Aloners, and the Difference Between Living Alone and Going Unnoticed

It is evening, and there are police at the door next to hers. Jina has come home the way she always comes home, earphones in, phone in hand, and the owner of the flat next door has news for her. The man who lived there died days ago, alone. Then the owner asks the question Jina will carry for the rest of the film: how could she not have noticed the noise?

Jina is the best performer at a credit-card call centre. She can keep her voice level through any amount of a stranger’s anger and hand back the right sentence from the script, every time. She had not noticed. And then something worse arrives. She remembers him in the corridor, showing her a small trick with a match and a cigarette, on a day when he must already have been dead.

The film’s Korean title means People Who Live Alone. Its English title, Aloners, says the same in a single unusual word. When it came to Japan, to the Osaka Asian Film Festival, it was given a title built on ohitorisama, the courteous word a restaurant uses for a party of one, with a suffix that turns it into a tribe. All three titles are plural, and the film follows one woman. One critic found the plural a little misleading. This essay thinks the plural is the argument. The film is about the others she did not count, and about what it costs when nobody counts you.

There is an easy way to read Hong Sung-eun’s Aloners, and it writes itself. A young woman lives inside her earphones and her television; a lonely man dies unnoticed on the other side of her wall; the lesson is to let people in before it is too late. The film does not say that. Its director has said that she began living on her own in her mid-twenties and found that it suited her, and the film she made never asks Jina to stop. Nobody moves in with her. No man arrives to rescue her from her flat. She does not go home to her father. At the end of the film she lives alone, exactly as she did at the beginning.

What changes is smaller, and harder to do. The film counts a cost, and the cost is not living alone. It is going unnoticed: a man dead for days behind a shared wall, a trainee who disappears without a word and whose things go into a bin, a mother who has died and a daughter who watches her father through a camera rather than answer his calls. And the turn the film offers is not towards company. It is towards what the director, just before the film opened, called learning to say a proper, heartfelt goodbye.

Living alone is a way of arranging a life. Going unnoticed is something that happens, or fails to happen, between people, and it can happen in any kind of household. The film knows the difference. By the end, so does Jina.

This essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends. If you would rather see it first, do; everything here will keep. Two deaths sit near its centre, the neighbour’s and, shortly before the story begins, Jina’s mother’s. Both are stated plainly below, and neither is described.

Aloners, in Korean Honja saneun saramdeul, was written, directed and edited by Hong Sung-eun. It is her first feature, produced by the Korean Academy of Film Arts, the film school she entered after leaving an office job at a public company. It runs ninety-one minutes. Gong Seung-yeon plays Jina, in her first leading role in a feature film; Jeong Da-eun plays Sujin, Seo Hyun-woo plays Seong-hun, Park Jeong-hak plays Jina’s father and Kim Hae-na her team leader. The film premiered in the Korean Competition of the Jeonju International Film Festival in the spring of 2021, where Gong won the competition’s acting award, and it opened in Korean cinemas on 19 May 2021. That year Gong also won the Blue Dragon award for best new actress. In March 2022 the film had its Japanese premiere at the Osaka Asian Film Festival and won the festival’s Grand Prix.

The story, in outline. Jina works at a call centre that handles a bank’s credit-card customers, and she is its best performer and its most solitary. She eats lunch alone, rides the bus with her earphones in and falls asleep to the television. Her mother has recently died. She has signed away her share of what her mother left, she does not answer her father’s calls, and she watches him instead through a camera she once put in her parents’ living room to keep an eye on her mother.

Then the man next door is found dead, and she is blamed for not noticing. At work her manager tells her to train a new hire, Sujin, an eager, clumsy young woman who wants them to have lunch together. Jina keeps her at arm’s length until Sujin stops coming in, and then throws her things away. A new tenant, Seong-hun, a man with a broken leg, moves into the dead man’s flat with his family. Worn down, Jina begins to show the same strain Sujin did, until the day a caller pushes her past what she can hold.

That day, and the last movement of the film that follows it, have sections of their own below.

Start with what she is good at, because the film does, and because it would be easy to mistake it for a flaw.

