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Korea · 2020
1h 17m
Director Hong Sang-soo
Starring Kim Min-hee, Seo Young-hwa, Song Seon-mi, Kim Sae-byuk
Genre Drama
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When her husband goes away on business for their first time in their five-year marriage, a woman copes with solitude and visits her friends. In reconnecting with her old friends, she begins to ruminate over marriage, closeness, and the shape of each relationship in her life.
Foregoing the knotty male-female relationships (and soju bottles) of recent work, Hong examines instead the textures of female relationships and what independence might look and feel like for women entering a new, more mature stage of life—and how a short trip out of one’s comfort zone might generate bounties of food for thought.
The Woman Who Ran is ultimately a minor doodle, even by Hong’s standards; it lacks the games of nonlinear structure, cognitive dissonance, or lightly surrealist Groundhog Day cycles that mark his best work. But the film has its moments, too, most of them concerned with the way social propriety affects communication.
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
Hong, who handled screenplay as well as directorial, editing and scoring duties, is in fine form here.
Hong Sang-soo invests the ironic, despairing theme of the film with humor and empathy—an empathy that he suggests he cannot extend to the women of his life.
The movie has a loose, almost amateurish quality to its production that suggests another rush job from a filmmaker unwilling or unable to slow down. But the movie reveals its deeper layers with time, congealing into a perceptive and often charming bite-sized study of smart women contending with a series of annoying men.
In The Woman Who Ran, Hong lets go of all vanity and gives Kim a well-deserved spotlight. With Kim’s rueful performance, and the film’s roaming, Eric Rohmer-like sensibilities, The Woman Who Ran allows itself to take solace in serenity and not worry so much about the would haves and could haves.
This deceptively offhand vibe requires the actresses to project effortless naturalism, and they all deliver.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Watching this film means recalibrating your expectations so you can gauge the subtleties and absorb the sotto voce implications about relationships and sexual politics. Pretty much all the way through, nothing very sensational seems to be happening. And yet the movie’s sensational meaning is hiding in plain sight: in the title.
The Film Stage by Rory O'Connor
Woman Who Ran looks and feels like a pleasant farce in comparison to much of Hong’s recent output.
Although perhaps on the enigmatic end of the Hong spectrum, The Woman Who Ran touches rewardingly on themes such as relationship dynamics and gender roles. The delicacy of the predominantly female-driven storytelling is unassuming but beguiling. And Hong goes so far as to skewer his own tendency to indulge monologuing windbag male characters in previous films.
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