The Woman Who Ran

Hong Sang-soo's film consists of three visits. Gam-hee, played by Kim Min-hee, is alone for the first time in five years while her husband is away on business, and she calls on three women friends in turn. Each visit contains a meal, a conversation, and someone unexpected at the door. The construction is almost motionless: long static takes broken now and then by an abrupt zoom. The women talk to each other about men, and the same sentence keeps circling back. Gam-hee says three times that she and her husband have spent every day together for five years and never once been apart, and with each repetition the line drifts from affection towards defence. That is why the title reads like a question. Hong won the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin in 2020 for it. Who it is for: viewers who value Hong Sang-soo's cinema of small gestures and the tension underneath ordinary conversation. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for event or explicit narrative, since the film sustains eighty minutes of nothing happening.