After an impulsive travel decision to visit friends, 25-year-old Frédérique Benoît (Park Ji-Min), aka Freddie, returns to South Korea for the first time, where she was born before being adopted and raised in France.  Freddie suddenly finds herself embarking on an unexpected journey in a country she knows so little about, taking her life in new and unexpected directions. However, she makes sure to treat the land and its people with near total indifference, as she recklessly baffles her new Korean friends at every turn, and it becomes evident that her motivations for coming to Seoul are a mystery even to herself. Eventually, she takes steps toward finding her birth parents, but instead of bringing Freddie’s identity into clearer focus, the process opens her up to new confusion and new heartbreaks.

Return to Seoul becomes an adoptee’s tale, one that delicately deals with Freddie’s deep-rooted feelings of abandonment by her birth parents and it seems that she has embraced her sense of being an outsider to cope with her trauma. Writer-Director Davy Chou elegantly creates a probing psychological portraiture from a character whose feelings of alienation have kept her at an emotional distance from nearly everyone in her life. Following Freddie over several years as her relationship to her homeland and adoptive country undergo dramatic shifts, Chou and electrifying newcomer Park Ji Min (in her debut role) create an indelibly specific yet universal portrait of one woman’s struggle to come to terms with herself.