This is Jo's commercial debut; he previously directed the arthouse flick End of Animal and the short film Don't Step Out of the House.

[14] Kim Sun-yi, an elderly woman in her sixties living in the US, receives a phone call about the sale of her old family home back in South Korea.

Sun-yi recalls how 47 years ago, when she was a 17-year-old girl in 1965, she moved from Seoul along with her widowed mother and sister Sun-ja to a remote valley to undergo a period of convalescence after suffering problems with her lungs.

The Kims lived in genteel poverty at the mercy of their arrogant landlord, Ji-tae, son of the business partner of Sun-yi's late father.

Even though he behaves like a wild beast, Sun-yi's kindhearted mother adopts him and names him Chul-soo, assuming he's one of more than 60,000 children orphaned in the Korean War.

She teaches him how to wait patiently before a meal, how to wear clothes, speak, write, and other human behavior so that he could one day live like a normal man.

[39][40][41][42] Not only were these numbers remarkably high for November, considered a slow season for moviegoing in Korea, but it was also a rare feat for its melodrama genre.

[43] The film also has the distinction of setting a new box office record for "suneung day," the date on which high school seniors take their College Scholastic Ability Test.

[56][57] The alternate finale involves Park Bo-young's Sun-yi, and among the deleted scenes are moments from Ji-tae's (Yoo Yeon-seok) childhood as well as more focus on the neighborhood in which the plot unfolds.