Film Review: Spring Night 봄밤 Bombam (2024) - South Korea
Rating: 7/10
Reviewed at Hong Kong Filmart 2025
2025 Review Count - 52
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Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
Tagline: This isn’t a film about love saving anyone. It’s about love “witnessing” and in that act, finding a kind of bruised grace.
Kang Mi-ja’s “Spring Night” feels like a whispered confession—a film that aches with loneliness yet resists the urge to console. Seventeen years since her last feature, Kang returns with a story as spare and unflinching as a winter branch, tracing the fragile bond between two souls drowning in the aftermath of their own ruin. Han Ye-ri and Kim Seol-jin inhabit their roles not with grand gestures, but with the quiet desperation of people who have learned to wear sorrow like a second skin.
The film opens at a wedding, a symbol of union that feels almost cruel in contrast to the fractured lives of Yeong Gyeong (Han), a divorced alcoholic estranged from her child, and Su Hwan (Kim), a bankrupt ironworker whose body betrays him as thoroughly as his ex-wife did. Their first encounter—Yeong Gyeong passed out drunk, Su Hwan carrying her home on his aching back—sets the tone for a relationship built on mutual collapse rather than redemption. There’s no Hollywood gloss here, no montage of healing. Instead, Kang trains her lens on the raw mechanics of survival: the clink of bottles, the creak of joints, the silence that hangs between them like a shared epitaph.
What fascinates is how Kang subverts melodrama’s usual beats. These two don’t “fix” each other; they mirror each other’s brokenness. In one haunting sequence, Yeong Gyeong relapses yet again, smashing a liquor bottle while Su Hwan watches, paralyzed not by judgment but by recognition. Kim’s performance here is masterful—his face a landscape of helpless longing, reversing traditional gender roles with delicate precision. Han, meanwhile, delivers a career-defining turn, her eyes oscillating between defiance and vacancy, as if daring the audience to romanticize her decay.
The film’s 67-minute runtime feels both economical and oppressive. Lee Ji-sang’s screenplay pares the story to its marrow, echoing the minimalist prose of Kwon Yeo-sun’s source material. Yet this very leanness becomes a double-edged sword. While the restraint amplifies the emotional rawness, it also keeps us at arm’s length. We witness their pain but rarely plunge into its depths, as if viewing their lives through frosted glass. Kang’s visual poetry—nights drenched in neon haze, daylight scenes washed pale as hospital walls—compels, but the pacing lingers like a held breath that never quite exhales.
There’s undeniable power in the way “Spring Night” rejects easy catharsis. When Su Hwan rasps, “We’re just ghosts keeping each other company,” it lands with the weight of a eulogy. Yet for all its lyrical bleakness, the film plants fragile seeds of hope: a shared cigarette, a half-smile in dawn’s light, the titular season hinting at cycles beyond human suffering. Kang doesn’t offer solutions, but she does grant her characters—and us—the mercy of being seen.
Is it a satisfying watch? Not conventionally. But like the faint sting of spring air after a long winter, “Spring Night” lingers in your bones long after the screen fades. Kang Mi-ja hasn’t made a comeback—she’s issued a haunting. (Neo 2025)
