Hong's fascination with the awkward performative dimensions of romance and the social contract in general finds its richest expression to date in this tour-de-force star vehicle for Isabelle Huppert. In three distinct roles, beginning first as a French filmmaker openly modeled on Claire Denis, Huppert subtly transforms herself across a trio of stories invented by a young aspiring filmmaker furiously writing as a distraction from an unnamed family trauma. Huppert's richly comic yet poignant encounters with strangers and lovers reveals Hong's narrative sophistication to lie beyond In Another Country’s film-within-a-film structure and instead within the careful intertwining of the three stories through a series of echoes that reveal the film's larger themes of loneliness, womanly charm and self-absorbed machismo.