THE STORY – When a young woman brings her longtime idealist boyfriend home to meet her parents, his respectful, ingratiating façade begins to crack when her parents question him about his own successful father.
THE CAST – Ha Seong-guk, Kang So-yi, Kwon Hae-hyo, Park Mi-so & Cho Yun-hee
THE TEAM – Hong Sang-soo (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 108 Minutes
In an industry where top filmmakers can take up to a decade between films, consider one of South Korea’s major auteurs, Hong Sang-soo. No slacker he, Hong has become one of the most prolific filmmakers in the world, directing 31 feature films in the last quarter century. From 2021 through 2024, he released two features each year to enormous acclaim, all of which were selected to screen at the New York Film Festival. This year, Hong seems to have slacked off (if you can call it that) by releasing only one film, but he made that one count. “What Does That Nature Say to You” stands as one of his most entertaining efforts in years.
The generational comedy has been described in several quarters as Hong’s version of “Meet the Parents,” and, minus the slapstick of that Ben Stiller film, that logline is not too far afield, even if it is a Hong Sang-soo film. Both films tap into that primal fear that hits a couple contemplating marriage when they realize they’re also marrying into a family. In the case of Hong’s protagonist, shy poet Ha Dong-hwa (Ha Seong-guk), that realization hits especially hard.
As Dong-hwa drops off his longtime girlfriend, Kim Jun-hee (Kang So-yi), at her parents’ home, she seems hesitant to ask him inside. Finally convinced that her parents are not home, she invites him in, only to run into her father, Oryeong (veteran Hong actor Kwon Hae-hyo). Oryeong, a bit of a car nut, is instantly taken with Dong-hwa’s beat-up ’96 Kia and marvels at its fabulous cassette deck, taking the jalopy out for a quick spin himself. He then offers to show Dong-hwa the family garden, and as the two men bond over a smoke, he notes that his wife, Sun-hee (Cho Yun-hee), who will be joining them later, is also a poet. The patriarch observes that Dong-hwa might be as good a match for his daughter as Sun-hee is for him, a promising sign, Dong-hwa thinks.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Jun-hee chats with her older sister, Neung-hee (Park Mi-so), who is suffering from depression so severe that she has moved back in with her parents and spends her days in her room doing little more than playing her traditional Korean gayageum. Anxious to raise Neung-hee’s spirits, Oryeong suggests (or rather, orders) that Dong-hwa and Jun-hee take her out to lunch.
For those unfamiliar with Hong’s work, it should be noted that mealtime in his films is prime time for drama, and his favorite setting for revealing a film’s themes. When a character sits down to eat, that’s when you should sit up and pay attention. Don’t expect any table-flipping theatrics; each character is usually well-mannered, with courtesy as the watchword. But there’s always one person who twists the knife just a bit, and at this lunch, that person is Neung-hee.
As Dong-hwa prattles on about the joys of being a free spirit and of not wanting material goods beyond what he needs, Neung-hee keeps needling him about his wealthy father, a powerful man in Seoul who commands enormous respect and whom she assumes would bail out his son. Dong-hwa is quietly furious at the very insinuation but knows he must keep his cool during the real test: dinner with the parents later that evening.
Hong stages his climax as simply as possible: a chicken dinner with the family. Dong-hwa’s self-control holds at first, but as the whiskey begins to flow and Neung-hee resumes her needling, his tongue loosens, even as he realizes that his chances of marrying Jun-hee may be slipping away. When it becomes clear to the parents that Dong-hwa can’t hold his liquor, they also begin to question whether he can provide the kind of life their daughter deserves.
One of Hong’s greatest strengths as a filmmaker is his refusal to judge his characters. In any other film, Neung-hee’s behavior might make her the villain, but Hong presents her instead as a loyal sister trying to protect Jun-hee from what she believes is a mistake. And Dong-hwa, even after being exposed as something of a poser, is given an open-ended fate, suggesting that there may still be hope for a life with Jun-hee yet.
One less-than-welcome element of Hong’s filmmaking, however, is his predilection for shooting in a low-resolution format, with several sequences out of focus. Here, those scenes are justified by showing us the world as Dong-hwa sees it when he’s not wearing his glasses. Still, it’s an annoying quirk, though we should be grateful that those sequences are brief and not filmed like 2023’s “In Water,” in which the entire movie was shot out of focus.
Though a few critics still grumble about Hong’s perceived lack of compelling mise en scène, given his preference for staging scenes as single-take conversations, his naturalistic dialogue is so clever, and his casts deliver it with such subtlety and precision, that it’s a testament to a director in complete command of his craft. With “What Does That Nature Say to You,” Hong has at last achieved a comfortable balance between exploring his familiar themes of the artistic process and familial relationships while never losing sight of entertaining his audience. That final achievement is key to why this dramatic comedy feels like a breakthrough for him; unexpected, yet very welcome.
