If you wanted to write an instruction manual on how to produce the most archetypal bad arthouse movie, you could do a pretty good job just cribbing every creative choice from The Day He Arrives. It's a 2011 independent drama from South Korea, and pretty much nails every cliche it can on its way through.The film, which is written and directed by Hang Sang-soo, follows morose film director Seong-jun as he returns to Seoul to catch up with old friends and confront his past. He meets his friends, drinks in a few bars, reunites briefly with an old girlfriend, wanders the streets, and has a generally depressed and high introspective time of it. There's more than a little of Samuel Beckett to the film, since he pretty much does the same things with the same or similar people twice.
It's worth running through all of the ways in which this film irritated me, not for the purposes of review but as a warning for future filmmakers to aggressively avoid this sort of thing. Reviewing the film is actually pretty easy: it's a boring, self-indulgent waste of time, and thankfully its obscurity will make it unlikely that many will have the misfortune of stumbling upon it.
