To be a teenage girl is to be in constant reconstruction of meaning, and coming in terms with a world filled with shifting meanings around you and the growing sense of listlessness in your gut that’ll eventually never leave you behind. Eun-hee’s mother is disappearing, but she can’t tell yet where to. Her father doesn’t seem to know her even a little bit. Together they are twin ghosts in the crucible of a middle-class existence. And in the midst of it all are Eun-hee’s perceptive, watchful, soulful eyes that always seem to be looking through things rather than at them. She carries the film with a solemn grace and maturity and is the gravity holding the film’s center. Eo be alive is to be in solitude, and eun-hee learns that early on in her young life. But she lives anyway.
The mid-nineties were the dying light of an old era at the cusp of a new one, where connections were made with landlines and pagers. Big feelings compressed in digits and dial tones. Heartbreaks in alleyways and street lamps. Coming-of-age and learning solitude like your own body part. To raise a teenaged girl in a sleepy town is grow an oak tree in a shoebox: there will always be places you can’t reach, nevertheless understand, but you will experience anyway: how the bloom and wilt of a first love can change everything about you over the course of a cruel summer. Smelling the smoke in your own home even without seeing it. Realizing your family does not speak your language, they never will.
There’s a small unnamed violence that comes with coming of age. To grow into adulthood is to welcome new shapes of grief into your body and to learn to stretch and grow to accommodate them. But there is only so much one body can hold.
House of Hummingbird captures the feeling of an old family photobook, filled with the small violences we leave unto one another when were young and don’t know any better, the kind of wounds that leave no exit wound. It is, frankly, quietly stunning.
