‘The Day She Returns’ review: Hong Sangsoo’s slight, ponderous character study stars Song Sunmi

Dir/scr: Hong Sangsoo. South Korea. 2026. 84mins

A middle-aged retired actress (Song Sunmi) has ventured back in front of the camera after 12 years to star in an independent film. To promote it, she gamely agrees to three interviews; once they are concluded, she takes an acting class in which she re-enacts the conversations. The latest from festival favourite Hong Sangsoo, The Day She Returns is an archetypal Hong picture: an occasionally droll, slow-burning, black and white exercise that subtly shifts our perspectives on each encounter. Lacking the scope and more overt comic aspects of some of his previous pictures, this could be a tough sell.

 Loses what steam it had once we get to the final two chapters

While each new Hong production seems to be guaranteed a premiere in one of the notable European festivals (he is a Berlin and Cannes regular), this is a modest picture even by the director’s unassuming standards. Themes include filmmaking, aging, relationship breakdown and, naturally, drinking. The fact that the film bows in Berlin’s Panorama rather than the Competition slots secured by What Does That Nature Say To You (2025) and A Travellers Needs (2024) is unlikely to hurt the picture’s festival journey going forward, but it may indicate a film better suited to a streaming rather than a theatrical release.

Like most of Hong’s projects, this picture seems to be in conversation with his other films. The title is reminiscent of The Day He Arrives (which also featured Song Sunmi in a key role); the structure has a distant kinship with Right Now, Wrong Then. And a central character who inhabits the world of filmmaking is part of a thematic through line which links the majority of his cinematic oeuvre.

Hong regular Song Sunmi doesn’t just carry this picture, she arguably IS the picture. Employing his trademark long takes and static locked shots, Hong positions the camera so that her character is more or less in the centre of the frame at all times. Her three interviewers, all younger women, sit facing her across the table of her favourite Korean-German restaurant, their faces obscured from the camera. It’s a polite, undemonstrative performance, but Song is fascinating, giving us glimpses of the layers of a life that she would prefer to keep hidden. The actress, the film suggests, doesn’t stop performing when she is no longer on the film set. 

The picture is divided into five chapters, punctuated by shots of the actress vaping, crouched by a hedge and out of sight of her public, and by plinky-plonky ukulele musical interludes. Along with the producing, cinematography, editing and screenwriting, director Hong also provides his own score.

The interviews themselves tend to reveal more about the journalists than the actress; it’s hard to imagine that they would result in anything other than the most threadbare copy. When she does open up – the conversation flows once she persuades one of the women to join her in ordering a draft German beer – the actress delivers a couple of bombshells, including details on her reasons for divorcing her husband. But she calls the journalist later to ask her not to use the material dealing with her ex-husband, or her observation that “people are not so nice”. 

While the interviews are largely quite banal, thanks to Song’s expressive performance, they are intriguing. But the picture loses what steam it had once we get to the final two chapters, where the actress is required to transcribe what she remembers of the conversations, memorise them and then perform them for her acting coach. The recreations of the interviews are faltering and uncertain; in this case, the device of repetition reveals very little of substance about the actress or her life.