Synopsis
A film director who no longer makes films, Seongjun arrives in Seoul to meet a close friend. When the friend doesn't show up, Seongjun wanders the city aimlessly for three days, grabbing drinks and meeting women, with each day playing out like a version of the last.
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Cast
- Yu Jun-sangSung-joon
- Kim Sang-joongYoung-ho
- Song Sun-miBo-ram
- Kim Bo-kyungKyung-jin / Ye-jeon
- Kim Eui-sungJoong-won
- Baek Jong-hakDirector
- Gi Ju-bongProducer
- Baek Hyun-jinComposer
- Ko Hyun-jungMovie Fan
- Ahn Jae-hongStudent
Recommendations
- 90
The New York Times
The Day He Arrives has real force and its experimentation is in the service of a moving story about a man who, as he says at the start, has nowhere to go. And so he returns to a bar, a woman and situations that are always the same and yet always different - snow falls during one kiss but not another - playing a director whose life resembles a movie he keeps remaking. - 90
Salon
But at his best - and his new movie, The Day He Arrives, is among his very best - Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that's like absolutely nothing else. - 88
Slant Magazine
The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives. - 88
Chicago Sun-Times
The movie finds the right tone to present its bittersweet wisdom. It's relaxed. It's content to observe and listen. - 83
IndieWire
Maintains a funny and sad focus on its single petulant subject. - 83
The A.V. Club
The Day He Arrives is a talky movie, full of long, boozy scenes and cosmic coincidences - and in that it echoes Allen, as well as Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the best of British kitchen-sink drama. - 80
Time Out
A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day." - 80
The Hollywood Reporter
Serves as an amusing itinerary of dining, drinking and sexual dalliance that beguilingly plays with narrative time.
