Seventeen years after her debut feature Let the Blue River Run, Korean director Kang Mi-Ja returns with this devastating tale of love and addiction, adapted from Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel. The film’s lo-fi aesthetics – unvarnished digital cinematography, minimally edited static shots – strips the already compact narrative down to pure, elemental passions. After a chance encounter at a wedding party, lonelyhearts Su-hwan (Kim Seol-jin) and Yeong-gyeong (Han Ye-ri Minari) cling on to each other for emotional shelter, their connection simultaneously fuelled and imperilled by the latter’s debilitating alcoholism.
The shared baggage of romantic betrayals and financial uncertainty is revealed rather swiftly in a rare dialogue-heavy scene; the rest of the film prioritises body language over words. After this hasty introduction, to ask viewers to immediately plunge into the depths of the characters’ sufferings is quite a demanding request. And yet the extraordinary performances from the lead actors, along with Kang’s eye for framing, beautifully fill out the missing gaps. The world around the couple is a void of indifference, filled with nondescript apartment buildings and forlorn bars. Together, these outsiders soften the harsh edges of city life; trained in dance, Kim Seol-jin and Han Ye-ri imbue their every gesture with a stunning physicality. A recurring composition of the doomed lovers locked in a nurturing embrace grows overwhelmingly moving with each episode, as external forces pull the pair apart.
Channelling Yeong-gyeong’s drunken blackouts, the elliptical structure of Spring Night conveys how misfortunes can arrive quietly, then all at once. But for such a melancholic plot, the film never veers into miserabilism. Instead of fetishising sorrow and despair, Kang grounds the atmosphere of hopelessness in concrete visual details that are decidedly unsentimental. This is not a sob story, but a slice of reality.
• Spring Night is at the ICA, London, from 23 May.