Jina works for a company whose motto, as the Osaka festival’s English synopsis records it, is Happy Your Life. She takes more calls than anyone. In a scene the critic Orla Smith singled out in her review for Seventh Row, the manager praises her for taking the most calls of the month even though she took days off for her mother’s funeral; in another, the whole room is warned that unless they get more efficient, their jobs will go to robots. Jina needs no warning. The callers shout, or ask for a whole month of card transactions to be read out one by one, and she keeps her voice level and hands back the right sentence from the script.

Hong has explained why she gave Jina this job. It is notorious for emotional labour, she said at the film’s press screening, and it could show a particular kind of person: someone with no interest in what happens in the space she is standing in, who is nevertheless very good at dealing with people far away. That is the director’s own description of her character, and it may be the most useful sentence anyone has said about the film.

The phrase emotional labour comes from the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, whose book The Managed Heart (1983) described, among other workers, flight attendants whose job was to be “nicer than natural”. A call centre asks for the same thing without the uniform or the face. The voice has to be nicer than natural for a whole shift, and it has to apologise, over and over, for things nobody in the room did. Writing for the Korean Film Archive, the critic Cho Hye-young noticed how empty those apologies are allowed to become: the agents say sorry countless times, and who actually did what wrong is beside the point.

Outside work the distance continues. Earphones on the bus. Meals at the same noodle shop, a quiet place that welcomes people eating alone, or a convenience-store box at home, with a video of somebody else eating playing on her phone. The television on all night, because she cannot fall asleep without its sound. Cho adds it all up and draws a sharp conclusion: Jina is never actually alone. At every hour she keeps traces of other people beside her. What those traces have in common, this essay would add, is that none of them can answer back.

Before any of this is read as a symptom, hear the reasons, because the film supplies them. Choi Seo-yoon, a writer who reviewed the film as a woman who lives alone, read the solitary lunches and the earphones as a way of surviving the job. If a working day drains feeling out of you, speaking to nobody but customers is how you keep something back for yourself. The director has described the same arithmetic from her own life. In the office job she had before film school, she came home worn out by people and found time entirely on her own comfortable and happy. A person who has spent a shift being nicer than natural is entitled to an evening of being nothing to anyone.

But a skill has a direction. Jina is fluent at the distance of a headset, a camera feed and a stranger eating on a screen. The distance she has no practice at is the thickness of a wall.

The man next door smoked in the corridor and talked to her when she passed. The official Korean synopsis calls him a neighbour who used to bother her with conversation now and then. One of the things he told her was a small piece of lore he had picked up somewhere: a cigarette lit with a match gives a different kind of smoke. She kept him at arm’s length.

It is worth stopping here, because the film is careful and a quick reading is not. Choi Seo-yoon wrote that, as a woman living alone, she watched those corridor scenes warily, half expecting the man to overstep, to make a pass or to push into Jina’s privacy. He does nothing of the kind, and the film never makes him a threat. But the wariness is not coldness either. A young woman who lives alone and keeps a talkative man next door at a polite distance is doing a calculation that women in cities are taught early, and that everyone would have praised her for if he had turned out to be dangerous. The film asks us to hold two things at once. Her caution was reasonable. He was lonely, and now he is dead.

Then the owner of his flat scolds her. How could she not have noticed the noise? In the critic Brianna Zigler’s account, the owner puts it down to the selfishness of the young. It is an unfair question, put to the wrong person. The owner had not noticed either; nobody had, for days. But the film lets the question stand, because it is the film’s own question, only badly aimed. Not why was he alone. Why did nobody miss him?

Later the film shows how his death is written up. Orla Smith quoted the newspaper headline in her review: it makes a joke of the way he was found, and adds a line of sociology about people failing to find their place in society. This essay will not repeat the joke. It is enough to see what the headline does. He had gone unnoticed for days, and when at last he is noticed, it is as a punchline and a trend.

And there is the trick. Jina remembers him in the corridor, showing her the match and the cigarette, after he must already have been dead. The film does not explain it. A column written ahead of the film’s release by a curator at CGV Arthouse asked how a woman who lives alone came to meet the ghost of the man next door, and Cho Hye-young gave the most unsettling answer: Jina had kept herself at such a distance from her own life that she had become something like a ghost herself, which may be why she could talk to his. There is a plainer reading as well. She had never looked at him closely enough to know when he stopped being there. Either way, what stays with her is not only that he died. It is that she cannot say when.

