Hi, Mystery Recapped here. Today I am going to explain a South Korean fantasy film called “Vanishing Time: A Boy Who Returned. ” Spoilers ahead!
Watch out and take care! At the start of the movie, a child psychiatrist interviews a girl named Soo-rin. Soo-rin gets visibly nervous when the doctor sets up a camera to record the interview.
She asks her to recite her story from the beginning. Soo-rin starts by saying that her mother married Do-kyun some years ago. Soon after the marriage, her mother passed away and since then, Soo-rin has been living with Do-kyun.
He is appointed to a construction site on a ruler island named Hwano, so the two have to move to the island. After her mother’s death, Soo-rin has never truly been happy. She doesn’t talk much and isn’t fond of her stepfather.
She is enrolled in a new school on the island where she has the opportunity to make many friends, but even then she prefers staying alone. Her stepfather has to work overnight as the chief of a tunnel construction site. Because of the explosions that take place during the construction, the inhabitants of the island are forbidden from entering the construction area.
One night, Soo-rin goes through her phone and reads comments on her blog about a wormhole. When her mother died, Soo-rin wanted to run away from the world, and while researching ways to do that, she started to gain interest in wormholes, supernatural beings, and so on. She talks to people on the internet about such topics even on the school’s computer.
She accidentally leaves her computer open which allows her classmates to read her comments and make fun of her. While returning home, Soo-rin meets a boy named Sung-min who lives in an orphanage. Sung-min introduces himself and tries to befriend Soo-rin but she ignores him.
The next day during lunch, Soo-rin comes across Sung-min and his friends talking about her blog on the wormhole. Sung-min claims to have entered another dimension after reading it. That day, Sung-min follows her behind as she is walking home.
On being called out, he says that he believes everything that she has written in the blog. Out of their shared interest in supernatural processes, the two become friends. Soo-rin has developed her own alphabets to communicate with Sung-min in secret.
They begin to use it daily to leave each other notes in Soo-rin’s diary. Every day after school, they go around town looking for ghosts. In one of such expeditions, Sung-min brings Soo-rin to an abandoned wooden house in the forest.
They explore the house and talk for a long time while carving on wax blocks. Soo-rin has started to fall in love with Sung-min. She kisses him out of the blue making him fluster.
One day, Soo-rin finds Sung-min and three of his friends planning to go to the construction site to watch the explosions. She joins them and the kids make their way through the woods so the grownups wouldn’t see them. When they cross the fence to the site, one of the kids chickens out and runs back home.
The other four hide behind a cliff waiting, but are disappointed when no explosions take place. While walking through the jungle, they come across a tiny cave. They decide to explore it and go inside one after another.
Eventually, they come across a bright glowing substance submerged in water at the end of the cave. Soo-rin assumes that it is a meteoroid. Sung-min takes it upon himself to dive into the water and bring the substance out.
On being brought out of the tunnel, the thing stops glowing. The kids notice that it looks like an egg. One of the guys named Tae-shik claims that the egg might belong to a time goblin.
His grandfather had once told him that on full moon nights, a cave appears in the mountains where the time goblin lives. Whoever goes into the cave will come out as an older person. The other kids do not believe him since they didn’t age.
Soo-rin discovers that her hairpin which was a gift from her mother is missing. She goes back into the cave to look for it as the guys guard the egg. She finds her pin but also notices that the glowing egg is back in the water.
Confused, she comes out to see that the egg has broken and her friends are missing. She looks for them all around the jungle till it gets dark. She is eventually lost in the woods and has to stay the night.
The following day a police force looks for the kids in the woods. Detective Ahn is made the head of the investigation. Soon, the police find Soo-rin unconscious in the woods.
Fortunately, she is alive and well. In the hospital, the detective asks her what happened to the other guys and she tells him everything about the cave and the glowing egg. The detective and the adults do not believe her story.
She even takes them to the jungle to show them the cave but cannot find it. It is almost as if it disappeared after the full moon night. Then, the detective is informed that the corpse of one of the missing boys, Jae-wook, has been found underground on a beach 20 KM away from the town.
It is revealed that the cause of his death was an asthma attack. Since someone had to bury him underground, the case turns from missing person to kidnapping. Weeks pass after the incident but the other two boys are not found.
Without Sung-min, Soo-rin turns into her older introverted self. She, too, is as confused as everyone but no one believes her when she says the truth. One day, she hears a noise from outside her house.
On checking, she sees a man running to the woods. She follows him behind and enters deep into the forest. Some minutes into running, she falls to the ground and the man also stops.
He approaches her and looks at her in fascination as Soo-rin freezes in shock. The man speaks for the first time and claims that he is Sung-min. On hearing his name, Soo-rin comes out of her shocked state and runs away crying.
She ends up in front of Do-Kyun’s car and hastily tells him about the man. The police are informed about the incident and they start searching the woods to look for the man, assuming that he is the kidnapper. Detective Ahn asks Soo-rin about the man and she reveals that he was pretending to be Sung-min.
The policemen do not find the kidnapper but they get their hands on Soo-rin’s diary that she and Sung-min used to leave notes for each other. On seeing the pages, she is surprised because they are filled with Sung-min’s notes. Using their code language, he has written about everything that happened after she went into the cave to get her hairpin.
The guys get curious about what is inside the egg, so Sung-min breaks it on the ground without waiting for Soo-rin. To their disappointment, it turns out to be empty. When Soo-rin doesn’t return for a while, Sung-min goes inside the cave and sees that she has frozen in her place.
He tries to talk to her and move her but she doesn’t respond. Moments later, he notices a drop of water levitating mid-air. He comes out of the cave and looks upwards to see the birds have also frozen in the air.
