Hong Sangsoo's The Day She Returns Gets US Trailer and Double-Bill Release

Cinema Guild opens Hong Sangsoo's The Day She Returns on a double bill with his 2011 film The Day He Arrives, debuting at LA's Acropolis on December 15 and reaching New York's Metrograph on December 18. A new US trailer for the film has just arrived. The pairing, per the distributor's announcement, gives audiences two structurally rhyming titles — and two black-and-white-less excuses to compare them.

The title echo is probably coincidence, as The Film Stage notes. The structural similarities between the two films start and end at the title, though black-and-white photography is another overlap — a common enough trait in Hong's work that, as the site puts it, "a lot" of his films would fit that tent. The Day He Arrives is no minor reference point: The Film Stage's Nick Newman counts it among the greatest films ever made in his Sight and Sound voting.

What is the new film about?

The Day She Returns is Hong's 34th feature. The official synopsis lays out the premise: actress Bae Jeongsu, played by Song Sunmi, stepped back from acting after marriage and a subsequent divorce. She returns to the profession with a role in an independent film. As that film's release approaches, she gives a series of press interviews — only to discover later, when her acting class asks her to revisit those moments, that she cannot clearly recall what was said. She is tired. She wants to go home. Her daughter is waiting.

The cast includes two longtime Hong collaborators: Cho Yunhee, of The Day After, and Park Miso, of Introduction. The synopsis describes a meditation on memory and performance, delivered in Hong's signature minimalist style — intimate conversations, precise compositions and a gently unfolding sense of time.

What did critics say at Berlinale?

The film screened at the Berlinale, where The Film Stage ran it as a Critic's Pick. Leonardo Goi wrote: "Hong is that rare artist whose corpus invites a kind of double consciousness: you can't watch any one of his works without thinking about the wider body it belongs to, a constantly evolving gossamer of twinnings and deja-vus. If it is true that, to borrow from Jean Renoir, 'a director makes only one movie in his life, then he breaks it up and makes it again,' what's most electrifying about Hong's cinema is the feeling of watching an artist interrogating his obsessions to say something new each time."

High praise, and characteristically self-aware: Hong's cinema is built for exactly this kind of comparison-shopping between films.

The double bill format suits him. Few directors' catalogues reward — arguably demand — back-to-back viewing the way Hong's twinned obsessions do. The Acropolis and Metrograph dates land mid-December, and the trailer is online now.