The film opened in Korea on 19 May 2021. Seven weeks before that, on 1 April, South Korea’s Act on the Prevention and Management of Lonely Deaths had come into force. In its first form the law defined a lonely death as the death of a person who had lived alone, cut off from family, relatives and the others around them, who died alone, and whose body was found only after a certain period of time.

Two years later the words changed. In June 2023 an amendment replaced a person who had lived alone with a person who had been living in social isolation, and took the word alone out of died alone. A second amendment, in February 2024, removed the clause about the body being found after a period of time. Read in order, the amendments are almost a summary of the film. The danger was never the household. It was the cutting-off.

Japan has been asking the same question in its own vocabulary. In April 2025 a working group set up under a Cabinet Office research group on loneliness and isolation reported on how to estimate what Japanese calls kodokushi and koritsushi, lonely deaths and isolated deaths, and it chose the second word on purpose. Loneliness, the group reasoned, is a subjective feeling, and a feeling is hard to establish after a death; isolation, a lack of connection and help, is objective and leaves traces that can be counted. Its method, offered as a working guideline for estimates rather than as a definition of anyone’s death, takes the people who lived alone and died at home, and counts those found eight or more days after death. Eight days, because a body found then implies at least seven days in which nobody who would have worried at being unable to reach the person was in touch. Using that threshold, the Cabinet Office estimated in April 2026 that there were 22,222 such deaths in Japan in 2025.

Set the definitions side by side, not the numbers. Neither of them measures solitude. What they measure is the absence of the person who would have come looking. The owner’s unfair question turns out to be the question two governments have written into their definitions.

This Library argued as much in “Living Alone Is a Household Type, Not a Diagnosis”, which pulled apart three things that one worried question folds together: who lives where, whether anyone is actually in contact, and how the days feel from the inside. Aloners puts all three in a single corridor. Jina and the man next door had the same household type. What mattered on the night he died was not how they lived. It was who would have come looking, and for both of them the honest answer was the same: for days, nobody.

Scale matters here for one reason only, and it is not a comparison. According to Statistics Korea, now the Ministry of Data and Statistics, one-person households made up 33.4 percent of Korea’s general households in 2021, the year the film came out, and 36.1 percent, just over eight million households, in 2024. Japan’s 2020 census counted single-person households as 38.1 percent of general households. The two censuses define and count households in their own ways, and nothing here ranks one country against the other. The figures say one thing: in either country, living alone is among the most ordinary ways to live. Jina’s household is not what the film is about. The week in which nobody comes looking is.

Sujin arrives at the call centre eager and unprepared. She follows Jina everywhere, asks whether they can have lunch together, brings her small presents, falls asleep on her first shift and struggles on the phone. The director has said that Sujin, a young woman just starting out, resembles Jina as she was before she became alone.

She is also the one person in the building who actually listens to a customer. A regular caller wants to know whether his card will work in 2002, the year his time machine is going to take him back to. The script has an answer for that, and it amounts to yes sir, no sir. Sujin leaves the script and asks him what he wants to do there, and he says that at last someone believes him. Walter Neto, reviewing the film for the International Cinephile Society, reports what the man wants: to be back at the 2002 World Cup, which Korea hosted with Japan, when people sang and cheered together. It may be the funniest call in the film, and the saddest, and Cho Hye-young saw why it matters. Curiosity about another person is only possible if you grant that they exist. Sujin grants it, and that is exactly what makes her bad at the job. Cho also records Sujin asking the question the job is built to prevent: why should she say sorry when she has done nothing wrong?

Jina keeps avoiding her. Sujin stops coming in. The manager remarks that she would not have passed her training anyway, and Jina clears Sujin’s things into the rubbish. It is the quietest cruelty in the film: a young woman removed from a workplace like a mug nobody claims, with no goodbye on either side.

