Walk Up

Walk Up is a formally cheeky, confident film from one of contemporary cinema’s true masters.

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

Like many great artists, Hong appears in some ways to be trying to tell the same story over and over, each new film an attempt to solve the same essential riddle about what makes us tick. Just as well.

Without leaving his comfort zone, Hong expands the margins of his repertoire just a little bit more in this film anchored by a new theme of an artist’s incompatibility with domesticity.

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

Rarely is professional, romantic, familial, creative and existential angst delivered with such a light heart.

Hong Sang-soo’s 34th feature confines an ageing Hong-like director to a single multi-storey building while ringing time’s changes

Walk Up is about the lives we haven't lived and the ones we still have yet left to live with the hope there'll always be someone willing to imagine them. [Full review in Spanish]

In Korean, Tab translates as “top,” a play on the word “tower,” and Hong uses the title building well, with each floor representing a different stage in Byung-soo 's life. If he intended the film as a self-portrait, though, it's not a very flattering one.

Walk Up is built from repetition and a difference in the conversational sequences of its honest characters, creating a sensation of temporary stillness. [Full review in Spanish]