Isabelle Huppert propels this diasporic comedy of awkwardness and introspection into terrain at once recognizable and uncanny to Hong Sangsoo appreciators. Grand Jury winner at the 2024 Berlinale, A Traveler’s Needs sees Huppert in her third tie-up with the auteur—and likely one of his most subdued, austere and tenderly enigmatic creations. In something of a geolinguistic inversion of 2008’s Paris-set Night and Day, Iris, a petite older Frenchwoman, appears suddenly and with no explanation in Korea, where she earns a living as a language tutor with a rapacious appetite for emotional connection and top-shelf rice wine. (“I usually drink one or two bottles every day,” she discloses to one of her adult students.) Soon enough, friendships and para-romances start to coalesce over alcohol-laden dinners, shot on lo-fi video using only available light. Ambient noises—city traffic, chirping birds—often overlay the out-of-focus image, all the while actors repeat (eerily, elliptically) lines of dialogue over and over. Floating clouds, sun-drenched canopies and the lyric poetry of Yun Dong-ju recur as leitmotifs in a film that offers no answer to its titular riddle. What are a traveler’s needs? Some money, makgeolli and deep interpersonal liaisons are enough, Hong seems to be implying.