80
Kim Min-hee, especially, gives another stellar performance.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
Ms. Kim is simultaneously an ordinary woman and a melodramatic heroine, her performance made more layered and intriguing by the intimation that she may be playing herself.
90
Knowing the real-life inspiration for On the Beach at Night Alone may help one appreciate the film’s moral trajectory a bit better. But the movie’s charms work on a much more immediate level, in the way it captures the ever-shifting dynamic between men and women, and the difficulty of matching one’s feelings to one’s words.
75
Hong Sang-soo simultaneously positions filmmaking as the ultimate act of atonement and evasion, eviscerating himself so that he may live to stage several more films about the futility of getting hammered and worshipping and bedding gorgeous young women.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
The story is scarce to non-existent, but Kim Min-hee in the main role keeps the audience awake, waiting for her next socially uncensored outburst of truth.
83
On the Beach at Night Alone is a fascinating sublimation of autobiography into Hong’s precise creative terms, a bittersweet character study as poignant, witty and deceptively slight as much of his work that also refurbishes it with a unique personal dimension.
80
Unfussy in form, open in expression and gentle in reach as its maker revisits such recurring preoccupations as loneliness, regret and the value of love in life and art.
91
whether because of its personal nature, its occasional ferocity, its unusually dark undercurrents, its audacious defiance of expectation and explanation or Kim Min-hee’s essential performance, On The Beach At Night Alone feels like it will be exceptional even for longtime diehard Hong fans.
75
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
It’s also somehow simultaneously one of his (Hong Sang-soo) most straightforward, emotionally direct movies and the weirdest damn thing he’s ever made.
91
The Film Stage by Rory O'Connor
On the Beach at Night Alone, a bittersweet tone poem from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo, thinks many a thought about the universe and the future, mostly expressed through nature and the characters’ anxieties about growing old.