The Day He Arrives (2012)
Average Rating: 8.2/10
Reviews Counted: 17
Fresh: 16 | Rotten: 1
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 8.2/10
Critic Reviews: 8
Fresh: 7 | Rotten: 1
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 371
My Rating
Movie Info
A film director who no longer makes films, Seongjun, arrives in Seoul to meet a close friend. When the friend doesn't show up, Seongjun wanders the city aimlessly. He runs into an actress he used to know, shares a drink with some film students and against his better judgment, heads to his ex-girlfriend's apartment. The next day goes very much like the last; Seongjun meets the actress, has drinks with friends, and falls for woman who looks remarkably like his ex-girlfriend. Each new day plays out
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Cast
-
Yu Junsang
Seongjun -
Kim Sang-joong
Youngho -
Song Sun-mi
Boram -
Bo-Kyung Kim
Kyungjin/Yejeon -
Yu Yungsang
Sungjoon -
-
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All Critics (17) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (16) | Rotten (1)
The listless execution may remind you less of 8 1/2 than of Woody Allen's whiny Stardust Memories.
Top CriticSang-soo Hong has no profound point to pound home. His story doesn't need an ending. He accepts all the characters just as they are.
Hong abstracts the tense network of fragile relationships to crisp, briskly sketched lines that he adorns with bubbly and self-deprecating humor and graceful wonders...
Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that's like absolutely nothing else.
The movie becomes an exploration, both playful and rueful, of desire, narrative and the idea beautifully expressed by Faulkner in "Absalom, Absalom!" that "maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished."
A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives-shot in luminous black-and-white-might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."
The ideas at the heart of The Day He Arrives are worth puzzling over and the discussion to follow may be the real reward, but the experience is muted.
Off-beat romcom.
Hong may be copying a template from his earlier movies about flailing directors (Like You Know It All, Woman on the Beach), but each film is unique, punctuated by occasional zooms that underline the randomness of existence.
The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of The Day He Arrives.
Even while The Day He Arrives doesn't come to much-at least not in comparison to some of Hong's other films, such as 2006's brilliant Woman On The Beach-it's still time well spent.
...maintains a funny and sad focus on its single petulant subject.
Modern Korean drama recalls heady games of Godard and Resnais
I always forget how funny Hong's films are until I'm in the middle of their deadpan variations on a by now standard theme of immature, self-involved men and accommodating women fooling themselves.
The ensemble acting is pitch perfect, and no-frills photography makes Seoul's streets a functional but characterful stage for this subtlest of farces.
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April 20, 2012:
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Foreign Titles
- The Day He Arrives (Book chon bang hyang) (UK)
- The Day He Arrives (Book chon bang hyang) (CA)
