The Woman Who Ran (2020)
Hong Sang-soo has been making films in South Korea since the mid-1990s, and by the time The Woman Who Ran arrived in 2020 he had settled into a mode of working that is essentially his alone: low-budget, shot quickly, built around conversation, and shaped almost entirely by one pair of hands. Hong wrote the script, directed, cut the footage, and composed the music himself, a degree of sole authorship that is rare even among auteur filmmakers. The film was produced through his own company, Jeonwonsa Film, which gives him a freedom from commercial pressure that is visible in every unhurried frame. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Hong took the Silver Bear for Best Director, a real and concrete recognition of what the film achieves within its very particular and self-imposed limits.
The premise is, on the surface, as simple as cinema gets. Gamhee (Kim Min-hee) finds herself with unscheduled time while her husband is away, and she uses it to reconnect with three women from her life: two she visits at their homes, and one she runs into by chance at a theatre. The film runs to just 77 minutes. There is no thriller architecture, no dramatic incident waiting around the corner. What there is instead is a close, patient attention to the texture of female friendship and the particular things that get said, and left unsaid, when women talk among themselves. For anyone coming to Hong fresh, it is worth knowing that this is representative of his wider body of work rather than an exception to it. If you have spent time with Korean cinema through films of a more obviously plotted or visually flamboyant kind (and if you want a point of comparison, see also my thoughts on The Handmaiden or A Tale of Two Sisters), Hong's register will come as something of a shift in register and pace.
Kim Min-hee, who has been Hong's lead across several films and is his closest creative collaborator on screen, brings to Gamhee a quality of careful attentiveness, a watchfulness that keeps you reading her face even in scenes where she is doing very little beyond listening. Alongside her, Seo Young-hwa, Song Seon-mi, and Kim Sae-byuk each bring their own register to the women Gamhee visits, while Kwon Hae-hyo appears in a brief, tonally precise supporting role. The ensemble feels less cast than assembled, in the best sense: people who know how to be still in front of a camera and let a scene breathe around them.
Cinematographer Kim Su-min shoots the film in a style that reflects Hong's structural choices: static or near-static framing, long takes with minimal cutting, and occasional abrupt zooms that feel less like a stylistic flourish than a mild correction of attention. The palette is naturalistic and undressed, catching ordinary interiors and suburban outdoor spaces without any attempt to make them look more interesting than they are. Hong's own musical contributions are sparse and understated, piano pieces that surface briefly and then disappear, more ambient punctuation than score. The editing, also Hong's own work, favours duration over momentum, holding on a shot long after a more conventionally paced film would have moved on. Whether that patience feels like discipline or like slowness is, of course, a matter for the viewer. For a companion piece on a film similarly interested in the weight of what is not quite spoken between people, my review of Past Lives covers territory that rhymes interestingly with this one.
On paper The Woman Who Ran is almost nothing at all. A woman, while her husband is away, visits three female friends in turn, and they talk: about food, about cats, about neighbours, about not very much. That is the entire film. What makes it absorbing is everything going on beneath that surface, all the things these women are not quite saying to one another.
It helped that I recognised so many of the faces. This is a Hong Sang-soo film, and his regular lead Kim Min-hee is front and centre, an actress I first properly noticed in The Handmaiden, which I loved, so seeing her and several other familiar names from Korean cinema here was a pleasure in itself. Hong shoots it all very plainly, almost like a pseudo-documentary, long unbroken takes and the odd abrupt zoom, no fuss and frankly not much to look at. The style is basic, and that is plainly the intention: nothing is allowed to pull focus from the talk.
And the talk, it turns out, is the whole game. Hong has an uncanny ear for the rhythms of small talk, the pauses, the polite deflections, the things people circle around without ever landing on, and he captures the reality of it about as well as anyone I have seen. Underneath the pleasantries run currents of happiness and disappointment, of the compromises these women have made, of gender roles worn like old coats. Almost none of it is spelled out. You feel it instead.
It will not be for everyone, and I understand why. It is slow, it is small, and if you need a plot you will be checking your watch inside ten minutes. But I found a great deal to admire in its restraint, and in how much it manages to say by leaving so much unsaid. Three and a half stars, a modest, unshowy film that rewards you to exactly the degree that you lean in and listen.
The Woman Who Ran sits comfortably within a strand of contemporary cinema that trusts its audience to do a fair amount of the work, films that measure their success not in incident but in accumulation. Hong's Berlin prize gives it a formal stamp of distinction, though the film itself seems almost allergic to distinction of any conventional kind. It is the sort of thing that rewards a certain disposition in the person watching it, and a certain willingness to adjust to its tempo. Whether that adjustment feels like effort or like ease will probably tell you most of what you need to know about whether this is your sort of film. Small, unhurried, and built to last in the memory rather than in the moment: some films whisper, and you either lean in or you don't.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2026-09-18
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Woman Who Ran (2020) on YouTube
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