Behind the label of top student sits a girl nobody actually sees. Student A is a 2018 South Korean drama about the distance between how a teenager is graded and how she is treated.
What is Student A about?
Jang Mi-Rae keeps to herself at school, and her classmates have long since decided she is not worth including. Home offers no relief: her father drinks and turns violent, and Mi-Rae learns to disappear into online role-playing games and her own writing rather than face what waits for her at the dinner table. For a while those private worlds are the only place she feels like herself. Then Baek-Ha, one of the more popular girls in her year, starts paying attention to her — a friendship that looks, at first, like the one good thing Mi-Rae has been missing. Director Lee Kyung-sub follows that shift carefully, letting the audience feel the relief of being noticed before the film starts asking what that attention actually costs. Kim Hwan-hee carries the role of Mi-Rae with a stillness that says more than dialogue does, while Jung Da-bin's Baek-Ha complicates the story's sense of who is really helping whom.
About the cast
Kim Hwan-hee plays Mi-Rae, the introverted student at the story's center, with a performance built on quiet observation rather than outward drama. Jung Da-bin plays Baek-Ha, the classmate whose friendship reshapes Mi-Rae's world, and the film's supporting cast includes Kim Jun-myeon, Lee Jong-hyuk, Yoo Jae-sang, and Jung Da-eun.
Context & significance
Released in South Korea in 2018, Student A sits within a wave of Korean youth dramas that look directly at school-yard exclusion and family instability rather than softening either one. The film keeps its focus tight on Mi-Rae's inner life, using her games and writing as a visual language for what she cannot say out loud at home or at school.
Watching Student A on Ktime
Student A is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, offered to Persian-speaking viewers through K-Time's Farsi-language interface. The title currently plays in its original Korean without a Persian dub or subtitle track on the platform.