Ms Moon is a care assistant in a South Korean hospital for VIPs, where the nurses dress like air hostesses, all women have to wear make-up and patients include 'the Chairman', a major donor to the hospital completely paralyzed by a stroke ten years before. The Chairman is kept alive by repeated heart transplants at the insistence of his bullying, pantomime-villain son.
One day a young woman is brought into the hospital, brain-dead. She's not as slim and attractive as the woman featured on the film's advertising poster: she's dumpy, garishly-dressed and heavily pregnant. Notwithstanding the obvious danger to the child, she is identified as a potential donor of the Chairman's next heart and Moon is assigned the task of locating her next-of-kin. As she does so, Moon uncovers the sad, small life of a woman nicknamed 'Madonna'.
Moon makes for a frosty heroine, showing little emotion for much of the film, but Seo Young-hee manages to get across the character's determination to do right by Madonna. As the abused, slightly dim, binge-eating Madonna, Kwon So-hyun does particularly well in avoiding outright melodramatics while creating a character the viewer can feel sorry for. There are some plot holes in the film: for instance, just how does Moon gain unfettered access to the Chairman immediately before the transplant? But female director/screenwriter Shin Su-won has created an engrossing mystery story that certainly isn't your average chick-flick; well worth a watch.
