Review | Blackpink’s Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rose get surprisingly personal in Netflix documentary Light Up The Sky

Caroline Suh’s film charting the rise of K-pop group, whose first album just appeared, is marketing of a sort but feels truer than recent pop-star documentaries

Band members talk about homesickness, body image and the pressure to deliver, and fly-on-the-wall moments allow fans to feel they’re being let behind a curtain

Reading Time:3 minutes

In Light Up the Sky, Blackpink offer up their thoughts on many subjects in a surprisingly intimate look at the group and the K-pop industry. Photo: Handouts

Published: 10:15pm, 15 Oct 2020Updated: 2:56am, 16 Oct 2020

Blackpink’s debut album hasn’t even been out for two weeks, and already the members of this K-pop girl group have the end in mind.

In fact, members Jennie, Jisoo, Rose and Lisa were pondering their own obsolescence more than a year ago, as we learn in Light Up the Sky, a new Netflix documentary about the quartet that started streaming on Wednesday.

Directed by Caroline Suh (who previously directed Netflix’s hit adaptation of Samin Nosrat’s cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat ), Light Up the Sky climaxes with Blackpink’s rapturously received performance at Coachella in California in 2019, where they became the first Korean girl group to play at the annual desert mega-festival in the US state.

Suh follows the women as they rehearse for the gig. She’s there as they huddle excitedly backstage seconds before showtime. And she checks in with them after, when Lisa tells her: “It doesn’t matter if we grow old and get replaced by a new younger generation … because they will still remember how we shone so bright.”

Light Up the Sky ends with Blackpink’s performance at Coachella in 2019. Photo: Handout

Kind of bleak for a group whose first album just entered the US Billboard charts at No 2.

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