It would be patently false to declare By The Stream, the 32nd film from South Korean naturalist Hong Sang-soo, to be the most personally revealing of his oeuvre. That title is likely reserved for 2017’s On The Beach At Night Alone, which follows an actress (Kim Min-hee) as she spends a chilly evening wandering the German coast, fretting if the married director she’s sleeping with actually cares for her. Hong and Kim announced their extramarital affair during that film’s Seoul premiere, a declaration that effectively saw the actress blacklisted from the Korean film industry. Since then, she’s solely acted in Hong’s output, appearing in 11 of the director’s 13 films since On The Beach. But By The Stream continues to meld the auteur and his muse with its two central characters, employing several of Hong’s narrative and technical staples with an air of heightened self-reflection.
Here, Kim plays Jeonim, a visiting artist and lecturer at a women’s university who finds herself in a tight bind. With only 10 days before her students are expected to perform a short skit during a performing arts showcase, it’s revealed that their boyishly handsome theater professor has been engaging each of them in clandestine romances. He’s swiftly removed from his post, leaving the class without a director for the approaching event (and with unresolved tension surrounding their simultaneous courtships). Jeonim calls her uncle, Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo, another Hong regular), a once-esteemed actor who has since been blacklisted from the industry over a vague political infraction.
To Jeonim’s surprise, he accepts the temporary post, in part to relive the experience he had directing a short play at the same university some 40 years ago. As he and Jeonim rekindle their bond, familiar Hong scenes unfold: Soju is endlessly poured, Korean delicacies are served, sudden zooms and pans are utilized in order not to break long takes. Romantic tensions are also stoked, both between the disgraced professor and one of his students as well as between Jeonim’s uncle and her boss Jeong (Cho Yun-hee), who gushes over the former actor’s talent. The latter scenario is to Jeonim’s thinly veiled chagrin, as she ponders what implications their potential affair might incur both personally and professionally.
As with many of Hong’s films, the fact that the protagonists are artists—namely poets, directors, actors, painters and writers—is typical. Yet details in By The Stream feel more relevant to Hong and Kim’s joint experiences as a couple, riffing on the trials they continue to overcome. The most obvious of these allusions is Sieon’s blacklisted status, but the impressionistic tapestries woven by Jeonim feel directly inspired by Hong’s diminishing vision (which he previously evoked in the intentionally blurry lensing of 2023’s In Water). Once again, the amorphous quality of water serves as a metaphor for bleary eyes, as Jeonim sits by the stream near campus and sketches abstract images for her massive two-meter pieces. Entitled Flowing Water, her artwork also feels directly linked to Hong’s own artistic approach. “Being able to complete this whole structure by myself,” she says, “that’s satisfying.” The filmmaker has served as director, writer, editor, cinematographer, and composer of his most recent projects, first wearing all these hats with Introduction in 2021.
The familial dynamic between Jeonim and Sieon serves as an interesting buffer for their real-life counterparts, allowing Hong and Kim to reflect on each other’s personhood without the obfuscating effect of their domestic partnership. In a stunning monologue during a 10-minute oner, Jeonim recounts a “mystical” incident in which she spontaneously bled from the eyes for several days, effectively blinding her before providing divine clarity. Sieon grapples with his confidence as a performer now riddled with restrictions, and the skit’s subsequent staging is met with criticism on the basis of gender and politics despite its delicate execution. (For context, Kim was met with international acclaim for her bold, sexually kinetic performance in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, which premiered only a year before she was blacklisted for her affair with Hong). Once one is considered a persona non grata, even the most calculated and comparatively small-scale of efforts will still garner considerable backlash.
But the central scandal of By The Stream also finds Hong and Kim probing the nature of their coupling. Jeonim confronts her disgraced former colleague during a crisp fall day on a park bench. “It was just something you shouldn’t do,” she scolds in regard to his pursuit of the student actresses. “You made it impossible to work with them.” While an added ethical boundary is at play here—as well as several more hearts involved—there is an intriguing dialogue being had about the validity of pursuing such a relationship in general. One could read this plot detail as a tongue-in-cheek assertion that Hong and Kim’s affair is relatively tame, based on mutual attraction and creative appreciation as opposed to the professor’s predatory proclivities. Indeed, a revelation regarding the lengthy process of divorce seems to balance things out by referring to the director’s experience with his first wife, who long refused to honor Hong’s legal request for separation.
If Jeonim is a loose avatar for Hong, the flowing water she draws inspiration from acts as a meditative reflection pool. His life—now inextricably tethered to Kim’s—is refracted and shaped by the path carved by the mighty Han river, which Jeonim follows upstream as part of her ongoing tapestry work. Though it might be the path of most resistance, it is also one that eventually leads to placid calm. Hong’s recent films have been categorized as overtly languid, narratively slight, and relentlessly quotidian. By The Stream incorporates (at times literal) dramatic details without ever sacrificing the veristic quality of his work, only made possible by the deep artistic and intimate connection he shares with Kim. With Hong’s eyesight diminishing, one wonders if he might be increasingly relying on Kim’s vision, both in the sensory and artistic sense—their ongoing project of mutual creation is only getting deeper and more transcendent.
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Writer: Hong Sang-soo
Starring: Kim Min-hee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Cho Yun-hee, Ha Seong-guk
Release Date: August 8, 2025
