A legal scrivener specializing in personal rehabilitation finds himself bankrupt after losses in cryptocurrency and stock investments, and is now working off his own debts. His son, who once dreamed of becoming a poet, has instead joined his father's office, taking on hardships he never needed to bear. The premise—of a son throwing himself into adversity to save his father—sounds like something out of a folktale. From a distance, it may seem moving, but up close, they are waging a daily war of mutual resentment and worry, cohabitation as grueling as walking through hellfire. The structure in which one can only escape one's own debt by helping others escape theirs evokes the film's English title, Karma. This father and son, whose lives—and choice to devote themselves to salvaging others' lives—seem anything but ordinary, burn themselves out within the machinery of capitalism in an attempt to preserve a single life and their family. In a society inflated with ego, the film quietly suggests what we may need to understand: to save yourself, you must first save others. (Sung MOON)