My Toronto International Film Festival screening of “Always Lalisa” was set for the morning after the documentary’s world premiere, which usually means the talent has moved on. Then Lalisa Manobal walked in. Phones went up. People screamed. A few fans near me were crying before the film had even started.
If you don’t follow K-pop, that reaction may sound excessive. It isn’t. As a member of BLACKPINK, Lisa is one of the genre’s biggest global exports, with more than 100 million Instagram followers and a solo career that has increasingly become its own phenomenon. In her native Thailand, her fame carries a weight that’s hard to overstate.
That kind of devotion creates an obvious problem for a documentary. How much can a film tell us about a star whose image is managed this carefully, especially when her own company, LLOUD, and several of her music-industry partners are among those behind it? I walked in expecting a very expensive press kit. I was mostly wrong. Sue Kim, who made the Oscar-shortlisted “The Speed Cubers” and TIFF-winning “The Last of the Sea Women,” has a knack for finding intimacy inside worlds most people only see from the outside. She doesn’t tear down Lisa’s image. She gets underneath it.
Kim catches Lisa at an unusual moment. BLACKPINK has paused group activities so its members can pursue solo work, and Lisa fills the break with a schedule that would flatten most people. She records and releases her solo album “Alter Ego,” makes her acting debut in the third season of “The White Lotus” and prepares for the performance the film builds toward: her first major solo set at Coachella, two years after headlining the festival with BLACKPINK.
Strung together, that’s a highlight reel. Kim is more interested in the stretches between the highlights. Lisa left Thailand at 14 to enter South Korea’s notoriously punishing trainee system, and she has spent most of her life since on a path someone else laid out. Now, maybe for the first time, there’s no group beside her and no schedule telling her what comes next. The film keeps circling one question: what does she actually want? And it keeps landing on an unexpected complication. She isn’t sure she can pull it off.
In that sense, “Always Lalisa” plays almost like a belated coming-of-age story. Lisa achieved a level of fame most artists never experience before she had much opportunity to figure out who she was outside of BLACKPINK. There is something almost adolescent about finally getting to experiment, fail and change her mind, except she’s doing it in her late 20s with millions of people watching. Kim doesn’t overstate this transformation, and the film is better for it. Lisa isn’t trying to become someone else. She’s figuring out which parts of herself haven’t had much room to develop yet.
The best scenes are the ones where Lisa admits what her stage persona never would. In one rehearsal, her vocal coach pushes her to sing more of her set. Lisa resists, arguing, fairly, that it’s hard to find the breath while executing choreography this demanding. But something else is audible underneath the objection. For most of her career, first as a trainee and then in BLACKPINK, Lisa has been positioned as the rapper, not the singer, and her reluctance sounds less like a technical complaint than like years of being told where her voice belongs.
Elsewhere she wonders whether she can carry a song alone, whether she can hold a stage without the three women she has shared it with for most of her adult life. Coming from someone who can stop a room just by walking into a morning screening, that sounds almost ridiculous. That’s why it lands. K-pop sells flawlessness, and Kim shows us what flawlessness costs the person delivering it.
Kim is careful not to confuse candor with misery, though. Nobody here is a sad superstar trapped in a gilded life. What comes through is how much of Lisa’s identity was shaped by a career she chose as a child, and how much lighter she seems with a little room to move. There are glimpses of the limits she has lived with, as a performer and as a young woman under constant watch. Nobody is plotting an exit from BLACKPINK, either. The year plays more like Lisa finding out who she is when the group isn’t in the room, knowing it will be again.
That independence isn’t entirely symbolic. Lisa launched LLOUD in 2024 to give herself greater control over her solo career and create a platform for her own ambitions in music and entertainment. This year, then, is about more than recording an album away from BLACKPINK. Lisa is also building the infrastructure that will allow her to make more of these choices for herself.
The film gets better every time it goes home. Lisa’s scenes with Teacher Mok, the mentor who saw what she had long before anyone else did, reveal someone acutely aware of who got her here. Time with her mother, her stepfather and her childhood friends does the same work. For a few minutes at a stretch, the global star recedes, and what’s left is a daughter and an old friend who has somehow kept her feet on the ground.
Where the film pulls its punches, you notice. At one point, Lisa and her bandmates have to answer for leaked videos from their past, and Kim acknowledges the fallout without staying with it long. The apology we see is brief, and I’m not convinced it will be enough for the fans who were genuinely hurt. It’s the clearest moment where you can feel the edges of the access.
Those limits aren’t particularly surprising. LLOUD is one of the production companies behind the documentary, alongside YouTube Premium, Sony Music Vision and RCA Records, among others. Kim gets considerably closer to Lisa than I expected, but this is still a portrait being made with the participation of Lisa’s professional world, not an investigation conducted outside it. Her romantic life stays offscreen, and her relationships with the other three members, including what this year apart may have meant for those friendships, remain mostly out of frame. Lisa is eventually returning to BLACKPINK, and there are places where you can feel the film respecting, or perhaps protecting, the boundaries around that return.
Still, the run-up to Coachella carries real stakes. Kim builds the final stretch like a backstage thriller, letting us spend enough time in rehearsals that Lisa’s nerves become increasingly difficult to separate from our own. She doesn’t rush the preparation to get to the payoff because the preparation is where the drama lives. After the earlier standoff with her vocal coach, the singing becomes particularly important. Each time Lisa chooses to use her voice rather than retreat to the role she has occupied for years, it registers as a small act of confidence. The eventual Coachella performance works not because there was ever much doubt that Lisa could command the stage, but because Kim has spent the previous 90 minutes showing us how much doubt Lisa herself carried into it.
“Always Lalisa” never completely escapes the boundaries of an authorized portrait, and there are parts of Lisa’s life it clearly isn’t prepared to examine. But Kim gets closer than I expected, finding a compelling story about a woman who reached the highest levels of fame before she had much opportunity to decide what she wanted that fame to look like. The year away from BLACKPINK doesn’t radically reinvent Lisa, nor does it need to. What changes is her sense of ownership over the artist and person she has become. For someone who has spent nearly half her life performing within one of pop music’s most carefully controlled systems, that feels consequential enough.
“Always Lalisa” will be released in theaters and IMAX worldwide beginning October 16.
Grade: B+