What we see in THE HOUSE OF SUH is a multitude of interviews, records, and photos that cohesively provide an image of Andrew and Catherine’s lives growing up as first generation children under Korean immigrant parents struggling under the weighty expectations of fulfilling the American Dream. Interviews with Andrew and Catherine’s family members shed light on Catherine’s volatile relationship with their father and his favoring of Andrew as the model son. Additional interviews with Korean journalists covering the story as well as Andrew’s pro-bono defense lawyer further capture an image of Andrew’s life under Catherine’s guardianship, following the deaths of their mother and father, as one tunneled into creating an ideal identity in her eyes, with impenetrable family loyalty serving as a central weight to his being. All of this, in the backdrop of Andrew’s own narration, weave together the heartbreaking complexities that riddled Catherine and Andrew’s lives — complexities that provide a pseudo-foundation for the motives behind the crime. 

     

THE HOUSE OF SUH presents Andrew with eloquent, paced speech and notable mannerisms trailing far from a stereotypical prison inmate that may seem off-putting to those who expect to see a broken Andrew — a remorseful Andrew — tainted with paralyzing regret of the night that cast him into a 100-year prison sentence. But Director Iris K. Shim masterfully fuses these off-putting images with the inner conflicts in Andrew and Catherine’s lives to represent a crime carried out in the name of undeniable family loyalty, which, in Andrew’s life, meant only Catherine. Hauntingly grim yet eloquently made, THE HOUSE OF SUH takes complex elements in unbreakable loyalty, life calamity, and even culture to focus on the murky shades of grey that are imperative in understanding the Suh family’s ultimate tragedy.