Few directors work as hard as Hong Sang-soo, at least not in terms of the sheer volume of output they provide. It has become almost a tradition for adherents of arthouse cinema to playfully refer to the director’s tendency towards constantly being producing work, and he seems to perpetually be in a state of creating his next film (if not several at almost the exact same time). However, unlike other notoriously prolific filmmakers, Hong has proven himself to be an absolute master of his craft with every film – it’s difficult to find a single one of his works that is not somehow meaningful and interesting in some way, as well as possessing an astonishing amount of artistic merit. He is the rare instance of a director who is able to balance both quality and quantity, which has led him to become one of the most celebrated writers and filmmakers from his native South Korea, whose national cinema he has helped guide to staggering heights, all through his penchant for the most simple but touching films imaginable. This brings us to Introduction (Korean: 인트로덕션), a story of a young man drifting through life over the course of an indeterminable period of time, in which he finds a lot of change occurring around him, which begins to unsettle him as he realizes that the small adjustments become major differences in his previously well-ordered life. Hong has a gift for telling incredibly human stories, and Introduction represents yet another peak for the esteemed director, whose vision has never been more potent.

However, as much as Hong may be a dominant force in contemporary arthouse cinema, for every devotee that praises his work, there will be a detractor that will mention how he is supposedly recycling the same ideas through each one of his films, which are produced quickly and cheaply. At a quick glance, it does seem like a lot of his work treads similar narrative territory, and they often do follow a familiar structure, which is primarily the reason why a lot of his critics seem to have a vendetta against his status as a master of his craft. However, a deeper look reveals exactly how different each individual film is, and Introduction is one of the most potent examples of how he takes the familiar structure, and uses it in increasingly creative, meaningful ways. This film touches on issues much more complex than we’d expect at the outset, which he carefully unpacks through the course of a few scenes, almost all of which are conversations between characters as they engage in the unique blend of existential pondering that is so distinctive of Hong’s work. It’s not particularly extravagant filmmaking (and one can understand why some viewers regard his work as trivial – they’re exceptionally simple and straightforward, taking place in limited spaces), but where it lacks visual flair, it makes up for in terms of the narrative details, which wield an abundance of meaning, which the director carefully and deliberately deconstructs in an effort to get to the deeper meaning that lurks beneath his film.

One of the most captivating qualities of Introduction is how this is a film that is a lot more complex in practice than it seems in theory. Like much of Hong’s work, the film depends on a very clear sense of direction in terms of how it is structured. Formed as a series of chapters in the life of the main character as he travels between Seoul and Berlin, the film is as much about the elisions as it is the inclusions, the narrative drawing on the audience’s constant tendency to create our own conclusions through being presented with incomplete information, and being able to extrapolate meaning from the more paltry, bare-boned version of the world Hong is so invested in exploring. Introduction is a film, like the title suggests, built on the idea of introductions being more important than anything else – we’ve all heard the adage that we only get one chance at a first impression, and while this film is not simply a series of moments in which the protagonist is being introduced to people, it’s the starting point for a thrilling and captivating drama about a man undergoing a journey of self-realization. He meets some people for the first time (and undergoes the traditional process of making an introduction), but it’s in the more abstract ideas that the film really comes into its own – for example, we have him coming to terms with the introduction to his father’s likely death, which starts the film, and his mother’s new relationship with a stranger, which ends it – and in between these two broad conversations on mortality, Hong finds the space to carefully plumb the emotional depths of a series of moments that don’t mean all that much on their own, but come to earn a much more significant meaning when placed alongside each other.

Introduction is a film about a young man in transit, both literally and metaphorically. Youngho, played by the incredible Shin Seokho (who had his debut under Hong’s guidance two years ago in The Woman Who Ran), is a fascinating character – he is constructed with enough ambiguity for any viewer to find some resonance in his journey, but he is also created in adherence to Hong’s usual pattern of writing his protagonists. He is of vague background, with very little information given to us at the start, with our experience of the film being almost entirely about trying to decode who this young man is, and what he represents as a whole. There is always a deeper meaning to Hong’s films, and focusing on one character as they navigate the world, coming to terms with their surroundings and trying to understand why they have been placed in this particular position, has always been one of his most fundamental strengths, and which is beautifully captured here. Taking place in Seoul (as most of his films do), but also having a lengthy sequence in Berlin, allows Hong the chance to both showcase his reliability as an artist, as well as his ability to try something new, which is often what he does when making slightly more experimental works. The use of the idea of a character constantly in some kind of transit is used extremely well, and we start to see the various fragments of his life coming together in a beautiful and significant way as the film progresses and becomes more invested in exploring his journey and showing the various diverging paths presented to him along the way.

Over the course of just over an hour, Hong introduces us to a range of deeply intriguing concepts, which are woven together into this mesmerizing series of moments in the life of a young man searching for meaning in a world that seemingly lacks it, or at least in a way that makes sense to him as a young person navigating the perils of early adulthood, while being keenly aware of the harsh reality that awaits him later on, as evident by his conversations with older characters, who show him a different side of life. Hong’s films are often described as acquired tastes – they’re deliberately paced and often quite slow, but in a way that is engrossing rather than uninteresting (since he’s working from a set of inspirations drawn from social realism), and the narratives can sometimes be quite opaque, leading us to simply take a chance on the film, rather than being drawn to it by a premise that rarely, if ever, tells us anything at all about the film as a whole, but rather serves to be a starting point for the overall narrative, which really only becomes clear in the later stages of the film. It may not be the best text for newcomers to the director, but those who have some experience with the director and his work will find Introduction to be a tremendously poignant and powerful character study, and the exact kind of subtle, nuanced drama we have come to expect and appreciate from the director.