cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Hong revisits his signature unstable romantic encounter through two subtly diverging versions, with awkward talk, alcohol-soaked candour and small behavioural shifts revealing how people fictionalise themselves.
02
Why this pick
A drifting filmmaker wanders through Seoul, where repeated meetings and uncertain chronology turn everyday drinking, longing and embarrassment into a dry, quietly disorienting study of recurrence.
03
Why this pick
Four linked chapters refract overlapping relationships and creative memory, using modest variations in viewpoint to make romantic insecurity feel both funny and piercingly unresolved.
04
Why this pick
Three variations on a woman's stay in a seaside town offer the same deadpan repetitions, fragile attraction and playfully artificial narrative design that make Hong's emotional evasions resonate.
05
Why this pick
Two old friends revisit a former lover, letting casual conversation and repeated memories expose the gulf between masculine nostalgia and the lived reality it keeps trying to rewrite.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
As the film begins, Sangwon, an aimless and indecisive college student on school holiday after final examinations, avoids walking together with his older brother by instead taking a side street, where he finds a former girlfriend, Yongsil, working at an optician's store. Unsure of his own emotional preparedness in rekindling the relationship, he decides to watch a play while waiting for her to complete her work shift, delaying the decision to meet her later in the evening. The final words of anguish in the play, uttered by a desperately ill child unable to be comforted by his mother, would later be echoed by Sangwon from the rooftop of his parents' apartment after his own failed act of despair. In the film's corollary chapter, Tongsu, a struggling, rootless, and inscrutable filmmaker who has become obsessed with a short film directed by his former classmate - and in particular, the devoted and obliging woman in the film - encounters the young actress in person and begins to ingratiate himself into her company, acting out his projected image of her by imitating gestures and revisiting locations from the film in an attempt to realize his own created image of her.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Choi Young-Sil
Jun Sang-Won
Kim Dong-soo
