Critics reviews

It’s like a series of charcoal sketches with marginalia; there are unexpected mini-flashbacks, and even a visualization of a poem. Hong’s free style isn’t showy; there’s a stillness holding the film together at all times.

“Hotel by the River” is — surprisingly, from the standpoint of a skeptic — one of Hong’s most unexpectedly poignant works, self-reflexive in a way that feels searching rather than rote.

It’s undoubtedly a quiet film, but only appears gentle because its characters, equal parts depraved and deprived, lack the honesty or emotional freedom to avert, even acknowledge, tragedy. Beneath the surface, it is no less scathing a portrait of male narcissism and fragility than any other.

Despite its wry tone, the movie offers, in the character of Young-hwan, one of the filmmaker’s more caustic artist stand-ins.

For all its solemn beauty, Hotel by the River is lax and under-imagined compared to Hong’s masterpieces. Love and death may be the themes here, but the stakes have never felt quite this low, the energy so sluggish.

Hong creates a constellation of objects and moments—architectural, automotive, culinary, medical, whimsical—and gives them a new artistic state of being, a reverberant poetic identity. They both inform the over-all composition and leap out from it.

I have absolutely no idea why this decision [shooting with a handheld camera] was made: the results look more like a parody of whatever you think the ugliest-looking mumblecore movie is than I ever imagined possible from a Hong film, and every zoom is particularly excruciating.

After searching through the film’s formal ploys and finding nothing particularly transformative, one begins to take its mostly solemn conversations and interactions at face value, even though these conversations and interactions don’t seem so different from the ones in earlier films that were undercut by absurd juxtapositions.

Following this past winter’s Grass, which similarly ruminated on death and prospective paths, Hong’s latest confirms a nascent sorrow in this increasingly complicated director’s work. The results are troubling, touching, and never less than beautiful.