General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Woman Who Ran (도망친 여자)

The Woman Who Ran (도망친 여자, Domangchin yeoja) is a 2020 South Korean drama film written, directed, produced, edited, and scored by Hong Sang-soo, in which a woman named Gamhee visits three friends while her husband is away on a business trip. It won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival and is Hong's 24th feature and his seventh film with actress Kim Min-hee.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Hong Sang-soo, who also produced, edited, and composed the music³
Premiere and award	Competed at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival; Silver Bear for Best Director, announced February 29, 2020²
Place in Hong's career	His 24th feature and seventh collaboration with Kim Min-hee¹
Runtime and release	77 minutes; South Korean theatrical release September 17, 2020, adults-only rating⁴
Cast	Kim Min-hee (Gamhee), Seo Young-hwa (Youngsoon), Song Seon-mi (Suyoung), Kim Sae-byuk (Woojin), Kwon Hae-hyo (Mr. Jung)⁵
Korean box office	143 screens, 10,344 admissions, $64,039 total gross⁴
Critical standing	98% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 46 reviews; 2nd place in Cahiers du Cinéma's 2020 top ten⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Premise and structure

Gamhee (Kim Min-hee) travels without her husband for the first time in the five years of their marriage, during which, she tells each friend, they have not spent a single day apart. She visits two friends at their homes and meets a third by chance at a movie theater, and the film divides into three casually threaded but distinct sections around these encounters.⁸^•⁹

The three friends carry separate small dramas. Youngsoon (Seo Young-hwa), divorced, has given up meat and gardens in her backyard; her neighbor demands she stop feeding stray cats because his wife fears cats and cannot leave their apartment. Suyoung (Song Seon-mi) has a crush on her architect neighbor and is hounded by a young poet she met at a bar and slept with once. Woojin (Kim Sae-byuk) works at a movie theater; her meeting with Gamhee is polite but strained, and Gamhee afterward has a tense conversation with Mr. Jung (Kwon Hae-hyo), a novelist she dated before her marriage and who is now Woojin's husband.⁶^•¹⁰

Repetition drives the film's effect. Gamhee repeats the same account of her marriage, including her husband's line that people in love should stick to each other, in each of the three encounters, and she sounds less convincing each time.⁹^•¹¹

Style

Men at the margins. In a reversal of the pattern in many of Hong's earlier films, the narrative stays almost entirely with the women's conversations, and the men who interrupt them are treated as nuisances to be talked down or sent away. In all three sections the men are shown only from behind, with their backs to the camera.¹²^•¹³

The film's best-known comic setpiece is the neighborly argument about the stray cats, which critics at the Berlinale singled out; the German critic Fabian Wallmeier of public radio rbb called it a lesson in how to answer unreasonable, passively aggressive behavior, ending on a close-up of the victorious cat.¹⁴

Cinematographer Kim Su-min's camera records the conversations from an undramatic distance, with pronounced zooms that end almost every shot and long static takes closing out the first two visits.¹³^•³

Release and reception

The film premiered in the Competition section of the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, Hong's fourth Berlinale Competition invitation, and took the Silver Bear for Best Director. It was the first Best Director award for a Korean film at Berlin since Kim Ki-duk's Samaritan Girl in 2004.¹⁵^•¹⁶

It screened on the Main Slate of the 58th New York Film Festival and played widely on the 2020 festival circuit, including San Sebastián, where it received a Special Mention in the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section, and festivals in Busan, Chicago, London, Vienna, Tokyo, and Singapore.⁸^•⁴^•⁷ Cahiers du Cinéma placed it second in its 2020 year-end top ten, and the Korean Association of Film Critics gave it a FIPRESCI award and a place in its ten best films of the year.⁷

In South Korea it opened on September 17, 2020 on 143 screens and sold 10,344 admissions for a gross of $64,039, a modest commercial result typical of Hong's releases.⁴ The Cinema Guild released it in United States theaters on July 9, 2021, and Rotten Tomatoes lists a streaming release on February 11, 2022; the film holds a 98% Tomatometer rating from 46 reviews.⁶^•⁸

Place in Hong Sang-soo's career

The award confirmed a run of Berlin recognition: Hong had previously won the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Kim Min-hee in On the Beach at Night Alone (2017), and he followed The Woman Who Ran with the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for Introduction in 2021.¹⁴^•⁴ Critics noted the film's shifted emphasis: since Kim Min-hee became his regular lead, Hong's cinema had moved toward its feminine pole, and here the women's talk carries the film while the men are reduced to interruptions.¹⁷ Reviewers read it as a study of marriage, friendship, and unspoken regret; Richard Brody in The New Yorker described it as putting "the strangeness of a happy marriage" under paradoxical scrutiny through a series of dialogues about money, animals, real estate, food, art, and men.¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026