Mongrels: Fragments of Memories
by Karenna Blomberg
“Mother’s hand is a healing hand…”
This phrase is one you hear in the form of a soothing, lullabye-esque song repeated throughout Mongrels, which is the feature film debut of Canadian writer and director Jerome Yoo. Long after the film ended, both the sound of this song and its simple, grounding sentiment lingered with me—a sign that the film struck me exactly where I believe it was aiming.
I caught Mongrels during its run at the Seattle International Film Festival 2025. After the screening, Yoo explained that the movie, which he initially began working on in 2022, was not supposed to be a strict retelling of any personal story, but instead was meant to represent “fragments of memories” of his life growing up in the community of Korean diaspora in British Columbia, Canada. And “fragmented” is an excellent adjective to describe the movie; it is jaggedly stitched together, floating from one thought to the next, sometimes dreamlike and other times brutally grounded.
The film, set in the 1990s, follows Sonny Lee (played by rookie actor Jaehyun Kim), his teenage son Hajoon (Hoyoung Jeon), and elementary school-aged daughter Hana (Sein Jin, also a first-time actress), who recently moved to Canada from Korea after the implied death of their mother and Sonny’s wife. Unable to find much work in their new home in the Canadian prairies, Sonny accepts a job offer from a local farm owner who needs help trapping and killing the wild stray dogs that get into his crops and disturb their peace with howls that last deep into the night. Hajoon becomes torn as his father demands he “man up” and help him with the gruesome job, but he finds himself drawn to a “softer” way of life, making friends with the farmer’s son, integrating himself into his new community, and caring for Hana, who has been left mostly in the dark about both her mother’s death and her father’s new profession.
The film’s composition (three acts—one for each member of the Lee family, each with a different tone, musical profile, and aspect ratio) may come across as gimmicky to some—and maybe it kind of is—but I found it to be well executed and apt for the story. We start the movie from Sonny’s perspective and follow his grim, existential tightrope walk between various poles: duty to his grief and duty to his family, seeking assimilation and approval while facing resentment and othering from his new employer and neighbors; managing his new role as both father and mother to Hajoon and Hana. Divided between many different needs and wants and identities, Sonny drifts helplessly between the human and the animalistic. Hajoon’s story then acts like a much more optimistic extension of Sonny’s, still torn between two worlds but not as horrified by his place within them. Then, Hana’s story shifts even more towards a feeling of hope amidst unsettling change, and acts as an anchor for Sonny and Hajoon’s more tumultuous storylines. The complete changes in tone might be a bit jarring, but act as a way to highlight the vastly different perspectives each member of the Lee family has on their new life.
The role of the dogs within the story is a clever way to expand the film beyond the typical diaspora narrative. Yoo takes a massive film taboo (you never ever kill the dog) and uses it as a way to cut to the conceptual chase. The titular mongrels become a sort of thematic spine that allows Yoo to reach out in many different directions without entirely losing his plot. A movie that could have easily been a jumbled mess of experiences from the diaspora is transformed into a textured exploration of how grief and assimilation can become, in their own ways, dehumanizing.
Despite subject matter that sounds quite disturbing on paper, Mongrels is an uplifting film overall. It almost entirely avoids actually showing you any of the violence, which provides a thin but necessary distance from reality for the audience. It does not act like an uber-realistic drama or a brutal tearjerker, but moves along more like a telling of a fable, with the slight air of surreality that you only feel in dreams and partial memories. The repeated song, “Mother’s hand is a healing hand,” ties all three parts of the movie together, quite literally working as a healing agent that counteracts much of the disturbing and confusing bits in between.
Mongrels may not be for everyone. But if it piques your interest in any way, I highly recommend seeking it out. Excellently acted and capably directed, I found that it is one of the most thematically rich movies in recent memory. And while it may prove tedious for some, allowing yourself to follow it through its darker moments and labyrinthine plotlines leads to a moving and strange yet life-affirming cinematic experience.