The film is exact about where the coldness came from. When the manager scolds Jina for not looking after Sujin better, Jina answers, in Cho’s account, that she only gave Sujin what the manager had given her when she was new. The director has said the same thing from the other side. Jina was never properly looked after by her own seniors, and she is curt with Sujin not because she is unkind but because she does not know another way. If isolation keeps being handed down inside a community, Hong said, nothing is ever added to the world.

This is not a story about women being cold to one another, and it would be a small betrayal of the film to read it that way. It is a story about a workplace that measures people in calls per month, where attention is the scarcest thing in the building and all of it is spent on strangers. A room built like that needs nobody to be cruel. It only needs everyone to be busy. The coldness is passed down the way a job is passed down, from the person who trained you to the person you train, until someone breaks the chain by doing something the figures do not count.

Grief is in the film from its first scenes, and it deserves to be read slowly. Jina’s mother has recently died. What she left goes to Jina’s father, and Jina signs away her share. He is a man who walked out on the family many years ago and came back only in her mother’s last years; since the mother’s death he is, as the Osaka festival’s Japanese synopsis puts it, the only family Jina has left. He keeps ringing her, and he rings from her mother’s phone. Several critics noticed that detail. It is worth imagining, for a moment, whose name comes up on Jina’s screen when it rings.

She does not answer. She watches him instead, on the camera feed, where he fills his days with his new church. The camera holds something else as well. Cho mentions recordings of her mother made shortly before she died, and says that Jina keeps going back to them. This essay goes no further into that. Some things in a film belong to the character, and a daughter watching her mother on a small screen after the funeral is one of them.

Nothing here needs a diagnosis, and none is offered. Grief is not a disorder, and anger at a father who left is not a symptom. What the film does with the camera is more interesting than any label. Watching is attention without exposure. It lets her see him without being seen, from exactly the kind of distance she is fluent in. Choi Seo-yoon recalls a moment when the father sends a message saying he is unwell and in hospital, while the camera shows him sitting at home in his living room. The camera gives Jina the power of the one who sees and is not seen. It also keeps her from the only thing that could help, which is a conversation in which somebody answers.

And look again at the father. A man newly widowed, alone in a flat, ringing his daughter from his dead wife’s phone and inventing a hospital visit to make her pay attention, is a man afraid of going unnoticed. He wants what the man next door wanted when he told a stranger about the smoke from a match. The film does not ask us to forgive him. It asks us to see that he is in the same corridor.

Then comes the day a regular caller shouts at her and demands her name. In a job where she is only ever a voice, a name demanded in anger singles her out as a person who can be blamed. Jina walks out of the building, rings her father and screams at him to apologise, to her and to her mother. He hangs up and blocks her number.

Consider what the scene is doing. All day, every day, Jina says sorry on a company’s behalf to strangers, for things nobody in the room did. The one apology she is owed, for herself and for her mother, nobody gives. Cho reads the outburst as Jina insisting, at last, that she exists: that she is a person with feelings, owed a real reply rather than a scripted one. It is the moment the whole film has been walking towards, and the moment her fluency fails. Distance can do many things. It cannot make anyone answer.

This is the ending.

The next day Jina asks for leave, and she rings Sujin to apologise for how cold she was. Sujin cries. In Cho’s account Jina tells her something more: that she gets lonely too, and that she is not good at eating alone or being alone either. The director has said this is what the two women were for: to show that Jina could pass on to the next generation a feeling she had never received herself. And partway through the call, the film cuts from Jina to Sujin at the other end of the line. Cho calls it the reverse shot the whole film was aiming at. Until this moment the people at the other end of Jina’s calls have been voices. In this call, one of them becomes a face, and a person.

Then Seong-hun, the new neighbour on crutches, holds a small memorial for the man who died in his flat, a man he never met. There is food and wine, and his front door stands open to the corridor. Jina watches from the doorway. Afterwards he shows her that the match trick really works. The dead man had been telling the truth. It had simply never occurred to her to find out.

She clears her desk. She tells her manager she does not yet know what she will do, and suggests they have dinner when she does. It is a goodbye with a future tense in it.

On the bus her father rings, as if he had never blocked her. She tells him about the camera, and that she will keep checking on him. The secret watching becomes an admitted one. The camera is not switched off. It becomes honest.

