More than the average auteur, Hong Sang-soo is known for drawing from a stable of themes, character types and structural conceits. The South Korean director’s work bears autobiographical elements, as many of his protagonists are narcissistic filmmakers, and, to distill his preoccupations perhaps simplistically, he tends to obsess over extended conversations between people who are seeking sex or love while imbibing alcohol, especially soju. His films are made with a light, unobtrusive touch yet still come off deeply considered and carefully composed. The thematic and narrative repetitiousness of Hong’s work is built into his movies: 2016’s Right Now, Wrong Then, still perhaps his biggest splash in the U.S., is a bifurcated story which, halfway through, doubles back and repeats the same interactions from its first half, with small differences that alter its trajectory and significance. His latest, Walk Up (his fourth feature to be released in the U.S. since the beginning of 2022), is certainly of a piece with his past films but includes some distinctions — both concrete and more intangible — that sets it apart. It’s among his best works of the last several years.
From the outset, Walk Up plays like a more delicate continuation of a lesser Hong work: 2018’s cynical, reductionist The Day After, which also starred Kwon Hae-hyo and was shot in black and white. In the earlier film, Kwon played a disloyal, self-involved book publisher and here he embodies a neglectful, self-important filmmaker. Broken into four sections, we observe Kwon’s Byungsoo as he twice visits and then moves into the titular, modest but appealing apartment building. We watch his painfully dismissive and disconnected relationship with his daughter in the first segment; booze-soaked oversharing with two of the building’s inhabitants in the second; and varying degrees of toxic dynamics with two women in the final couple of scenes.
While location is central to many Hong films, never has a place been as integral and amplifying of the characters’ emotions and motivations as the eponymous structure is here. In 2019’s Hotel by the River, the snowy inn of the title was a stage for familial reconciliation and in Grass, released the same year, a single cafe served as a site for voyeurism and artistic inspiration. But in Walk Up, the collection of rooms and winding staircases has a near-magical aura, even though it’s also clear that it’s a just a prism through which the characters’ histories and choices are reflected.
The building’s landlord, Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-yeong), is our physical and spiritual guide, leading Kwon and the audience through its five floors, including the basement. Kim makes multiple amusing references to the fact that while the basement is technically her office, she mostly rests there. Thus, the pliability of a place, and how we use home as a multi-purpose utility, becomes a running theme. In more than one scene, Hong — who photographed, edited and scored the film in addition to writing and directing it — lingers in the hallway as the dialogue persists in the other room, as if our real anchor is to the wood paneling itself. Furthermore, late in the film’s penultimate section, Kwon naps in bed as he either imagines a future conversation between himself and his unhappy girlfriend or as the actual, forthcoming conversation somehow rings in his ears. It’s a quietly gripping moment that’s not only sharply attuned to men’s possessive, overbearing tendencies—well-documented in Hong’s movies—but also feels expressive of a kind of psychosis of the home.
The rest and tiredness themselves are sticking points: Hong’s characters have grown older with him, and most of the main figures in Walk Up are middle-aged, reckoning with the breakdown of the body and how most relationships expire, or how sometimes people eventually find they’re best suited to be alone. In Front of Your Face, one of the trio of films Hong released last year, featured a main character who (spoilers herein) was besotted with a life-threatening disease. Similarly, in his newest effort, we come to learn that Kwon has been diagnosed with an unnamed ailment. However, unlike in Face, where the condition was used somewhat cheaply as a reveal three-quarters of the way through, in Walk Up, Hong teases it out less flashily and more naturalistically, and as a result it has a more insidiously impactful effect on the audience. Kwon’s health problems don’t become some overly definitional part of his character but rather just one of the many challenges life throws at him, as equally present as his relationship to his faith, his work and to romance.
In a filmography with as many overlapping concerns and hallmarks as Hong’s, what separates the great from the good from the merely average can be minute and even ephemeral. There’s something about the finest and near-best Hong movies (Walk Up belongs to that second tier) that is an unplaceable vibe — the signature pregnant pauses and awkward silences feel freighted with more observational heft and its patience results in something exceptional rather than jejune, here bringing to mind past triumphs like Night and Day and Claire’s Camera. Tiny details such as the tinkering plucked guitar music that transports us from one section of the film to the next and the noise the electric lock makes as people come in and out of the third-floor apartment elevate Walk Up to a plane of Hong excellence.
Photo courtesy of The Cinema Guild
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