The Woman (2025) Fantasia Review

The Woman has a stellar lead performance and promising setup, but its unclear ending leaves a lot more questions than answers.

On paper, The Woman has an alluring premise. The story centers on Sun-kyung (Han Hye-ji), who arranges to meet a man giving away a free vacuum cleaner, as she needs one for her apartment. After seeing the gentleman in question, she realizes that there’s something peculiar about him. Thankfully, just as the situation escalates, her classmate Ui-jin (Nam Yeon-woo), who happens to be passing by, intervenes, as he too realizes the man’s strange behavior. The day after the bizarre interaction, Sun-kyung is contacted by a detective who questions her about what happened the day before. He states that Ui-jin committed suicide shortly after the encounter with the offbeat man took place. After absorbing this horrifying news, Sun-kyung is convinced that the man who sold her the hoover has something to do with her friend’s death.

For the first hour of The Woman, I was completely immersed in the story. After Ui-jin’s apparent suicide, viewers are left wondering what happened to him as they try to put the pieces together. At first, the strange man Sun-kyung meets seems guilty based on the circumstances, but as time passes, viewers realize that he isn’t the only one who appears unusual within the story. The motives of certain other characters and their broader involvement in the situation are also questionable.

Sun-kyung seems an innocent, down-to-earth character, but as time goes on, certain behaviors she displays make you question if she could be hiding something. This facade is further validated when we start to see the character laughing to herself at inappropriate times, and when we see visions she has where her classmates ask her, “Why did you do that to me?”. It is also established that she doesn’t stay in one particular area for a long time, and continuously moves around. You can’t help but wonder if she keeps running away from something, or if she just enjoys being in a new setting every few months, and her excessive town-hopping is completely innocent. Han masters the role of Sun-kyung, as one minute you’re completely trusting of her, and the next moment you fear for those around her as you ponder just how calculated she really is. The film does a fantastic job of keeping you guessing about which side of the coin you should fall on.

I was looking forward to gaining clarity on such questions, but once the credits rolled, I still didn’t feel as though I had a true grasp of the story or understood the roles some of the characters played within it. By the third act, a significant revelation is made, but after this information is revealed, I was left confused by its meaning. There are numerous breadcrumbs laid throughout the narrative, which include some unusual figurative imagery; however, by The Woman’s conclusion, I was left perplexed as to what, among other things, it is meant to represent.

This was incredibly frustrating, as The Woman is by no means a bad film. It’s simply that the movie feels too convoluted and ambiguous for its own good. By the conclusion, I didn’t feel as though the reasoning for some of the scattered imagery displayed throughout the story was given, which made it feel more tacked on without a sufficient explanation. Some of the characters’ conclusions and whether they were actually bad people or not also remained vague.

Sometimes ambiguity works, but in the case of The Woman, I was left more frustrated by the end than satisfied. Sun-kyung’s performance alone makes the film worth watching, but in the case of the ending and the loose ends, less definitely didn’t equate to more.

The Woman (더 우먼) had its World Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 26, 2025. The film will be screened again on July 28.