The Rule Breaker: when happiness moves and social weight stands still
The title The Rule Breaker (반칙왕 몽키, 2025) invites suspicion: is this yet another exercise in hollow provocation, an adolescent gesture from someone who believes breaking rules simply means not going to bed early or turning their back on surface-level conventions? Hwang Daeun and Park Hongyeol’s film responds with an unexpected twist: here, the rules being challenged are the most rigid and silent ones—the ones that dictate how a family should be organized, what success means in South Korea, who should work and who should raise children, how a child’s well-being is to be measured.
The protagonist, Monkey, embodies the unlikely figure of a father of four who decides to stay at home, while the mother becomes the household’s economic provider. But what is decisive is not so much this role reversal—already uncommon in Korean society—as the tone in which it is lived. Monkey does not appear as a domestic martyr or as a didactic “exemplary man,” but rather as someone who turns routine into play, who makes parenting into a dance of improvisation.
What is most fascinating about the film is how this playful spirit becomes inscribed in the audiovisual language itself. The camera—handled by Monkey himself—is anything but neutral: when it moves, when it follows bicycles, skateboards, the children’s outings, it conveys expansive happiness. Movement becomes synonymous with vitality, resistance, and the possibility of inventing a different world in the midst of precarity. These are images that breathe, where the camera shakes with the energy of the bodies, as if the device itself was infected by the children’s laughter.
In contrast, stillness is linked to moments of uncertainty. At night, in static shots with dim light and hushed voices, the couple discusses the possibility of the mother’s unemployment, the fragility of a lifestyle that strays from collective expectations. Here, the camera freezes, almost like a petrified witness registering the density of reality. Visual stillness turns into a metaphor for the weight of society on those who choose to live “on the margins”: it is the pause where the flow of movement stops to reveal that happiness is not always guaranteed, that daily insurrection has its cost.
This oscillation between movement and stillness is not a minor technical device, but the film’s secret key. It suggests that life itself swings between the lightness of moving and the gravity of stopping, between the desire to escape and the need to confront. And it does so without artifice, instead with a rawness resulting from intimate recording, built from personal videos that nevertheless reach an unexpected cinematic power.
What is admirable about The Rule Breaker is that it does not fall into the trap of spectacle or autobiographical self-indulgence. The film articulates something more complex: how the intimate becomes universal when filmed with honesty. Monkey’s smile while carrying a child in front of him as he cooks, the rush of skateboarding through the city, the tension of a nighttime conversation… All of this builds a family portrait that is at once particular and deeply political.
Because the political here is not in slogans but in evidence: in South Korea, a country facing a birthrate crisis, a large family sustained without privilege and refusing the path of private schools and ostentatious consumption becomes an act of resistance. And that is where the film does justice to its title: breaking rules is not about making noise, but about living in a way that contradicts dominant logics, proving that happiness is not equivalent to social success or accumulated wealth.
Hwang Daeun and Park Hongyeol achieve, with apparent simplicity, a deeply innovative documentary. Not because they invent new technical forms, but because they reconfigure what we understand as an intimate document: what seemed like a collage of home videos acquires, through editing, a narrative structure that oscillates between celebration and fragility, between movement and stillness. This double rhythm is the heart of The Rule Breaker.
In the end, what the film offers us is neither a political manifesto nor a sociological portrait, but something more valuable: the certainty that tenderness, humor, and play can be the most radical tools for confronting a system that dictates how we should live. The Rule Breaker reminds us that happiness, when it moves, can be an act of rebellion.
By David Sanchez
Edited by Savina Petkova
Copyright FIPRESCI