It is night and two strangers meet; but any resemblance to any syrupy romantic song ends there. Filmmaker Kang Mi-ja, in her second feature film after her debut, Let the Blue River Run (2008), no less than 16 years ago, plunges us into an aching universe, where alcoholic Yeong-gyeong (played with rawness by Han Ye-ri) and rheumatoid arthritis sufferer Su-hwan (a brittle and restrained Kim Seol-jin) barely survive. Both have lost everything and are clinging to a relationship defined by the director herself as “miserable love”. Both need each other, and therefore love each other in their own peculiar way, but are unable to stop each other from falling into the void. Kang portrays lives that are stripped down, victims of society, but also of their own shortcomings, and to this end she creates a film that is equally stripped down. To do so, he uses a synthetic narrative, free of all distracting elements, focused on a few characters, actions and settings. The result is a film that transpires both stillness and heartbreak, that seeks to understand its characters without pitying them, and that knows how to present lacerating realities without gloating or moralising. With an almost somnambulistic style, blurred between abstraction and hyperrealism, Spring Night –one of the gems of the last Berlinale Forum– immerses us in one of those rare stories of “shattered” love, borderline, that scorch the eye and, perhaps, warm the heart. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH GONZÁLEZ