The boys go to the town and see that everyone, including their families have paused. This makes them realize that time has frozen for everyone except the three of them, meaning that they can do anything they want. For the first few days, they are on top of the world.
They eat and drink whatever they like, sleep whenever they want to, and play around the entire day. After a month or so, they get bored so they decide to leave the island and go to another city to see if they are actually the only people on the earth who can move. However, their plan is spoiled when they realize that the water in the ocean has also stopped flowing, which means that the boat will sink.
Back in the present, Soo-rin registers that the man who approached her in the woods was in fact Sung-min. She stops reading as now getting the police away from him is her first priority. If they find him, they will surely arrest him for being the kidnapper so she claims to have lied about seeing anyone in the jungle.
The police believe her and she continues reading the journal. Many months later, the guys start to live inside a tent in the mall. Jae-wook’s health gets worse by the day because he has asthma and his inhaler stops working.
One night, he suffocates and slowly passes away in front of his friends. Sung-min and Tae-shik are devastated. With a heavy heart, they bury their friend’s corpse under the ground on a nearby beach.
After dying, Jae-wook’s body also pauses like the others. Five years pass but the world remains the same. The guys have now grown into teenagers.
Although they have been living in isolation for so many years, they still hope that someday, the world will go back to normal. Sung-min believes that when they turn twenty, their time will resume. They steal a little bit of money from everyone to be rich when that happens.
However, even when they turn twenty, nothing changes. They slowly begin to lose hope and start to live in the wooden house in the jungle. One day, the isolation gets the best of Sung-min; he screams and yells for it all to stop.
Tae-shik witnesses this from afar and loses all hope. Some days later, Sung-min notices that the moon’s shape is changing, meaning that the world is about to be resumed. He goes looking for Tae-shik but doesn’t find him anywhere.
He searches for him throughout the island and eventually reaches the last cliff. There, he discovers Tae-shik’s clothes on the ground and registers that his friend has He also jumps behind Tae-shik as the last resort. But at the very moment, the world resumes.
He comes out of the water and is mesmerized by the moving nature. After reading the journal, Soo-rin runs to the wooden house and finally sees her friend. They decide to tell the story to the world but are unsure if anyone will believe them.
Meanwhile, CCTV footage shows the police that Sung-min is in the woods. They believe he is the kidnaper. At night, Sung-min comes to Soo-rin’s room for emotional support.
Since he has been living alone for such a long time, he is scared he will harm himself to get rid of the pain. The next day, Tae-shik’s parents arrive at the construction site blaming Do-kyun for their kid’s disappearance. They believe that the explosion in the site killed their son, and Soo-rin is making up stories to save her stepfather.
Meanwhile, Soo-rin and Sung-min go to the orphanage that Sung-min used to stay in. Soo-rin explains everything to the warden and comes outside to call Sung-min. However, she is dragged away by her father right then.
Sung-min approaches his mother-like warden and tells her everything he used to do as a kid. She is shocked but she still doesn’t believe him. Do-kyun locks Soo-rin in her room at night but Sung-min enters through the back door and frees her.
They run away from the house to decide what they should do next. Soo-rin remembers seeing a second egg in the cave. She suggests she uses the egg and returns as an adult to prove to the others that Sung-min is innocent.
However, Sung-min is against the idea because he knows how difficult it is to live in isolation. He would rather be named a kidnapper than let her go through what he felt in the past years. Do-kyun sees that his daughter is missing and figures she went to the wooden house after finding a picture of her and Sung-min on her phone.
He goes there at night, attacks Sung-min, and tries to take Soo-rin back home. But Sung-min knocks him out and runs away with her. The next day, the police investigate the wooden house and believe that the kidnapper is manipulating Soo-rin by making her believe he is Sung-min.
The news about Soo-rin’s disappearance is on the TV so the police soon find the two. A chase ensues between them and the police when Soo-rin turns herself in to save Sung-min. Before separating she asks him to meet her at the cave.
Detective Ahn tries to make Soo-rin understand that the kidnaper is lying to her but she doesn’t believe him. She makes an excuse of wanting to go to the bathroom and runs away to the cave. She brings the glowing egg out and hands it to Sung-min but he refuses to return it to her because he doesn’t want her to use it.
He is about to turn himself in and take the blame for killing his friends. He runs away into the woods as Soo-rin follows him. At the same time, the police arrive and chase behind.
They stop at the end of a cliff. An officer grabs Sung-min and pushes Soo-rin off the cliff in the process. The detective helps Soo-rin but ends up hanging off the cliff with her.
Sung-min tries to save them, but before he can, they both fall back. To save them, Sung-min breaks the egg again and stops time. When Soo-rin wakes up a few seconds later, she is on a beach with the detective.
She realizes what Sung-min has just done. Although it has only been a moment for her, for Sung-min it must have been another decade. She is then taken back home.
While eating dinner, she apologizes to her father for everything she has done and calls him dad for the first time. The detective comes to inquire how they survived the fall. Soo-rin doesn’t answer but he figures out that she was telling the truth this entire time.
He suggests she give a false statement to the media and say that the kidnapper had manipulated her. This way, the people who are accusing her of killing her friends along with the kidnapper will be proved wrong. Soo-rin is finally done telling her story to the psychiatrist.
She is left stunned after listening to it all and wants to write a book on it. Some months later, Soo-rin is moving to a different city for high school. Before leaving, she meets the psychiatrist who gives her the book which has now been published.
On her way to the ferry, Soo-rin sees Sung-min through her car window and runs to meet him but finds no one. But some time later, the two meet on the deck. The movie ends as they stare at each other.
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