Critic Reviews

A conversation falters. Another bottle is opened. Three people share drinks and their universe is completely reordered.

Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward.

To an even greater degree than in most Hong films, the film’s scenes of casual small talk, awkward silences, polite smiles, and glasses clinked to change the subject, open up faultlines in the characters’ lives.

Existing sharply in such a naturalistic register that they scarcely seem scripted at all, all the film’s interactions are still so cleverly designed that despite being blurry with alcohol or attraction or self-analysis, they all highlight the funny, sad truism that no one human can ever really know what it’s like to be another.

With each new film, Hong Sang-soo’s work becomes more subtextual, more fraught, even funnier.

Without the looming pressures of rent, work-from-home set-ups and casual business meetings, Hong suggests that we might just finally be free.

It’s uniquely pleasurable in how self-contained it is.

The impasse implied in “The Novelist’s Film” gets a strenuous and sardonic dramatic workout in "Walk Up," which is both a work of art and a theory of art—or, rather, several theories, which emerge in the course of the discussions between characters who are themselves artists or former artists.

It’s maybe dull for critics to praise compactness or pureness in one Hong film after another, and Walk Up will definitely not be anyone’s favorite, but it’s hard not to be sympathetic to something so personal.