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A great sin of mine as a cinephile is that I have always been a Hong skeptic. Perhaps it is due to his distancing effect as a formalist, but I’ve never been able to fully grasp onto the ins and outs of his filmmaking in an emotional context. On the Beach at Night Alone is an entirely different story. This is the most direct film I’ve ever seen Hong make with his camera centering Kim Min-hee and giving her the space to really ask viewers to latch themselves onto her journey.

The brilliance of Kim’s performance is that she’s so hard to read throughout, not because she conceals emotion but because her face, rounded and impish, seems to convey so many things at once: in these table-talk scenes, where she’s seen largely in profile, her face can suggest at once tenderness, amusement, and outright contempt, or perhaps all at once. It would be wonderful to see Kim play out-and-out comedy, but what she gives here is something much more nuanced and shifting.

Even if you don’t know anything about the director’s life, Hong’s films have always seemed personal — their candor, their naturalistic and lived-in rhythms feel like they’re coming from a place of honesty. Knowing the real-life inspiration may help one appreciate the film’s moral trajectory a bit better. But the movie’s charms work on a much more immediate level, in the way it captures the ever-shifting dynamic between men and women, and the difficulty of matching one’s feelings to one’s words.

The latest feature from Hong Sang-soo is one of his most somber, and yet, funniest films to date (though that could change by next week.) The melancholic air drifting through the spaces of this film aren’t ones of overwhelming sorrow however, but more the fleeting autumnal feelings one experiences through the changing of the seasons, a hushed reminder of memories faded and gone, but born not of bleakness and hopelessness, but of enlightenment and forward progression.

I count neither On the Beach at Night Alone nor The Day After as among the strongest of Hong’s films—the latter at least has a potent kicker, where the former only trails off—but the nature of his practice makes these sorts of value judgments seem almost superfluous... The movies seem to turn away from the very idea that there is anything to build toward, in either life and in art: things happen and then more things happen.

Hong's visual style, offering little camera movement or editing within scenes, is deceptively simple, exposing the characters' emotional complexity, and the friction between his serious psychological concerns and his playful narrative, with its dream sequences and clever elisions, generates a certain frisson.

The film’s emotional impact is all down to Kim’s subtle range; she is the beating heart of the film.

On the Beach builds on Right Now, Wrong Then‘s airlessly nearly room-tone-free settings; barring a few crucial outbursts, both settings and people are relatively quiet. Where Right Now felt (to me) self-consciously unnatural in its attempted calm, this works better as a sad, mournful work that’s also unexpectedly heartening in cordoning off a meaningful, if probably fragile, moment for actual healing and self-improvement.

Hong builds moments of extraordinary romantic power, culminating in a brilliant sequence, constructed from a single ten-minute shot parsed with brisk and assertive zooms and pans, in which Young-hee reflects on her bitter experiences. Kim infuses the scene with a passionate existential resignation reminiscent of Gena Rowlands’s work in the films of John Cassavetes.

Hong simultaneously positions filmmaking as the ultimate act of atonement and evasion, eviscerating himself so that he may live to stage several more films about the futility of getting hammered and worshipping and bedding gorgeous young women. Hong’s repetitious thrashing is one of contemporary cinema’s most damning and evocative representations of arrested male myopia—which is turned... into an ongoing poem of self-entrapment.

Hong runs the risk of exhausting moviegoers with his indomitable pace, and his fans, who sometimes seem like the arthouse equivalent to Christopher Nolan fanboys, can, in their obnoxious yammering, distract from the work on the screen. But for those keeping up, On the Beach at Night Alone is one of the best cinematic experiences of the year.

The film is marked by a certain unevenness that matches the speed with which it was written and shot, but its terrible highs are as gut-wrenching, funny, and formally freewheeling as anything in recent cinema, while its lows are negated to some degree by the sense that the film’s messiness is a prerequisite for any artwork so grounded in the crucible of life in which it was forged.