Unravelling the Thread of Elegant Lies: The Depiction of Students and Teenage Bullying in South Korean Film

This article explores the 2014 film adaptation of Thread of Lies (directed by Lee Han), a popular young adult novel written by Kim Ryeo-Ryeong (2009) of the same title. The story centers on the aftermath of Cheonji’s death. Cheonji—a thoughtful, quiet, and academically successful 14-year-old student—died by suicide using a red scarf that she knitted. Her widowed mother (Hyun-Sook) and her older sister in high school (Manji) are faced with “elegant lies” that had been there all along: teenage bullying and depression. A direct word-to-word translation of the film’s title—Uahan Geojinmal—from Korean to English is “Elegant Lies.” They discover handwritten letters that Cheonji left inside knitting yarn, which help them get closer to a possible answer behind her decision. This article interrogates the five letters left by Cheonji by concentrating on the person the message was directed for and what their relationship reveals within the film. In these explorations, I examine the intersections of family, friends, economic class, and academic performance which work to heighten the conflict and competition between the students. In a country that has the highest suicide rate among OECD countries at 26 per 100,000 population, Thread of Lies provides meaningful representation of middle and high school students—within a single-sex educational environment—grappling with the complexities of success and acceptance.