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Korea Herald

Review: 'Spring Night' a drink-soaked exercise in aesthetic masochism

Kang Mi-ja's return after 17 years drowns in its own formal experiment, mistaking symptoms for substance If alcoholism is a pathology that corrodes the soul with insidious inevitability, "Spring Night" -- director Kang Mi-ja's second feature after a 17-year hiatus -- is cinema's manifestation of that harrowing condition, in both form and content. Fresh from its run at the Berlinale's Forum section earlier this year, this 67-minute exercise embodies the endless cycle of addiction down to its very bones. Rarely does a film mirror its subject matter with such uncanny fidelity, but the effect proves decidedly less than the sum of its meticulously damaged parts. Kang introduces her characters with an economy that borders on the clinical — fitting for a work that clocks in at barely over an hour. We meet the mild-mannered Su-hwan (Kim Seol-jin) at a wedding afterparty, where the camera holds its ground with documentary-like detachment. Things shift when Yeong-gyeong (Han Ye-ri) enters the frame, consumed by a deeply private trauma that spills out in every gesture. She pounds back soju among unconscious guests before Su-hwan — the sole conscious survivor — carries her home on his back, as she whispers fragments of Kim Su-young's poem "Spring Night" into the darkness. Their subsequent meetings unfold through halting dialogues over drinks, revealing kindred wounds: Yeong-gyeong, a former schoolteacher reeling from a bitter divorce and lost custody; Su-hwan, laid low by crippling arthritis. They bond over shared misery and decide to merge their damaged lives under one roof. Time becomes elastic, uncertain; we soon glimpse the couple, after some indeterminate stretch, deteriorating in a nursing home — Su-hwan wheelchair-bound, Yeong-gyeong's addiction now a full-blown dysfunction. She signs out repeatedly, promising to return the next day, only to break that promise in favor of another binge as Su-hwan waits outside in vain. The camera documents this decline with unflinching patience until a surreal finale suggests the inevitable separation has arrived. There's a sticky, all-consuming sense of lethargy and aimlessness permeating this narrative arc, and that seems precisely the point. The film at times channels aspects of Hong Sang-soo's uneventful cinema but strips away even the minimal gestures toward meaning or resolution. Every stylistic choice here seems reverse-engineered to produce the debilitating symptoms of alcoholism itself. The elliptical structure mirrors the consciousness of a drunk: abrupt cuts to darkness punctuate not just transitions but ongoing scenes, as if consciousness itself keeps shorting out. The opening sequence, where Su-hwan carries the drunk Yeong-gyeong home, repeats twice in succession — a disorienting gimmick that suggests those harsh loops of addiction. Meanwhile, the static camera, stuck at the same height and position, captures everything with equal gravity like an empty gaze: devastating stumbles and wails receive the same visual weight as workers moving furniture through hospital corridors. This flattening of affect through formal restraint becomes the film's primary language, turning viewers into detached observers of endless self-destruction. So what are we to make of this total convergence between form and pathology? As an artistic experiment, "Spring Night" may have its own merits. But in terms of what the director wants to communicate, its emotional core — that desperate passion and love supposedly binding these lost souls — remains criminally underdeveloped, actively undercut by the film's masochistic commitment to its own deterioration. This aestheticization of symptoms, this transformation of cinema into disease as we might say, yields a fragmented conceptual exercise that fails to meet the basic expectations of coherence or emotional totality. Despite the film's commitment to capturing raw, unvarnished despair, its narrative foundations prove rather banal: The romantic betrayal, financial hardship and terminal illness plaguing the two leads are the stuff of countless melodramas. Not that such troubles can't be heartbreaking, but the film presents them in such a way that makes them seem generic, contrived even. The chief culprit here is the curious reliance on dialogue to deliver the backstory — meandering, expository lines that sound lifted directly from the original short story without the necessary adaptations. Their literary heaviness, utterly at odds with the film's otherwise brutal minimalism and bare-bones visual approach, leaves viewers with no real emotional currency to invest in the characters or their plights. One might argue that's the whole point: a film that self-reflexively undercuts its own coherence, so invested in representing trauma and addiction that it becomes indistinguishable from their worst bits. But whether it's aiming for clever metafiction or just floundering in artistic overreach, the result is a punishing viewing experience with little sense of purpose. What value lies in watching a film engaging in thematic sabotage? Why should viewers invest in a documentation of self-destruction devoid of any social or cultural specificity? What does it contribute to our understanding of human experience beyond its own misery? Perhaps the film's saving grace lies in Han Ye-ri's performance. Fresh from her breakout in "Minari," she throws herself into this difficult role with stunning commitment — stumbling, wailing, collapsing, weeping without warning or reason, often all at once. Her background in modern Korean dance may help explain the visceral physicality she brings to these expressions of grief. One prolonged scene where the ailing couple crawls across the ground to embrace each other carries genuine power through sheer bodily eloquence. It's a shame that Han's tour-de-force job gets reduced to something between a freak show and an endurance test, stripped of the broader context that might make it meaningful rather than merely unsettling. "Don't be ambitious, don't hurry, like light fallen on the river" whispers Yeong-gyeong, reciting Kim Su-young's verse that gives the film its title and central motif. Kim Su-young, a modernist voice from Korea's tumultuous 1950s and '60s, wrote from the rubble of a war-torn nation. A raging alcoholic himself, his work pulsed with barely contained fury and anguish, regardless of subject — from nocturnal musings to political rage. His wasn't poetry of pristine beauty; it was raw, unrefined, often an incoherent jumble of high literary language and street-level vulgarity. Appropriating Kim's poem suggests a parallel, perhaps even an aspiration to similar heights, but the crucial difference lies in context. The poet's seemingly personal despairs always carried social and political weight — a society in shambles, a country in ruins, a democracy stillborn. Whether yearning for an elusive dawn in "Spring Night" or confronting his cowardice with the defiant promise of resilience in "Grass," Kim fused the personal with the political in ways that still resonate today. That fusion gave his work its enduring power. It's unclear whether Kang Mi-ja intended her film as homage to Kim's aesthetic of disorder. But for a work that offers so little beyond flickering outbursts of anguish, perhaps a more fitting touchstone would be those famous lines from "Macbeth": "Life is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing."