In five years of marriage, Gam-hee—played effortlessly by Hong Sangsoo’s real-life partner Kim Min-hee—has never spent a day apart from her (unnamed, unseen) husband. “People in love should always stick together … it’s only natural,” the man apparently likes to repeat. The Woman Who Ran unobtrusively chronicles the heroine’s long-overdue time off as she visits three old friends—one single, one divorced and the other unhappily married—on the outskirts of Seoul. All could in different ways be interpreted as women who ran (or should run), yet the writer-director is less interested in Rohmerian couples therapy moralism than in visualizations of autonomous female subjects in relationship with the social and natural environment around them. An intense neighborly argument (in which Gam-hee refuses to yield to a man’s insistent desire) ends with one of cinema’s greatest animal appearances, which Hong complements with in-depth discussions of vegetarianism and ecology. Iridescent floral landscapes saturate the film at regular intervals, offering respite from the at times suffocating colloquies—until the protagonist ultimately runs away yet again, this time to the cinema.