Nowhere to Lay My Eyes: Hong Sang-soo’s meditative family drama is familiar in all the right ways
An experimental filmmaker takes an eventful trip to Jeju Island with her family in this quiet addition to the Hong Sang-soo oeuvre that paints the inner lives of its characters into every subtle gesture.
- Reviewed from the 2026 Locarno Film Festival
Early in Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, Sang-hee (Kim Min-hee) and her brother Sangwon (Shin Seok-ho) are shown around a rental property recently renovated by their mother (Choi Myung-gil), where the adult siblings will stay during their visit to Jeju Island. Proudly presenting a fancy Italian sofa, their mum says how these days, if you don’t have something special, people don’t come.
It’s an amusing line to appear in the prolific Hong Sang-soo’s second feature of 2026 (after The Day She Returns), considering that the multi-hyphenate filmmaker has made his bread and butter demonstrating that even the slightest variation on his regular setups still attracts a devoted following. The converted are like the bar patrons in Hong’s films: keen to revisit the same haunts for familiar tastes and textures, but also for the hope that a curveball conversation might trigger profound epiphanies about how to see the world.
That loyal audience appears to include the international competition jury at Locarno, who awarded Hong and Kim with Best Direction and Best Performance awards, respectively; Kim won the same prize at the Swiss festival when she last led a Hong feature, By the Stream, in 2024. If that plottier and longer (at 111 minutes) prior collaboration ostensibly gave Kim more to do, Nowhere to Lay My Eyes – which barely cracks the 70-minute mark – is no less a showcase for the actor’s deft ability to instil rich inner life into every line and subtle physical gesture.
One of the film’s more overt body movements comes at the beginning: upon the siblings’ arrival at their mother’s home (the estranged Sang-hee’s first in-person visit in a decade), their stepfather (Kwon Hae-hyo) immediately trips down the property’s outside steps. The nearly disastrous pratfall is so convincing that you might believe Hong just kept rolling through a real blunder. Funnily enough, this character is a documentarian, and the concept of the “truth” behind images, editing and framing when approaching that medium ignites one of the more passionate discussions from Sang-hee, whose own forays into filmmaking are ruminative experimental shorts.
These shorts draw admiration from her new stepsister, shy artist Juwon (Park Mi-so). Sang-hee somewhat disparages the younger woman in the film’s occasional narration, partly as a reflection of resentments towards the mother they now share. But their gradually warm rapport and growing solidarity over the two-day timeframe proves one of the feature’s most rewarding threads. Complicating just which character you might read as the likeliest avatar for Hong himself this time around, Juwon professes liking to work through repetition.