"A Normal Family"

A Normal Family  is a 2023 South Korean drama film directed by Hur Jin-ho and written by Park Eun-kyo and Park Joon-seok, based on Herman Koch’s 2009 novel The Dinner.

The story follows two affluent families—two successful brothers—and a social world built on routine, composure, and reputation. The disruption does not come from the outside. The film shows how “normal” can cover cruelty and make it easier to accept, tolerate, and justify. It’s unsettling less because violence occurs and more because it can be made to fit.

The ethical problem is tied to a specific family setup. Jae-wan is a high-profile lawyer who has recently had a baby with his second wife, Ji-soo. She is much younger than him, and her arrival has shifted the balance in his household. His brother, Jae-gyu, is a gentle doctor. He is married to Yeon-kyung, a sharp, capable translator who also cares every day for her mother-in-law, who has dementia. When the two families meet for dinner, the scene looks like upper-middle-class normalcy: warmth, controlled disagreement, light teasing, and practiced respect. But the film treats this surface not as comfort, but as a moral technology—something that can absorb conflict while still looking “decent.”

The plot’s turning point is simple and decisive. Jae-wan’s teenage daughter Hye-yoon (from his first marriage) and Jae-gyu’s son Si-ho seem like typical kids at the table. Offstage, they live with reckless freedom, protected by money and the quiet assumption that consequences can be managed. On the night the families dine together, the two teens leave to drink at a party. Later, on the way home, they assault a homeless man and leave him badly injured. The film does not frame this as an aberration. It reads as an expression of entitlement and moral distance—violence made plausible inside a world where visibility and “social value” shape whose suffering counts.

From there, the film works as a study in moral perception: how harm becomes visible, nameable, and actionable inside a privileged social order. “Normality” is not a neutral label. It functions like a filter for what seems credible, what counts as context, and what looks like a “reasonable” response. The central question is not whether the adults know right from wrong, but how they manage knowledge and responsibility once wrongdoing is discovered within their own circle.

The truth surfaces through mediation, not confession. Yeon-kyung sees news coverage of the assault, including CCTV footage, and realizes Hye-yoon and Si-ho are the attackers. She becomes an unwilling hinge: she cannot unsee what she has seen, and she must decide whether to keep it inside the family or force it into the open. The film emphasizes her initial uncertainty. Ethical failure, it suggests, often starts as an attempt to preserve the things that make life feel stable—family unity, career security, social standing.

The brothers’ responses sharpen the conflict. Jae-gyu argues the children should be reported. He grounds this in his professional identity as a doctor—someone trained to treat harm and take responsibility seriously. Jae-wan immediately calculates reputational fallout and institutional risk. As a lawyer, he understands exposure: how scandal can undo a career, destabilize a family, and stain a name. He fears losing what he has built—his new marriage, his baby, his status. The film’s ethical tension is not a debate about abstract right and wrong; it is a struggle over practice: who gets protected, what suffering is treated as acceptable, and what costs are judged too high.

This is the film’s core claim: the gap between morality as performance and morality as action. The characters can speak in polished, even principled ways, while quietly narrowing the circle of who deserves their accountability. The collapse of ethics appears less as a rejection of values than as a shrinking of their scope. The victim—a homeless man—is treated as low-credibility, low-importance. His injury becomes easier to reframe as bad luck, “a mistake,” or an unfortunate event to be handled discreetly. The film is not only about concealment. It is about how respectability gives people language and procedure for avoiding responsibility—describing harm in ways that sound prudent, necessary, even humane, while the harm continues.

The mother-in-law’s dementia underlines this with a single line: “He may look gentle, but he’s cruel. Be careful.” Here dementia matters less as diagnosis than as narrative device. It loosens politeness, interrupts the usual scripts, and makes room for what is normally unsayable. The film suggests cruelty is rarely unknown. More often, it is unspeakable within the family’s preferred self-image. Naming it clearly would threaten the “normal family” story. What sustains normality, in other words, is not ignorance but disciplined civility.

The film also shows how wealth and success function as moral credit. Affluence reads as virtue; achievement reads as character. A Normal Family highlights the practical payoff: the ability to shift costs without losing face, to offload risk onto others, and to keep actions within the bounds of what still looks “reasonable.” Cruelty is portrayed less as a private emotion than as a mode of conduct—strategic indifference that lets one proceed with life while others absorb the damage.

That is why the film feels so recognizable without turning into a lecture. Status allows people to perform innocence, receive trust, and shape the story of what happened—and what counts as harm. Harm does not simply occur; it is managed and sorted through the rules of respectability. Even the friction between the women—Yeon-kyung’s needling of Ji-soo, the younger wife—signals more than family tension. It marks differences in class position, gendered authority, and moral standing, which become decisive once the family must choose whose future to secure and at what price.

By the end, the film lands a blunt ethical point: “normal life” can absorb a great deal of damage when the same rules that preserve normality also help people overlook damage, bury it, and move past it. The story is disturbing not because it lingers on violence as spectacle, but because it shows how violence becomes compatible with polite conversation—how cruelty persists when morality remains something people say, not something they do.