Among Hong Sangsoo’s most immediately bleak and bitter works, his final film of 2017 weaves a dense tale of infidelity, mistaken identities, and unexpected spirituality. The central character, Bongwan (Kwon Hae-hyo), is a publishing executive whose wife has just discovered his affair with a former employee. Soon after, he meets his new employee Areum (Kim Min-hee), and their conversations are interwoven with flashbacks to Bongwan’s memories of his infidelity.

Shot in shimmering monochrome tones, The Day After is at once relatively straightforward (for Hong) and complex, negotiating the entire emotional spectrum and unflinchingly diving into people’s capacity for deception. His trademark symmetrical one-take table conversations have an additional charge to them, as the camera pans back and forth between two (or three) contentious parties, with all involved attempting to find some agreed upon version of the truth. Hong provides few true answers, but the raw, self-lacerating emotion and the deft plays with time speak for themselves.

“As so often in the past, this filmmaker inhabits a Rohmeresque world of talk, of dialogue, and there is something unfashionably and refreshingly minimalist about [The Day After].” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

All images on this page courtesy of Cinema Guild.