For Fans of Hong Sang-soo

The filmmaker who makes the same film differently every time

Hong Sang-soo has been making Korean art cinema's most quietly radical work since the mid-1990s, and his films still catch critics off guard because they look, at first pass, so unassuming. A writer visits a friend in a provincial city. Two people get drunk and talk past each other at a low table. Someone walks up a hill in the snow. That is the film. That is, often, the whole film.

But the texture underneath that plainness is everything. Hong shoots on small budgets with minimal crews, often writing the script the morning of the shoot. He uses long zooms with that slightly seasick mechanical quality, plants his camera on a tripod and refuses to cut when things get uncomfortable, and builds his narratives around repetition: a scene plays out, then the same events recur with subtle differences in dialogue or in who holds the power. The effect is closer to a short story cycle than a conventional screenplay. You watch a Hong film the way you reread a Chekhov, noticing what shifted.

At the center of his recent work is the actress and his partner Kim Min-hee, who appears in most films from Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) onward, and their collaboration has produced some of his best: The Woman Who Ran, Introduction, In Our Day. The films are saturated with artists talking about art, with the embarrassment of feeling too much in public, with Korea's particular social choreography around hierarchy and alcohol. Soju and makgeolli flow constantly. People say things they cannot unsay.

If you love Hong Sang-soo, you probably love a particular kind of attention: unhurried, precise, a little deadpan, convinced that the way two people talk around something they cannot say to each other is, in fact, the subject.