It is the dead of winter and a poet invites his sons to join him at a hotel for a reunion. The hotel also hosts a newly single woman who has a friend keep her company and with whom she shares a room, strolls and conversations. The poet is drawn to the beautiful girls and cannot resist the temptation to discover more. Their lives intersect, connect and disconnect and potentially become a metaphor for modern life.... (Full plot summary below)
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It is the dead of winter and a poet invites his sons to join him at a hotel for a reunion. The hotel also hosts a newly single woman who has a friend keep her company and with whom she shares a room, strolls and conversations. The poet is drawn to the beautiful girls and cannot resist the temptation to discover more. Their lives intersect, connect and disconnect and potentially become a metaphor for modern life.
Leave your thoughts about Hotel by the River.
| Slant MagazineChuck BowenA story of a poet, Hotel by the River comes to resemble a poetry collection itself, abounding in emotional currents and grace notes that are bracingly allowed to hang, free of reductive explication. |
| Cinema ScopeJordan CronkHong's latest confirms a nascent sorrow in this increasingly complicated director's work. The results are troubling, touching, and never less than beautiful. |
| VarietyGuy LodgeAs a forlorn kind of hangout movie, then, Hotel by the Sea proceeds at a pleasing shuffle, spiked with bittersweet humor and even a gentle, surprising hint of sentimentality. |
| Screen InternationalAllan HunterThe forlorn feel of Hotel By The River becomes increasingly endearing, and there is a strain of bone dry humour that lightens the mood. |
| The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyBut despite its wry tone, the movie offers, in the character of Young-hwan, one of the filmmaker’s more caustic artist stand-ins. The aging sadsack poet can’t see anything outside of himself. |
| RogerEbert.comGlenn KennySuch is the nature of this movie. It’s like a series of charcoal sketches with marginalia; there are unexpected mini-flashbacks, and even a visualization of a poem. Hong’s free style isn’t showy; there’s a stillness holding the film together at all times. |
| Battleship PretensionScott NyeIt can be tempting, even from the outset, to read this hotel, this winter, these people, as a sort of purgatory. But wherever they are, these five have managed to remind themselves of love. |
| The PlaylistJoe BlessingCombined with a narrative with a more defined ending, this darker tone suits Sang-soo’s minor-key ruminations, injecting more tension and pathos into his trademark conversations. |
| Austin ChronicleJosh KupeckiThe director is notorious for not having a working script, writing the day’s scenes the morning of, and improvising at any given moment. The internet tells me that this film was shot in two weeks, and while Hong’s off-the-cuff style seems restless at times, it coagulates like a small scab that never quite stops itching. |
| The New York TimesBen KenigsbergHotel by the River is — surprisingly, from the standpoint of a skeptic — one of Hong’s most unexpectedly poignant works, self-reflexive in a way that feels searching rather than rote. |
