Sooner or later, conversations around the ever-growing oeuvre of Hong Sangsoo all land on the same word: repetition. That’s kind of inevitable: few could ever dream of putting out new stuff at the Korean’s pace, his filmography—now spanning 34 features—expanding at the same speed with which his characters down their soju. Hence the almost forensic attention people have devoted to unearthing similarities and connections. Sure enough, he has unmistakable fixations, both thematic—a certain type of struggling artist, often a filmmaker, often male, often drowning his creative and sentimental sorrows in liters of that traditional rice liquor—and formal: a lo-fi, minimalist mise en scène punctuating static shots with a few conspicuous zooms. But much as his detractors will have you believe, no two Hong films are ever alike; not only do they all meaningfully differ, but wield repetitions as a structuring principle. Hong is that rare artist whose corpus invites a kind of double consciousness: you can’t watch any one of his works without thinking about the wider body it belongs to, a constantly evolving gossamer of twinnings and deja-vus. If it is true that, to borrow from Jean Renoir, “a director makes only one movie in his life, then he breaks it up and makes it again,” what’s most electrifying about Hong’s cinema is the feeling of watching an artist interrogating his obsessions to say something new each time.
So it is rather ironic that his latest, The Day She Returns, should in some ways be about the very thing his most coruscating critics have routinely leveled as an accusation. “She” (Song Seon-mi) is an actress who was once famous for roles in big-budget productions, retired after she got married, and when she finally divorced, decided to interrupt a 12-year hiatus to star in an independent film. What that’s called or concerns is anyone’s guess—as is her name, for that matter—but none of the three female journalists who take turns to sit and talk with the star seem all that interested in her new role. The three interviews comprise the bulk of The Day She Returns, and all begin with the middle-aged woman gingerly soliciting the journos’ thoughts on the new film before departing from it entirely. As far as press tours go, what Hong imagines here is something closer to therapy.
There’s a 26-year-old writer—the first in line—who starts by asking the actress about the “difficult” divorce, only to open up about her own traumas and frustrations (“I guess I just wish for too much in life”); we hear about the thespian’s epiphany atop Mount Sorak, where—for one brief, luminous instant—she “saw things just as they are,” and listen to her recommend which dog breeds to buy if you’re worried your pet might shed. There’s small talk, awkward silences, nervous chuckles, and then (of course) repetitions. The interviews all take place at a German restaurant in some unspecified city, which gives the actress a chance to wax lyrical about Teutonic beer and cuisine to each interlocutor; most notably, all three chats end with her having to field the same question: “any word of advice for young people?” (Among many other things, The Day She Returns is a perceptive reminder of the mind-numbing effects of these junkets.)
The film’s fabric teems with rhymes, too. Hong—once again running the whole show as writer, director, editor, composer, sound designer, producer, and cinematographer—captures the three conversations in the exact same way: a static shot that frames interviewer and interviewee talking face-to-face and is only broken several minutes into the chat, at which point the multi-hyphenate cuts to a close-up of whatever the actress is drinking (a coffee at first, and finally her beverage of choice, German beer) and eventually zooms back out to the original camera angle. This isn’t a substantially novel grammar for Hong, but then again, familiarity is a hallmark of his artistry. It is also what makes his cinema so endlessly pleasurable. To be clear: those charms aren’t the prerogative of Hong devotees or experts only. To venture into his oeuvre is to wade into a self-made universe that’s both instantly recognizable and tweaked in each new work—to experience the jolt that comes from watching a world you think you know slowly change and jam your bearings. I say recognizable, not repetitive, because even in a film that’s full of formal and thematic parallels, no chat ever simplistically retreads the others, and despite the echoes to its predecessors, The Day She Returns makes for a singular addition to a shapeshifting body of work.
Late into the third exchange, the woman confesses she’s taking acting classes, and in the film’s final chapter she strives to remember and reenact those interviews under her coach’s supervision. It turns out the exercise is a lot harder than she imagined, and what makes her stumble—surprisingly—is the answer she’d given to that parting question. Earlier that day, loosened up by the beer, she’d said young people were “too dark,” that they needed to learn how to “love themselves.” But now the words just won’t come out. What did she mean? Why is she struggling so hard? What we’re watching here isn’t only this film’s climax, but one of the most revelatory moments in Hong’s entire corpus. Because in Song’s hesitation—in the way she scans the rehearsal room and the young woman playing the interviewer in front of her—lies a strange paradox. No, the actress cannot resurrect those encounters verbatim—how could she? But it’s only when she’s finally confronted with that impossibility that the “real stuff” emerges, and life begins to flow into her craft.
The Day She Returns is Hong at his most elemental, a work that sheds any semblance of plot to remind you that authenticity—in life as in cinema—comes from those moments we allow ourselves to freely step into the unknown. A chronicle of a few only deceptively unassuming conversations becomes a journey of self-discovery and creative catharsis: we witness someone who’s preached the importance of being true to oneself achieve that through their art. All through the press junket, the actress had traded compliments with her interviewees—“you’re so pretty!” “no, you’re so attractive!”—the kind of flatteries traditionally uttered by Hong’s pesky men. Yet at the end of the rehearsal, once she lets go of the script she’s clinging to and finds herself again, she’s told something rather different: “you’re so transparent.” Hard to tell if that’s on par with the realization she experienced atop the mountain. But look how she glows.
The Day She Returns premiered at the 2026 Berlinale and will be released by Cinema Guild.