General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Grass (풀잎들) (2018 film)

Grass (Korean: 풀잎들; revised romanization: Pul-ip-deul) is a 2018 South Korean black-and-white drama film written, produced, and directed by Hong Sang-soo, set almost entirely in a small Seoul café where a young woman observes and writes about the patrons around her.¹ It premiered on February 16, 2018 in the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival and opened in South Korean theaters on October 25, 2018.²

Key fact	Detail
Director, writer, producer	Hong Sang-soo¹
Premiere and release	Berlin (Forum), February 16, 2018; South Korea, October 25, 2018²
Runtime and format	66 minutes, black-and-white, D-Cinema³
Lead cast	Kim Min-hee (Areum), Jung Jin-young (Kyungsoo), Ki Joo-bong (Changsoo)⁴
Korean box office	54 screens, 7,594 total admissions⁵
US reception	92% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 26 reviews; limited US release April 19, 2019 via Cinema Guild⁶
Music	Schubert's Impromptus, Wagner's Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld³

Spoilers

Premise

The film takes place in a café down an alley where, as the Korean Film Council synopsis puts it, one would not expect to find such a place. People sit at different tables talking; across the street, the owner of a small grocery has planted vegetables that sprout in large rubber basins. As time passes the patrons grow familiar with one another, and one woman, Areum, observes them and writes down her thoughts. They remain in the coffeehouse late into the night.⁵

Film at Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival notes outline the framework that Areum holds together: she listens in on three overheated encounters, one involving a young woman headed for Europe and a male friend who trade venomous blame, another in which a faded actor woos an old friend so he can stay on, and a third with a self-absorbed actor-director (Jung Jin-young) hoping to enlist a young writer for his upcoming film. These conversations, played largely in long-take two-shots, form a kind of never-ending theatrical performance.⁷

Style and interpretation

Observation and authorship. Areum claims to be "not a writer, just writing," but the film playfully calls her diffidence into question, raising the possibility that some of the characters and conversations are filtered through her perceptions or are entirely inventions of her imagination.⁸ The reviewer Christopher Bourne reads the film as simultaneously observational and self-questioning, a slice of life that is also a universe in microcosm.⁸

Form. The film was shot in black-and-white, like Hong's other 2018 film Hotel by the River, and consists mostly of simple two-shots and over-the-shoulder framings punctuated by Hong's signature zooms.⁸^•⁹ A detailed census by the critic Ryan Swen counts 26 shots, with 18 zooms out and 25 zooms in, and lists the soundtrack's classical selections alongside Pachelbel's Canon and a recorder-and-xylophone version of "Oh! Susanna" over the closing credits.² The Busan International Film Festival program notes, citing critic Nam Dong-chul, observe that Hong examines the situation of death from various angles, with characters distressed, hurt, or emptied by it, and that the dramatic classical music is a striking feature of the film.³

Release and reception

After its Berlin premiere, the film screened in the Masters section of the 2018 Jerusalem Film Festival and at the 56th New York Film Festival (September 28 to October 14, 2018).¹⁰^•⁷ Cinema Guild gave it a limited United States theatrical release on April 19, 2019, with a gross of $9.0K.⁶ In South Korea it earned 7,594 admissions on 54 screens.⁵

Critical response was strongly positive in the United States. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 92% Tomatometer from 26 reviews, with an average of rated reviews of 7.20/10.⁶ Justin Chang, then film critic for the Los Angeles Times, called it "small, sharp and bladelike" and praised Hong's narrative economy, in which five-minute exchanges between strangers carry considerable emotional intensity.¹¹ On MUBI, Giovanni Marchini Camia described it as a charming minimalist exercise, a "minor Hong" in festival parlance, lifted by the classical music constantly playing in the café.¹² Metacritic's sampled reviews range from Glenn Kenny's 80 for The New York Times to David Ehrlich's 67 for IndieWire, which found it less consistently enjoyable than longer Hong films but noted that it engages ideas his work often skirts.¹³

Context in Hong Sang-soo's career

Hong Sang-soo is a South Korean director whose work, produced almost yearly on low budgets, has made him a fixture of the international festival circuit; a 2017 New York Review of Books essay by Phillip Lopate reported that international critics and festival programmers rank him among the best filmmakers working today, even though few of his films had received commercial distribution in the United States.¹⁴ Grass was one of two films he released in 2018, the other being Hotel by the River, and it was his fifth collaboration with actress Kim Min-hee, who by then was his most frequent leading woman.⁹^•² The film was produced by Jeonwonsa Film, with international sales handled by Finecut.¹^•⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026