Over the past few years, there have occasionally been news or documentaries focusing on the difficulties of emotional laborers who engage in the service industry that exposed the terrible working conditions of service industry workers with their faces pixelated as they are forced to tolerate being humiliated as an individual or displaying the behavior of ‘clients’ caught off guard on camera. But this movie is different. Instead of just delivering details of the reality that emotional laborers face, The Emotional Society on Stage portrays in its own way the burden of reality that they are coping with. When there is a voiceover of a pre-school teacher, for example, a woman with a doll on her back stays in a crouching position. This woman must maintain this strenuous position as the preschool teacher tells of her experiences and difficulties so that we feel her physical pain as well. As such, people holding specific postures resembling the characteristics of a call center employee, a flight attendant, a beauty salon trainee, a cook’s assistant and a bodyguard accompany each of their voiceovers. In other words, this movie converts the time that emotional laborers of this era must bear into the film’s physical time to make the viewer ‘withstand’ it instead of hearing it. The movie perceives social issues with cinematic language and draws the audience into its world with fierceness and creativity. (NAM Da-eun)