Jeonim (Kim Min-hee) is an art instructor at a small women's university in Seoul. She asks her uncle Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo) to help her out with a new project. She needs someone to write and direct a short scene for her students to perform at the university's theatre festival.

Saying more than that, or detailing what else happens in By the Stream, would be beside the point. Director Hong Sang-soo isn't particularly concerned with dense plots or even the three-act structure. An intensely prolific filmmaker who frequently releases two movies a year (some as short as an hour in length), Hong is interested in realism in its most, well, real form. He has increasingly abandoned heavy planning and pre-production, keeping to brief shooting schedules of often less than three weeks and writing scenes the day of. The end credits are brief and list Hong as doing almost all of the major technical duties. Takes are long, uninterrupted, and unmoving. Seeing Hong do a close-up is like watching Scorsese do the hallway scene in Goodfellas. Many of his films are barely an hour long. By the Stream is close to two, which is his version of a sprawling epic. You're either a devotee or you're asleep. As one attendee of the TIFF screening I went to declared to his friends, 'Well, I'm glad you liked it.'

Hong's films are often variations on the same themes of isolation, connection, and finding purpose through creativity. By the Stream is no exception. It also employs some of his favourite actors from previous films. Kim Min-hee, his most frequent collaborator and his partner, who you might recognize from The Handmaiden, is once again excellent. The New York Times named her one of the best actors of the 21st century based almost exclusively on her work with Hong, and she continues to prove why it was a deserved honour. Her naturalism feels so breezy and spontaneous. She makes it seem so easy when, in uninterrupted takes that last for ten minutes or more, she goes from chatty to introspective to teary. You can completely understand why Hong dedicates such attention to letting Kim do so much with so little.

Brief moments of the autobiographical slip through too. Sieon talks about his wife finally agreeing to divorce after a decade of separation, which is clearly an allusion to Hong's own circumstances (his wife refuses to divorce him so that he can marry Kim, and the revelation of their affair all but killed her career outside of Hong's work.) He's also an artist who has faced blacklisting for his political views and is seen as someone that many critics 'don't get.' Again, it's not subtle.

So yeah, typical Hong, right? It's a film where people live very normal and quiet lives and then, while drinking soju and eating dinner, confess quiet but devastating emotional revelations. What makes By the Stream different from his other works? Not much, but again, that's not the point. It's in those tiny moments where you find yourself lingering. For me, it was one scene where Sieon asks Jeonim's students to share what kind of people they hope to become after graduation, and their emotionally naked confessions made me cry as much as they did. It all feels so truly real, the inevitable endpoint of cinema that wants to recreate as much as possible the truth of our day-to-day existence. That means no splashy monologues, no snappy dialogues, no grand confessions, and no action more kinetic than Jeonim sitting by the stream (title drop) and painting.

There's really no point in trying to convince skeptics or the apathetic into seeing a film like By the Stream. You're either with the cult of Hong, like most major film festivals and their harried critics, or you're not. And he's not especially interested in the mainstream anyway. He's working at his own pace with minuscule budgets and the people he likes, largely Kim Min-hee. Critics who dislike his work often claim that he's not really doing anything, and that they could make films like this if they wanted to. But they couldn't. What Hong does is far harder than it looks. It takes a lot of trust to commit to ten-minute one-shots wherein your actors must run through the gamut of emotions without stopping and make it seem as spontaneous as real life. You need to know what you're doing to avoid the artifice that cinema typically welcomes. Why shouldn't real life, such as it is, be the stuff of filmic art? For the devotees, By the Stream is another strong example of Hong's technique and his variations on his preferred themes. For everyone else, well, you knew you weren't going to like it.

By the Stream had its North American premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It currently does not have a release date.