The season’s best romantic comedy has finally landed stateside, although it’s been making the rounds on the festival circuit for a year now. Fortunately, it was well worth the wait: Hong Sang-soo’s 33rd feature and his funniest ensemble of the decade so far, What Does That Nature Say to You, takes some of the genre’s most familiar tropes and gives them the sort of spin only Hong could pull off. (Who else could make a straightforward narrative feel so fresh without any of the typical experimentation or structural mold-breaking?)
We find ourselves in the car with Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk) and his girlfriend, Jun-hee (Kang So-yi), parked outside her parents’ house following a drive in from Seoul. After watching Jun-hee’s mom (Cho Yun-hee) drive off, Donghwa is tempted to take a look at the place – a beautiful mountainside home custom-designed by her dad (Kwon Hae-hyo), whom Jun-hee assumes is away. As they pull into the driveway, they discover that she was wrong: The coast wasn’t clear. Her dad wasn’t elsewhere on the sprawling property, he’s just … right there, standing outside the house, happy to see his daughter and curious about her new companion. Before Donghwa can get away – it’s still a little early in the relationship for this sort of thing – he’s roped into dinner with Jun-hee, her parents, and her younger sister (Park Mi-so). From there, it’s only a matter of time before the drinks start flowing.
From that first encounter with Donghwa, Jun-hee, and her father, Hong walks the tightrope between Hallmark’s annual “Spring into Love” programming and a psychological thriller about the limits of kindness toward strangers in the fashion of Funny Games (1997; 2007) or Speak No Evil (2022; 2024). Those acquainted with the director’s work know this is definitely overselling it — his films are much, much more leisurely (not to mention subtle) than either end of such an extreme spectrum — but the point remains: It’s as lovely as it is uncomfortable.
What Does That Nature Say to You feels like as good an entry point as any into Hong’s staggering body of work, a blueprint that lays out everything the audience needs to know to properly navigate all thirty-something other features (and counting). Here’s what makes him laugh, here’s what he thinks is sweet, here’s how he feels about family, about art, about relationships, about alcohol, bibimbap, even old cars. If any of it strikes a chord, try another. And another. And another. Before you know it, you’ll be anxiously awaiting the 34th feature with the rest of the Hong hive.
Here is a filmmaker who has always been notorious for self-inserting, injecting his real-world problems into the lives of his on-screen characters, but there’s a different modus operandi at work here. Hong is not making another movie about making movies or teaching college courses, great as those examples might be. This is a film about a millennial introducing her partner to her parents, a well-trodden setup that, on paper, couldn’t be further removed from the experiences of the 65-year-old who made it. Yet, somehow, it still feels as personal as if it’d just happened to him. It’s evident in the uncynical way he portrays every member of the impromptu gathering: the young couple, the older parents, the little sister in the middle. Hong finds the heart (and the humor) in it all.
What Does That Nature Say to You screens nightly at 7:00 p.m. on Mar. 13 – 15 at the Webster University Film Series.
