A melancholy filmmaker returns to the city to reunite with friends and a past only partially revealed in Hong's simultaneously wistful and witty double portrait of a frustrated artist and the charming Old World tangle of taverns and back alleys that makes up Seoul's Buchon Village neighborhood (a focus made clear by the film's Korean language title, "In Buchon Village"). Hong's use of crisp black and white beautifully captures both winter's fleeting light and the shadow of regret that accompanies even the film's happiest moments. A rumination on friendship and middle-age, The Day He Arrives follows a richly meandering course, unfolding a series of days and nights that become increasingly interchangeable, confused in the mind of both the hungover filmmaker-hero and the audience who thus come to inhabit the film's rich space-time of nostalgia, deja vu and reverie.