Review of The Novelist’s Film / 소설가의 영화, directed by Hong Sang-soo

At the time of posting this, I’ll have been a film critic officially for two and a half years now, which is wild to me. I was fresh out of college when I landed my current position, which then inspired me to create this blog as a side outlet, as I couldn’t cover every single film I wanted to see.

That said, my first in-person film festival was at the New York Film Festival in 2022, which was such an incredible experience for me.

I spent the week in New York, which is pretty common for me to begin with, as my theater work is there, and then I would go to Lincoln Center for the screenings I wanted to see.

That kind of coverage was really cool for me, and The Novelist’s Film was one of the movies I saw that year. In 2024, right at the beginning, I kept thinking about this movie again.

I’ve seen quite a few Hong Sang-soo movies throughout the years, but this is one of the ones that has really stuck with me.

So when I saw it was available to watch for free through my library’s Kanopy account/subscription, I decided to sit down and rewatch the movie for the first time in awhile. And I think it did age well for me.

Let’s get into the review!

A slice of life in the perspective of a novelist and dwelling on the notions of writer’s block.

The movie begins with the novelist, Jun-hee, coming out of her way from Seoul to visit a cafe run by her friend.

The friend lives in a small commuter town that could be considered a satellite of Seoul, and she has a cozy little bookstore and cafe situation within the town. However the friend, named Se-won, doesn’t know that Jun-hee is coming to visit her.

She’s caught off guard when she sees Jun-hee sitting in front of her, but invites her in anyways. We learn that the two of them haven’t seen each other in years, and have actually been estranged.

As they sit down for a cute little coffee moment together, their story comes to light. Se-won once lived in Seoul herself, but left Jun-hee behind. She, too, was a writer, but decided she wanted to read books, and only the ones she really wanted to read.

There’s not a moment where we learn why exactly they fall out of touch, and even Jun-hee seems to lose interest in the conversation about halfway through. She watches the assistant of the store instead, and eventually she says her goodbyes and decides to wander the town.

She comes across this big park, and at a lookout tower, she actually runs into someone she knows: Hyo-jin. Seems like everyone is in this small, random town. Hyo-jin is a filmmaker with quite a bit of prestige, but they have history together: the filmmaker wanted to make an adaptation of one of Jun-hee’s novels.

It never happened, and Jun-hee seems to have some resentment because of it. They continue walking through the nature and greenery, where they run into the actress Kil-soo. Jun-hee and Kil-soo hit it off, and they leave behind a disgruntled Hyo-jin.

They go to ramen together, and discuss Jun-hee going into directing and making her own movie. We do end up seeing a portion of the short film, which means that Kil-soo and Jun-hee decided to go for it, but it’s quite artistic. Like a Hong Sang-soo movie tends to do, this film goes full circle, too.

Overall Thoughts

I think this is quite the standard Hong Sang-soo movie, although it isn’t as clear where the lines between fiction and reality are in this movie. He has a tendency to insert a character like himself into the narrative, which makes this a bit more interesting to analyze.

But that means there are a lot of dialogue conversations about the merits of arts, its blocking, and the fact that some things just don’t happen in the creative world. We see some of that edge when we meet the filmmaker, who abandoned Jun-hee for other projects.

Regardless, I think there’s a lot to learn in the black and white of this film—I thought that it was filmed quite beautifully, and that’s quite hard to do in this medium.

I also think there are some solid conversations about artistry, but, again, that’s like many of Hong’s other movies. This isn’t unique in that regard, but I thought that this movie was particularly standing out in his filmography for me because of the beauty of the black and white and conversations.

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