Alan Kim

David Yi in Minari (2021) has a heart murmur and orders not to run, and Alan Kim, seven when the film was shot, plays him as a boy who has heard the order and privately regards it as advice. He watches his father explain that the male chicks at the hatchery are thrown away because they are no use. He folds paper aeroplanes with "Don't fight" written on the wings and launches them down the hall while his parents row in the kitchen. Most of the film is his, and he carries it without seeming to know that he is carrying anything.

Asked how he did it, Kim said: "Mostly, I just did what I normally do. I acted like myself." Directors say that about children when they mean the editor rescued them. Here it is closer to the truth. Lee Isaac Chung told him, by the boy's own account, not to rush and not to overreact, and he did neither. The mischief, the boredom and the fear are all in the performance and none of them is pushed at us. He is not overawed by Steven Yeun's proud, stubborn Jacob, and opposite Youn Yuh-jung's grandmother, who is the reason to see the film, he holds his end. We were more upset than we expected to be by the plain sight of a small boy told not to run on a farm in Arkansas where there is nothing to do but run, and that is Kim's doing: he never lets us forget how much he wants to.

Before Minari he had done one advertisement for a children's furniture shop. Since it he has done voices in Monsters at Work and PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, played the young Wally in Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens (2021), taken an ensemble part in Theater Camp (2023) and played Benjamin in John Krasinski's IF (2024). Our own review of IF does not mention him, which is not a slight. That film belongs to Cailey Fleming and has no room for anyone else to register, and the part gives him nothing like the hatchery or the aeroplanes to work with.

The awkward fact about child performances is that some of what we admired belonged to the age he was, and that cannot be booked again. Kim was born in 2012. What he has now is one film in which he was exactly right and several in which nobody asked much of him. The next director who hands him a part as difficult as David will tell us which of those is the truer picture.