General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

In Water (물안에서)

In Water (물안에서, styled in lower case as in water) is a 2023 South Korean drama film written, directed, produced, photographed, edited, and scored by Hong Sang-soo, in which a young actor travels to Jeju Island with two friends to shoot a short film he has not yet conceived. At 61 minutes it is the director's shortest feature and his 29th overall, and it is filmed almost entirely out of focus.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director	Hong Sang-soo (born 1960, Seoul), who also wrote, produced, edited, photographed, and composed the film¹^•⁴
Premiere	73rd Berlin International Film Festival, February 2023, Encounters section⁵
Running time	61 minutes, Hong's shortest feature¹^•²
South Korean release	April 12, 2023; 3,918 admissions and $26,871 gross on 61 screens¹
Cast	Shin Seok-ho (Seongmo), Ha Seong-guk (Sangguk), Kim Seung-yun (Namhee), Kim Min-hee (woman on the phone)⁴
Signature technique	Shot almost entirely out of focus, a last-minute decision, except a few interior scenes³
US release	The Cinema Guild, opened December 1, 2023 in New York and Los Angeles⁴

Spoilers

Story: Production

Story. Seongmo (Shin Seok-ho), an actor who has decided to give up acting and direct a short film with 3 million won (US$2,280) he earned through part-time jobs, brings two former classmates to Jeju Island: cameraman Sangguk (Ha Seong-guk) and intended female lead Namhee (Kim Seung-yun).⁸^•⁴ He has no plan for what to shoot, so the three wander the island, eat, drink, and wait while he writes day by day.⁹ The turning point comes when Seongmo spots a woman picking up litter under a seaside cliff, speaks with her, and finds in the encounter the story he needed; the shoot then quietly begins.⁵^•¹⁰ Kim Min-hee appears as a woman on the phone.⁴

Production

Hong Sang-soo made the film with a crew of four people, including himself and his partner and collaborator Kim Min-hee, who served as production manager, set photographer, and singer of the theme song.⁶ Kim is also credited as line producer, and Hong as executive producer; the sound recordist was Kim Hyejeong and the production assistant Kim Soryung.⁴^•¹ Hong said he shot the film himself in a week, and his shouldering of nearly all production responsibilities mirrors the skeleton crew shown on screen.⁷

The out-of-focus images

The film's defining choice is that nearly every shot is deliberately out of focus. According to Hong, the decision was made at the last minute.³ An early interior scene is sharp enough to show the characters' faces; after that, every exterior and most interiors are blurred, so that facial expressions and even small details like the kind of sashimi being eaten become hard to parse.³^•⁷ Reviewers compared the effect to an impressionist painting or a beach watercolor, with people reduced to silhouettes and landscapes to fields of color.¹⁰^•⁶^•⁹

The blur is never explained within the story, but it resonates with the characters' situation, adrift in the uncertainties of creation, and with the director's own method of writing scenes day by day and leaving room for accident.⁹ At a press conference at the Gijón International Film Festival in Spain in November 2023, Hong revealed that he suffers from a serious eye disease that has considerably altered his vision, leading some critics to read the film's haze as the director incorporating the degradation of his own sight.⁹ The film also shows the act of filmmaking itself, which is rarer in Hong's work than his usual focus on pre-production or distribution; one of the two scenes seen being shot recreates an identical moment from earlier in the film.³

Reception

At the Berlinale, where it premiered in the Encounters section, a critics' poll aggregate gave in water a score of 8.09 from 64 reviews, ranking it fifth among Encounters titles; the section's best film award went to Bas Devos's Here.¹¹^•¹² The film was also an official selection at the New York, Chicago, and AFI festivals in 2023.⁴ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 90% Tomatometer from 21 reviews.¹³

Critical responses divided along familiar lines for Hong's work. Sight and Sound's reviewer called it "by far the most visually beautiful of his non-monochrome films," while the South China Morning Post gave two stars and found the out-of-focus device tedious over 61 minutes.³^•¹⁴ Yonhap's reviewer wrote that watching the film felt like seeing images through water, though lovers of impressionist painting could take pleasure in its slow, poetic aesthetics.⁵

Later recognition. Cahiers du Cinéma ranked In Water third in its list of the best films of 2024, and Cinematheque KOFA selected it among its 11 notable Korean films of 2023, chosen by 16 critics, programmers, and film journalists; the Korean Association of Film Critics' Critics Prize also placed it in its top ten of 2023.¹⁵^•¹⁶^•¹⁷ In South Korea the film opened on 61 screens and sold 3,918 tickets, grossing $26,871.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2023 and 2024 › Titles H to N

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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