“This is Hong at his most deceptively simple.”

Hong Sang-soo’s films are enveloped in awkwardness – with constant shifts in conversation, casual often turns into consequential. In What Does That Nature Say to You, the first escalation happens when Donghwa, a poet in his thirties, is swept into a full day of family scrutiny when he intended to simply drop off his girlfriend Junhee at her parents’ house. While they’re three years into the relationship, he still hasn’t met her family or been invited inside their luxurious home.

The father appears first, circling Donghwa’s Kia Pride with barely concealed disdain; the family’s Mini Cooper looms in the background like a standing reproach. He insists on taking Donghwa’s car for a spin, almost as if to test its worth, or perhaps its driver’s. This initial encounter sets the tone: while Junhee’s family perform polite hospitality, objects and gestures carry the weight of unspoken judgments.

Back inside, the father hands him several packs of cigarettes and invites him outside to smoke, and propelled into this one-on-one moment the tension rises for Donghwa as well as for the audience. The father’s monologues about his own projects – a hideout he designed, a landscaped garden built for his mother – swell with pride. Donghwa tells both of Junhee’s parents to drop formalities; he, too, tries to accelerate a familiarity with people he has just met. At one point, he mentions a poem he wrote about filial love to Junhee’s father, but later at dinner when he’s asked to recite one of his poems, he fails miserably at impressing anyone at the table. His lack of self-awareness is painful: the son of a prominent attorney, he’s desperately trying to embody a purer and more creative version of himself. He’s ridiculous, yes, but his longing is real.

Later Donghwa, Junhee, and her sister Neunghee go out for lunch and visit a Buddhist temple, while the parents cook a chicken stew from the coop out back. At each turn, bonds are tested, boundaries pressed. Junhee herself remains oddly sidelined, as if the gathering were less about her than about whether Donghwa can withstand inspection.

Hong’s comedy often lies in the way masks slip. By evening, Donghwa is drunk from the alcohol that Junhee’s father has been serving him all day. Unable to hold his posture of polite deference any longer, his frustrations spill out, but not at the parents, who have been dominating the conversation, and not at Junhee, whose approval he still seeks. Instead, he lashes out at her sister. It’s a small cruelty, but sharp: the kind of misdirected anger that reveals his character more than any poem he could have recited. The sister becomes collateral damage, the softest target he could have chosen.

Hong has always made films that double as mirrors: they reflect the fragility of his characters back at us through repetitions, banalities, but most of all cunning humor. Here, the mirror is angled toward the comedy of late arrival – three years into a relationship, finally meeting the parents, and immediately floundering. Donghwa wants to live a simple life, to keep close to poetry, but he has clearly failed the test. Later, Junhee’s mother poetically notes that he “hasn’t collided with reality“. What lingers isn’t the story but the mood: the accumulation of small humiliations. The title keeps echoing: What does that nature say to you? Hong doesn’t resolve the question, of course. He lets it hang, like the taste of too much wine after an evening gone completely sideways.

This is Hong at his most deceptively simple: long takes, static frames, characters circling each other until their masks crack. For viewers already familiar with his repetitions, the pleasure is in the variation – the way a notebook, a stew, or a car become instruments for discomfort. The film’s slight blur deserves mention too. Watching it, you find yourself squinting, as though straining to see Donghwa more clearly – just as Junhee’s family might be scrutinizing him across the dinner table. But the blur also softens time, as if to make the story less about one specific afternoon outside Icheon and more about the uneasy ritual of meeting a partner’s parents anywhere. It lends the film a universality, blurring cultural detail into something recognizably human: the comedy, and the terror, of being seen.