Walk Up

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.

While Hong’s films are often highly comic, albeit in a subtly dry fashion, they can also be intensely melancholy; and few are sadder, or indeed more elaborately perplexing, than this.

... Quietly radical but carried off by Hong in an assuredly casual way.

More than a movie about filmmaking, however, “Walk Up” is a pandemic flick meant to remind viewers of the preciousness of our existence.

This delightful film is not so much a crowdpleaser than it is a sly peephole&#59; it wonders at the sheer simplicity of everyday life. A delightful addition to the prolific auteur’s oeuvre.

What Hong subtly and impressively achieves in his film is a merging of time and space, allowing the apartment building to strip away any sense of when its events are occurring.

The remarkable achievement of Walk Up is that Hong manages to accommodate both... a linear, behaviorally coherent chronology and a metaphysical image of simultaneously coexisting presents.

A well-made grim film that's starkly funny but has no emotional impact.