sides assume the other already knows. “Some feelings don’t disappear just because we don’t talk about them,” the film reminds us, and that sentence alone carries the weight of generations.
I felt their struggles deeply. I felt the unsaid thoughts, the heavy emotions hidden behind ordinary conversations, the pretending not to care while slowly breaking inside. In families, I believe the relationship between a mother and a daughter is one of the strangest and most complicated bonds that exists. Relationships between women are already complex, often tense, rarely simple. But when you add blood, history, duty, and unconditional love, everything becomes beautiful and ugly at the same time. “Love between a mother and a daughter is often expressed through silence,” and silence, in this case, becomes both protection and poison.
The film also speaks quietly but powerfully about parental sacrifice. About how mothers make choices believing they are building a better future for their children, even if it costs them warmth, softness, or presence. From the mother’s point of view, it is love. From the child’s point of view, it can feel like distance. As children, we don’t understand sacrifice. We understand affection. We understand being seen, held, listened to. When that kind of love is missing, even unintentionally, something cracks inside us. We grow up unable to fully understand our parents’ choices, especially our mothers’. And that misunderstanding follows us into adulthood.
There is a painful truth the movie made me face: when we don’t receive love in the way we need as children, we grow up carrying emptiness we don’t know how to fill. We don’t learn how to give what we were never given. No matter how much love surrounds us later, something inside remains unreachable. You cannot pour from an empty cup. And so the choices mothers make when their children are young don’t only shape their own lives, but echo through their children’s futures in ways no one can fully predict.
Another quiet truth the film holds is about acceptance and moving on. We like to believe that healing is a solitary act, that we can simply decide to let go. But the daughter in Our Season cannot move on until she hears the words she has been waiting for. Until her mother comforts her. Forgives her. Gives her permission to live. “Live well. That’s all I want for you,” her mother says, and only then does life begin to move again.
This made me realize that acceptance is rarely something we reach alone. We need help. We need clarity. We need words to untangle the unfinished thoughts looping endlessly in our minds. The daughter tortures herself by living half a life, abandoning her dreams, because she couldn’t be present at the end, because she couldn’t love properly while there was still time. She stays stuck until she knows she is forgiven, until she knows she was loved despite everything. And then the film gently reminds us of something devastating: most of us will never get that chance. Not everyone gets to speak to the dead. Not every goodbye gets a second season. Not every unsaid word finds its way back. And that is unbearably sad.
This is where the heart of the movie truly lies. Our Season encourages us to value the people we love while they are still alive, not only once they are gone. We don’t need death to force honesty. We don’t need loss to start speaking. Talk while you can. Speak while you can. Love clearly, imperfectly, openly, now. As Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, “No one deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry,” and yet we so often save our tenderness for too late.
On a personal level, this movie made me think deeply about distance, loneliness, and my own way of loving. I believe that living far from our parents can sometimes be a good thing. Loneliness gives us a strange chance to think, to overthink, to dig deeply into ourselves. In the times I was away from home for days, weeks, or months, I understood my emotions more clearly. I had deeper conversations with my mother then than I ever did when I was physically close.
I am shy. I struggle with eye contact. I don’t know how to hug naturally. I don’t know how to respond to grief or happiness. I don’t know what to do when someone cries beside me. I am the kind of person who loves deeply but doesn’t know how to show it. Being loved makes me uncomfortable, even when I crave it. I tried to change this. I tried to learn. And at some point, I stopped fighting myself and accepted that this is part of who I am. Thankfully, I met people who loved me even with these edges.
That is why the daughter in Our Season felt so familiar to me. The way she listens deeply while appearing indifferent. The way she seems distant while caring too much. The way love exists loudly inside her but struggles to come out. This movie surprised me because it didn’t just reflect a story on the screen, it reflected something buried inside me. It spoke to me in a quiet but undeniable voice.
Living alone remains a dream for me. A goal. I believe it is the only way I can truly face the chaos inside my head. My inner world is big, complicated, and layered, and it only reveals itself in silence. Noise outside and mess inside cannot coexist. A calm, quiet life allows emotions to surface, to be seen, to be understood. As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “I live my life in widening circles,” and I feel that only in stillness can I see how wide those circles truly are.
That is why solitude has never felt like emptiness to me. It feels like space. Like honesty. Like the only place where everything I carry can finally breathe. And maybe that is what Our Season ultimately gave me: the reminder that the softest stories often hold the heaviest truths, and that sometimes, a quiet movie can say everything you’ve been unable to say yourself.
So, dear reader, how often do we wait for words that may never come, instead of speaking them while we still can?