At the film’s press screening, eight days before it opened, Hong said she thought of it as a film about learning to say a proper, heartfelt goodbye. Whether we choose it or not, she said, we end up living alone or living with someone, and relationships that mattered to us leave; it would be enough if we could say goodbye well to the people who come and go, and accept that we are still connected. Her message to the audience in Osaka put it in one line: “When we see someone off, we must bid them a proper farewell.”

Read the first hour again with that line in mind. Every departure in it happens without a goodbye. The mother has already gone. The neighbour dies without anyone knowing. Sujin simply stops coming, and her things are binned. The father hangs up and blocks his daughter. In the last movement the goodbyes arrive, one by one: Sujin gets an apology, the dead man a memorial, the manager a dinner promised, the father a sentence about a camera. For her mother, the only thing Jina could do was demand, at the top of her voice, the apology they were owed. And Jina still lives alone. Cho notices one more thing. After the call to Sujin, for the first time in the film, Jina falls asleep without the television or a video playing. She has not given up solitude. For the first time, she can stand it.

This Library argued in “Being Good at Solitude Is Not the Same as Needing No One” that independence is a real capacity, and that it becomes a prison only when having a key is confused with never opening the door. Aloners is almost a demonstration. At the start, Jina looks superbly good at solitude; nobody could fault her routines. The call to Sujin is her admitting that she was not as good at it as she looked. That is not a defeat. It is a correction, and the film ends with a woman who still has her key.

There is a sharper point, too, about women on screen. The Library’s essay on Wim Wenders’s film, “Perfect Days and the Difference Between Solitude and Emotional Absence”, observed that a man who withdraws into a small, orderly life is read as austere and dignified, while a woman living the same way is read as someone to worry about: his quiet is permitted, and hers requires a defence. Aloners is the other half of that observation. The owner scolds the young woman next door for not noticing. The father rings, and in Choi Seo-yoon’s reading what he hopes for is a daughter who will pay him attention and help keep his house, the house her mother kept. Jina declines both inheritances, the estate and the role. And she keeps watch anyway, in a form she chooses.

Notice, too, what the film declines to give her. The new neighbour is a man with a family, and what passes between them is a trick with a match. Her turn runs through a young woman at work, a dead stranger and her father. No man arrives to cure her solitude, and no romance is offered in its place. For a film about a woman alone, that is an unusual courtesy.

What the film asks of her is not company. It is something closer to being legible. Let the people who would notice your absence know that they are the ones. Let the people you watch over know that you are watching. It is a much smaller request than let people in, and a much harder one to refuse.

When the film won the Grand Prix in Osaka, the jury singled out one piece of film language: the shot that frames Jina alone at work, answering the phone. It was the right image to choose. A woman speaks to strangers all day, and nobody speaks to her.

Its Japanese title borrows a word with a history. Ohitorisama became a book title in 2001, when the journalist Iwashita Kumiko published a book of that name; in 2007 the sociologist Ueno Chizuko carried it into later life with a book about growing old on one’s own. The word travelled from a pleasure to a plan. Jina fits neither end of it. She is not savouring a dinner for one, and she is not planning a solitary old age. She is simply a woman for whom alone is the default, which describes a great many women in Japan as well.

The festival’s Japanese programme note introduced the film by calling Korea a society that does not tolerate solitude. This essay will not describe any country that way. Nothing in Aloners depends on Korea being unusual, and a corridor in Saitama has the same walls as a corridor in Seoul.

One strand of the film arrives in Japan with particular timing. From 1 October 2026 employers in Japan are required by law to take measures against customer harassment, which the amended law defines as conduct by customers and others that goes beyond what is socially acceptable and harms the worker’s working environment. South Korea has required employers to protect customer-facing workers from abusive customers since October 2018: where a worker’s health is harmed or plainly at risk, the employer must take steps such as pausing or changing the work, and the worker may ask for them. Laws like these can oblige a company to let a worker step away from a caller who is shouting and demanding her name. What no law reaches is the training underneath: the daily practice of not minding, kept up until not minding is all that is left.

