Winter’s Night

Due to unexpected incidents, a Korean couple is forced to stay one more night in their weekend destination, in the north of the country. Thirty years before they visited that same place as two young lovers, but now they face these extra hours being in a tired love that cracks like ice. The Korean director Jang Woo-Jing uses the nocturnal atmosphere to transform the expressiveness of the landscape and its sounds, infusing them with a magical, unreal aura. That night the past and present times seem to dissolve so that wife and husband find their personal mirror and can reevaluate the way they have walked. At some point, Hong Sang-soo may pop up in our minds because the presence of soju but the reflection on the emotional cracks caused by the passage of time would dialog well enough with Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010), although here the melancholy has a delicate trace of winter and night. ANDREA MORÁN