By the Stream review - enigmatic Korean drama

“I lead a peaceful, idle life, running a bookstore in Gangneung. Honestly, no customers.” Chu Si-eon (Kwon Hae-hyo) is genial and self-deprecating but he was previously a well-known actor and director before he criticised the authorities and was forced to lay low.

Now he’s directing a short drama for a few university students in Seoul in a class taught by his niece, the reticent, charming Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), who’s asked him to help out, though she assumed he’d say no. The previous director has just left due to embarrassing circumstances – he dated three of his students separately, so they’ve left too, leaving just four.

This is South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s 32^nd feature. Known for a slow-paced naturalism, he is remarkably prolific: A Traveller’s Needs, also made in 2024, stars Isabelle Huppert as a French teacher in Korea. And as in In Front of your Face (2021), which, as always, features several of his regular cast members, By the Stream concerns loneliness, a return and a transcendent, revelatory experience. An epiphany following a strange illness – blood poured from her eyes for three days - has marked Jeonim. And, another Hong trademark (he’s known for bonding with his actors over alcohol and cigarettes), there is a great deal of food and drink, with meals constantly being planned and an eel restaurant as a particular favourite.

Phases of the moon mark time passing. Nothing is clear-cut: the disgraced previous sketch director (Ha Seong-guk, another Hong regular) returns one night to ask one of the students to marry him, giving her two days to decide before he goes to the US. She’s not averse to the idea, in spite of her friends, and Jeonim, telling her he can’t possibly be a sincere person. “If the words we always use all disappeared, I could like him,” says the girl, not throwing much light on things.

Outspoken Professor Jeong (Jo Hun-hee, pictured above, right, with Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), left, and her uncle (Kwon Hae-hyo), who helped Jeonim get her job at the college when she was uncertain of her path after dropping out of engineering school, is a huge fan of the uncle’s work. How disgraceful it was of those terrible people, she tells him, to bury such a great artist’s career. She’s seen every one of his films, both as an actor and director. There’s much embarrassed laughter. “You’re completely unique,“ she says, getting more and more over-the-top every moment (enthusiastic flattery is another Hong stock-in-trade). She’s his biggest fan, the biggest in the whole of Korea.

“I should buy her a drink, shouldn’t I,” he says to Jeonim. “That’s exactly what I’d like,” the professor responds, and suggests the eel restaurant, a bucolic spot with the sound of a stream in the background. Professor Jeong and the uncle both like to drink. And she says that she’s got a million dollars stashed away, as she’s got nothing, apart from fine food and wine and treating her students, to spend her money on. Travel makes her lonely. Romance is in the air in a low-key way between the two, which seems to be disconcerting for Jeonim, who demands to know if they’re sleeping together.

Jeonim, says the professor, has the soul of a true artist. It transpires that she works in textiles, getting her inspiration from flowing water, and we see her on several occasions sitting beside a rather unlovely stretch of river, making notes (pictured above). At one point she waves a large leaf, dancing slowly on her way to the university president’s office, where she’s been summoned after the sketch: a moment of unforced beauty.

The sketch, which features the four young women sitting round a floor-table eating and discussing levels of spiciness, was too risky, apparently, and displeased the president as well as some of the audience. History has repeated itself: years ago the uncle came to this college to direct a skit for the same festival and the reception was equally bad, though it’s not spelled out why. But that doesn’t interfere with his bonding with the four students over copious amounts of booze, and – perhaps manipulatively – asking each one to describe, in improvised poetry, what sort of person they would like to become. This is strangely uplifting, as is the entirety of this enigmatic, gentle film.

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