According to audio description (AD) guidelines, characters’ emotions and thoughts should be described as objectively as possible by using visual aspects of the screen. However, questions have been raised about both the dichotomy of ‘objectivity vs subjectivity’ and the possibility of objective descriptions of characters’ mental states. Against this background, the present study aims to show how characters’ mental states are described objectively in an AD movie and what kinds of writing methods are used to describe the mental states. For this purpose, a Korean AD version of Henri Henri (written by an experienced describer) was transcribed and analysed according to an adapted model from Palmer and Salway (2015). A total of 167 phrases associated with characters’ mental states were categorised into the following codes: (1) description of simple actions that imply mental states, (2) description of facial expressions, (3) modification of the description of actions (e.g., ‘walks cautiously’, ‘smiling in relief’), (4) description ending with -deut, -cheok, or -ji (in English, ‘as if to ...’ and similar expressions), (5) ‘direct’ description of particular mental states (e.g., ‘He was disappointed’), and (6) description with more than one code (e.g., ‘He can’t hide his disappointment, smiling vacantly’). The analysis showed that subjective descriptions of characters’ mental states often appeared in the movie and that Codes (1) to (5) were distributed almost evenly. This article concludes with brief discussion about the implications of the findings for AD theory and practice.