For a woman living in Japan with her family in another country, the camera may not look strange at all. A parent watched over through a screen, at odd hours, across a time difference, is an ordinary form of love. The film does not call it a failure. Its only correction is honesty: tell them. And another question travels with it. This Library has argued, in “Having People Around Is Not the Same as Having Someone to Call”, that a wide circle can have a hole exactly where it is needed. For a woman far from her family, the question the owner put to Jina is worth asking early and gently: if you did not appear for a week, who here would come looking?

Now the objections, made as strongly as they can be.

The first is Orla Smith’s. Jina’s isolation plainly predates her grief, Smith pointed out: she has worked beside the same colleagues since long before her mother died and is friends with none of them. Building the film’s arc around the mother’s death, in Smith’s words, “feels like skirting around the real problem”, and makes it too easy to resolve Jina’s troubles within a neat running time. This essay concedes most of that. Grief is not the whole explanation, and ninety-one minutes resolve what a life would not. The film is tidier than the loneliness it describes.

The second is Brianna Zigler’s, in Paste. The film’s social commentary, she argued, never gets much deeper than young people on their phones, and the only alternative to solitude it offers is religion: the father’s church, and a memorial at which people cross themselves. Part of this lands. The owner’s scold about the young is the film’s cheapest note, and the church is watched but never examined. But the memorial does not advertise a faith. What it shows is a man setting a table for someone he never met, which is not a doctrine. It is what noticing looks like after it is too late.

The third is Choi Seo-yoon’s. The apology to Sujin, she wrote, runs too smoothly; its lines are so polished that you become aware of the writer behind them. That is fair. It is the least lifelike scene in a film that is otherwise very close to life. Real apologies stumble.

The fourth goes to the film’s own origin, and it cuts deepest. Hong has said that the documentary about lonely deaths left her wondering whether a life lived alone is incomplete and easily broken. In an interview with Elle Korea she added that the documentary was mostly about men over fifty, yet it brought a sudden fear to her in her twenties, when she had believed herself whole and strong on her own. That is a more frightened film than the one this essay has described, and it may be the truer account. Cho Hye-young read the same film the other way round, as a film about how a person can truly exist alone and whether a society makes room for that. This essay leans towards Cho. A reader should know that it is a lean, and that the film keeps both fears in the same small flat.

Not that living alone is dangerous. The film’s own director found that it suited her, and the film ends with its heroine still doing it. Living alone is a household type.

What this Library takes is narrower. Going unnoticed is a failure of contact, not a way of life, and it can happen in a full house as easily as an empty one. The remedy the film offers cannot be bought and does not require anyone to move in. It is small, mutual and a little awkward: an open door, a table set for a stranger, an apology given properly, a dinner deferred but promised, a camera admitted to. None of it is company in the usual sense. All of it amounts to the same sentence: I know you were here.

There are good reasons for keeping your distance, and the film honours them. A job that spends your kindness on strangers all day can leave you none for the corridor. A woman alone is taught to be careful with the man next door. Grief makes the phone heavy. None of these reasons is foolish, and none of them is a flaw.

So, once, to you. If you live alone, you owe nobody an explanation for it, and nothing in this film asks you for one. But it may be worth knowing, quietly and in good time, who would come looking if you did not appear for a week, and letting that person know that they are the one. And it may be worth asking the other half of the question as well, the half the film saves for last. Whose absence would you notice, and have you ever told them so?

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and nothing in it is advice about how anyone should live. The film was not screened for this essay: its story is taken from the official record and from the reviews and interviews named above, and every line of dialogue is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. The official figures are given with their year and definition, and they are not a ranking of countries. If living alone has started to frighten you the way that documentary frightened the director, that is worth saying to someone. In Japan the Cabinet Office’s site You Are Not Alone (Anata wa hitori ja nai) helps you find places to talk, and your city or ward office is another place to ask what support there is where you live.

If you did not come home for a week, who would be the first to notice, and how would they find out?

Whose absence would you notice? A neighbour, a colleague, a voice that rings every month with the same question?

Is there someone you let go without a goodbye? Is it too late to say one now?

Is your distance a rest or a wall? Only you can tell, and both are allowed.