Metacritic reviews

The nothing much that unfurls over the following eighty or so minutes feels like everything.

Despite being shot during the pandemic, In Front of Your Face is one of the South Korean director’s most open films of late, poignant in its use of a simple structure to touch on the eminently difficult question of how to live happily between past, present, and future.

A body of work like components of a house: one film is a corridor, another a small bedroom window. Others are the structural backbone. A looming jewel of a career, right in front of your face.

Typical of Hong’s work, the laid-back anti-storytelling lets daily life flow slowly by without incident, until a revelatory twist in the last act gives the film its meaning. It will certainly appeal to his festival fan base but neophytes beware: It takes patience to get to hidden truths, and even so they are about as clear as a Zen koan.

Hong’s film and his radiant star are not made for melancholy, and so instead they laugh — at the absurdity of hoping for some castle in the air when there’s so much life all around you, always, right in front of your face.

Here, more than ever, Hong’s cinema is also revealed to be a philosophy—his method not a means but an end in itself, an embrace of the history of the art and a preservation of its future in the eternal present tense of creation.

The result is one of Hong’s most emotionally generous films. In a career full of small triumphs, it’s a beautiful gesture of family love, of non-specific spiritual awakening, and self-possession meant to create outward waves of goodness.

The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.

In most other filmmaker’s hands, these seemingly inconsequential observations wouldn’t seamlessly create a tender and alluring narrative. Yet Hong Sang-soo seems to have it all down to a science.

The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.