Locarno Review: Nowhere to Lay My Eyes Finds a Reenergized Hong Sangsoo

Hong Sangsoo’s Nowhere to Lay My Eyes is, as his fans like to say, “a good Hong.” Now 35 features into his famously prolific career, that “good” can sometimes ring like faint praise, but Nowhere to Lay My Eyes feels like more than just a break from the norm. It’s funny and in-focus, neither of which have been guarantees of late, and features a now-somewhat-rare lead performance from Kim Min-hee, an actress whose presence has always made his work more vibrant and less prone to spells of gloominess and self-pity—though those Hongs can be good sometimes, too.

Case in point, the opening scene wherein Kim’s character, Sang-hee, and her brother (Shin Seok-ho) arrive on the island of Jeju to her mother (Choi Myung-gil) and stepfather’s house (Kwon Hae-hyo), only for the stepfather (a director, no less) to face-plant off a garden step the moment he appears. We soon learn that Sang-hee was raised by her grandparents on the mainland and this is the first time she’s seen her mother in ten years, and the first that she’s met this man at all. Let’s just say it sets the tone.

All four actors are regulars, but Kwon’s presence in particular should alert certain viewers to the kind of Hong that Nowhere to Lay My Eyes is. Since starring alongside Isabelle Huppert in 2012’s In Another Country, Kwon has essentially been on retainer. The typical Kwon role is a moderately successful creative type (usually a stand-in for the director himself), so to see Hong cut his character down to size so early says all you need to know about the vibe here.

The central character is of course Kim’s Sang-hee—a 40-something who works for a company that imports “foreign snacks” (ha!) but also, as she awkwardly explains to her bewildered mother, makes experimental films aesthetically similar to the short at the end of Hong’s The Novelist’s Film. Sang-hee likes to capture quotidian moments on a handheld digital camera; she’s also modest enough to post them directly to YouTube soon after. Kwon’s character, by comparison, has just finished a project that required him to shoot for ten years and has now moved on, God help him, to a movie about a grass tomb. No points for guessing which of their two artistic approaches the director is more sympathetic toward.

One of the best descriptions of Hong’s work I’ve encountered compared the Korean master to the kind of painter who will spends years capturing the same landscape again and again: sometimes these turn out to be sketches or doodles, but occasionally, as in the case of Nowhere (which still only clocks in at 72 minutes), the same elements meld into something more. At around the halfway point, Sang-hee meets her stepsister, who is also an artist and explains that she likes to work slowly and through repetition. In narration, Sang-hee admits to finding her a little creepy, and there’s a clear layer of jealousy toward her close relationship with their mother, but the film allows for plenty of warmth and artistic solidarity between them.

This is also a “good Hong” for the simple fact that it looks crisp, bright, and clean, with plenty of those lovely, curling street shots that he seems to like. There’s also a rare-but-quite refreshing use of narration (by Kim) as well as another of Hong’s recent, fuzzy guitar scores. This one’s kinda grungy, to the point that I wondered if the director had recently discovered Slint. There are still a handful of dinner scenes, of course, one in which Sang-hee drinks a little too much and ends up making a disparaging comment about documentary filmmakers, fatally wounding her stepfather’s ego in the process—a bingo-card Kwon scene.

More interestingly, that sequence also features a bracing reference to Gaza and line of dialogue in which Hong essentially calls himself a scammer—which is, I’m happy to say, more piss and vinegar than we’ve lately come to expect from the 65-year-old. Hong closes his film by showing us one of Sang-hee’s movies: a plaintive shot of a dandelion growing in some weeds that she narrates over as if journaling out-loud. She talks about cinema (and perhaps life) as a process of “regarding.” It would be an apt description for a few of the director’s recent films. Somehow, this one’s got more juice.

Nowhere to Lay My Eyes premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival and will be released by Cinema Guild.