A once-acclaimed actor-director arrives at a women’s college to replace a licentious young teacher suspended for dating three of the seven students in his theater class. At dinner-table conversations, beer, wine and makgeolli (Korean rice wine) flow as smoothly as the titular waterway. Wide shots of Seoul’s sprawling green vistas infuse and geolocate By the Stream at regular intervals; at the same time, Hong’s standard acting troupe situates the action firmly in the director’s multiverse. (Kwon Hae-hyo and Kim Min-hee appear in their twelfth and fifteenth Hong Sangsoo enterprises, respectively.) Iconography and leitmotifs are unmistakably the auteur’s as well: falling leaves, sexual promiscuity among intellectuals and alcoholized expressions of future aspiration—always inextricable from past regret—thrust the film forward at the speed of a rushing river, even if downstream its serpentine meanders lies “nothing, nothing at all,” as Min-hee’s character concludes. Life and water may twist and turn (inexplicably, unannounced), yet there is beauty to be apprehended in the curves, in a path’s sudden zigzag.