Art imitates life in this quietly devastating masterpiece from Hong Sangsoo. Kim Minhee (The Handmaiden, Right Now, Wrong Then)—in the role that won her the Silver Bear for best actress in Berlin—plays Younghee, an actress reeling in the aftermath of an affair with a married film director. Younghee visits Hamburg then returns to Korea, but as she meets with friends and has her fair share to drink, increasingly startling confessions emerge.
No stranger to mining his own experience for his films, Hong, whose real-life affair with Kim stirred up a media frenzy in Korea, here confronts his personal life with a newfound emotional directness. With an incredibly raw and vulnerable performance from Kim at its center, On the Beach at Night Alone is one of the most dynamic collaborations between director and performer in contemporary cinema. (Cinema Guild)
A drama of rare lyrical exaltation.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
As gut-wrenching, funny, and formally freewheeling as anything in recent cinema.
- Dan Sullivan, Film Comment
In a quiet, understated way, it is one of the most emotionally devastating films in [Hong's] rapidly expanding œuvre.
- Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema
Hong’s repetitious thrashing is one of contemporary cinema’s most damning and evocative representations of arrested male myopia—which is turned... into an ongoing poem of self-entrapment.
- Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine
Equal parts the most self-reflexive and emotional of the filmmaker's works... For what it’s worth, I think this is Hong Sangsoo’s best film, and perhaps the culmination of a series of films about the ‘self.’
- Neil Bahadur, MUBI Notebook
(Available to download after screening date)