“Like weather, location gives me a lot of stimulation,” Hong Sangsoo once said of his artistic method. While geolocatable material places have functioned as symbols throughout the director’s oeuvre (think only of Jeju Island in any number of his itinerant tales, or of the titular mythic object in Turning Gate), nowhere are they more consequential than in 2022’s Walk Up. Set and recorded entirely in and around a four-story elevator-free apartment building in Seoul’s Gangnam district, the black-and-white chamber drama is a polished product. There are little to no traces of Hong’s late-style nonchalance: every shot is in focus and diligently framed, including compositions so tidy they might as well be embezzled from Bresson. Narratively, Walk Up accompanies an insecure middle-aged filmmaker on a merry-go-round of encounters with residents on different floors, interlacing a Möbius strip of flashback and simultaneity, lived experience and memory, that crescendos in a remarkable and mind-twisting final act. The film would not be a certified Hong endeavor without a hefty dose of wine (in place of soju), upmarket cigarettes and delectable meals. Even Covid-19 makes a brief appearance, suggesting a less innocent dimension to the film—one of the director’s strongest—as a study of enclosure and involuntary domestic confinement.