Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: C
Editing: B

I could see why some critics enjoyed Ms. Purple, a very small-budget drama about a Korean American family in Los Angeles, with a particular focus on the grown daughter who works as a karaoke bar hostess in Koreatown. For the life of me, I could not find a way in, to connect with it in any real way.

The largely amateur sensibility of director and co-writer Justin Chon — probably best known as Eric from the Twilight series, but here directing a feature film for the third time — is a pretty significant barrier. But, I was most consistently distracted and irritated by Ante Cheng’s cinematography. Making pointlessly liberal use of slow-motion effects to convey, I guess, a sort of dreamlike state in a film that otherwise never means to be “dreamlike,” most scenes look as though they were shot by someone who saw great cinematography in other, far better films and took great pains to emulate it, without any visual cohesion.

I’ll grant that the story, largely mystifying at first, starts coming together in unexpectedly satisfying ways in the last act. It’s enough to make me feel like I did not completely waste my time. I still don’t feel like I would missed out on anything special had I not bothered to see this movie to begin with, but whatever.

At the very lest, the acting is . . . fine. Tiffany Chu plays Kasie, the central character, who struggles to make ends meet as she lives alone with her unconscious, bedridden father in obvious need of hospice. When the live-in caretaker can’t take it anymore and resigns, Kasie calls up her estranged brother Carey (Teddy Lee) to ask for help. He actually shows up, although soon enough a relatively twisted family life reveals itself in flashbacks, and we see Carey screaming at his unconscious father’s face. We eventually learn that his and Kasie’s mother left them all when they were young children, although the story never reveals nearly enough about how or why.

Such is the case with much of this story, which follows Kasie around, largely at the karaoke bar where she works, with clients often indifferent to her relatively listless presence. When Ms. Purple begins, it’s with several minutes following her around such environments, with no straightforward dialogue. I began to when we’d start hearing people speak in audible and complete sentences. We eventually learn about a man in Kasie’s life who gives her large sums of money and, although her role in his life is never defined as such, treats her basically like a call girl.

I spent a lot of time watching Ms. Purple with my attention waxing and waning, but there is a scene near the end that certainly got my attention, in which Kasie is involved in a violent incident, coming to the defense of a client getting belligerent with another hostess. A bit of a melee occurs, but a ton of the other women working there come rushing in, to her defense. I’d be much more interested in a movie about the dynamics and interpersonal relationships among these women, a sort of Koreatown Karaoke version of Hustlers.

But, this is the one I got. There are some “aha moments” as certain childhood traumas inform this set of siblings’ current life circumstances, and a bit more life gets injected into the story. Indeed, the broader story arc is a lot better constructed than most of the actual dialogue, which is often rambling and aimless. It’s easier to appreciate the big picture than the details in this movie.

Overall: B-