For ‘poetry’, of course, read ‘cinema’. Lee Chang-Dong is hardly the first filmmaker to send a protagonist on a journey of discovery that changes their perception of the world, but no one’s ever put a sixtysomething granny in the early stages of Alzheimer’s through an adult-education poetry class as a way of crafting a social statement about a self-absorbed patriarchy’s paucity of human insight. We watch and learn – about South Korea certainly, but about ourselves too – though this never becomes a duty, since Lee’s enviable level of accomplishment seemingly precludes didacticism. Here’s a filmmaker with a conscience, that’s for sure, but one who deploys it in an astringent challenge to our assumptions rather than sentimental pandering. Lee is esteemed at home and on the festival circuit (he’s a regular in competition at Cannes), but this is the first of his five features to secure UK theatrical distribution. It’s fair to say that the subject-matter, encompassing poetry, dementia, sexual abuse and suicide, is likely to be a hard sell, but the quality of the film is such that it simply demands an airing...Here the elderly Mija reacts to news of her irreversible Alzheimer’s by signing up for a poetry class. She’s losing her words (even everyday ones like ‘electricity’ and ‘wallet’), so why even enter an arena that’s about shaping enhanced perceptions through the skilled command of language?..Mija’s endeavours culminate in an all-consuming identification with the suicide victim Hee-jin, setting up a closing gesture of transcendence achieved through Mija’s written words and Lee’s images of running water. Somehow it’s at once a moment of liberating individual release and a bleak recognition of an intransigent status quo, and it lifts what is already a rich and compassionate film into something approaching greatness.[Sight and Sound]