The Intertwining Reveals a Japanese-Korean IVF Swap — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Akira Yamamoto extends shots beyond their expected length to hold on dialogue pauses, while asking Jiyoung and Karata to internalize the film’s biggest emotions instead of playing them outward.
- Ji-hyun and Nakano meet after responding to an elderly woman’s collapse on a city bus; Ji-hyun is a fifth-year Korean exchange student often mistaken for Japanese, and each set of parents worked in hospitality as the women discover they were born at one clinic around the same time.
- Nakano tests her DNA against that of her parents and brother after learning about DNA sequencing, then learns from a nurse that the adults who raised her are not her biological parents and receives their names.
- The fertility clinic implanted IVF embryos in the two mothers on the same day but transferred the wrong embryos more than 20 years ago, leaving Nakano biologically Korean and Ji-hyun biologically Japanese.
- Nakano’s father angrily confronts the clinic head for putting “a Korean embryo” into his wife, treating the error as a betrayal of family honor and helping Nakano feel no guilt about leaving him behind.
- Ji-hyun loves her family and does not want to become Japanese; she and Nakano visit her supportive family’s seaside restaurant in South Korea, where their bubble of unspoken words strains with tension.
- The Intertwining premiered at the 2026 Tokyo International Film Festival and is currently seeking U.S. distribution, although the reviewer says tighter narrative focus would have strengthened the film.
Why it matters: For Nakano and Ji-hyun, the fertility clinic’s same-day IVF mix-up more than 20 years ago turns a medical error into a clash between ethnicity, family honor and selfhood. Yamamoto’s restrained staging gives their identity crisis an explicitly political dimension in Japan that a generic medical mystery would miss.
Ask SkimNews
