Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.
Kwon returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori, who has come back from Japan to propose to her. Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology.
Relying not only on soju to complicate rifts between romantic interests, this tender comedy from Hong Sang-soo is the director’s most daringly constructed. Led by Japanese star Ryo Kase (Silence), Hill of Freedom is a multilingual and wonderfully jumbled story that is delightfully surprising.