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Korea · 2015
2h 1m
Director Hong Sang-soo
Starring Jung Jae-young, Kim Min-hee, Youn Yuh-jung, Ki Joo-bong
Genre Drama, Romance
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A film director arrives a day early to a town that is screening one of his films. After stopping by an old restored palace, he meets a young woman, and goes to a coffee shop with her. They fall in love fast, and spend a drunken night together, as the day seemingly begins to start again.
In building a mystery, comedy, romance, occasional melodrama, and even a study of the artist’s foolishness that defies expectations well after we’re familiar with its brilliant conceit, Hong has yet again proven the vitality of his voice. At this point, it seems unlikely he’ll ever make a bad film.
Consequence of Sound by Blake Goble
The way Right Now, Wrong Then yields different results, moods, and beats as the result of minor shake-ups in the opening scenes is beyond fascinating, often charming, and at times amusingly uncomfortable.
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
Taken separately, these two medium-length works would be diverting but also rather minor Hong, with their typical dry humor and observations about life and love. But taken as a single, 120-minute work, the small differences in the dialogue and attitudes of parts one and two reveal nothing less than the humanity, inner life and subconscious decision-making processes of the characters, turning the whole into one of Hong’s strongest features to date.
Right Now, Wrong Then is a film of minute observations rather than grand revelations, less concerned with butterfly-effect consequentiality than the variable human foibles that can turn a bad day into a good one.
Slant Magazine by James Lattimer
Spotting and processing the countless differences between the parts offers pleasures on various levels.
The Playlist by Kenji Fujishima
Hong’s two-part structure in Right Now, Wrong Then, instead of just being a cute formal trick, reveals a character’s troubled inner life in fiendishly clever ways.
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Right Now, Wrong Then — which won the top prize at 2015’s Locarno Film Festival, and is heroically being released by brand-new distributor Grasshopper Film — is not only his finest work to date but also the very best film released in 2016 so far.
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life, about foregrounded action and the weight of personal history. Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience. Hong’s narrative gamesmanship reveals agonized regret.
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
No director working today can carry out this kind of heavyweight emotional excavation with such feather-light flicks of his trowel. That’s Hong’s gift, as counterintuitive as it is unique: he makes molehills out of mountains.
Screen International by Wendy Ide
There’s an element of playfulness here – Hong challenges us to identify the subtle shifts in emphasis and interplay between the two versions of the story. The narrative expands into an intricate game of spot the difference.
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