The Day He ArrivesMovies like The Day He Arrives
- Key Features:
- Existentialism, Repetition, Filmmaker, Lost in translation, Character study, Independent film, Ambiguity, Korean cinema, Alcohol consumption, Relationships, Identity crisis
- Tone:
- restrained, poetic, deadpan
- Target Audience:
- Art house enthusiasts, Contemplative viewers, Character-driven narratives, Korean cinema fans
- Emotional Arc:
- Disorientation → Reflection
The Day He Arrives

A film director who no longer makes films arrives in Seoul to meet a close friend. When the friend doesn't show up, he wanders the city aimlessly for three days, grabbing drinks and meeting women, with each day playing out like a version of the last.
The Day He Arrives
By mistake, film director Ham Chun-su arrives in Suwon a day early. With time to kill before his lecture the next day, Chun-su stops by a restored, old palace and meets an artist named Yoon Hee-jung. Together, they go to Hee-jung's workshop to look at her paintings, have Sushi with Soju for dinner, and get close. Later, they go to another café and have more drinks with Hee-jung's acquaintances. When asked if he is married, Chun-su is forced to reveal the fact that he is, and Hee-jung gets deeply disappointed...

While a South Korean man wanders the city in search of the woman he just broke up with, she successively meets and flirts with two men who claim to have met her before.

After being rejected for a film role, a stage actor leaves Seoul to visit a friend and, in his travels, winds up getting involved with two women.

Three years ago, a father saved his daughter's life. After she's involved in a car accident, it looks like he'll have to do it again, no matter how many attempts it takes.

As the first snow falls in Seoul, two old friends reunite; one is a successful college professor, and the other, a struggling filmmaker recently returned from the United States. After their reminiscences, they finally decide to go in search of the young woman each had romanced years earlier.

Areum sits in a small café, typing on her laptop. Around her, customers enact various dramas from their lives. Is she writing what she hears or is she hearing what's been written?

The lives of 4 interconnected South Koreans - a married couple, a novelist the wife is having an affair with, and a second woman the novelist is simultaneously involved with.

After an impulsive travel decision to visit friends, Freddie, 25, returns to South Korea for the first time, where she was born before being adopted and raised in France. Freddie suddenly finds herself embarking on an unexpected journey in a country she knows so little about, taking her life in new and unexpected directions.

Kwon returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori, who has come back from Japan to propose to her. Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology.

Over drinks, two friends agree to swap fond memories of their recent trips to the same seaside town. As the stories unfold in flashback, it becomes evident their accounts take place at the same time and with the same people.

Luo Hongwu returns to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years ago. He begins the search for the woman he loved and whom he has never been able to forget.

In Seoul, a suicidal student meets a young woman who decides to join him in his fatal gesture. Dong-soo, an unsuccessful filmmaker, spots a beautiful young woman, who happens to be the lead actress in the film he has just seen. Their stories will cross paths thanks to their love for cinema.

A recovering drug addict is granted a day’s leave from rehab and returns to Oslo, where he reconnects with friends, faces the weight of his past, and struggles with uncertainty about his future. Over the course of one day, he drifts through encounters that reflect his longing for connection and his deep sense of alienation.

On her first day at work, Areum replaces a woman who broke up with the boss. The wife of the boss finds a love note, bursts into the office, and mistakes Areum for the other woman.

Through the course of their lives, a man and his first love are repeatedly separated from each other because of circumstances out of their control.

A college professor travels to New York City to attend a conference and finds a young couple living in his apartment.

An aging poet summons his estranged sons to the hotel he is staying at because he feels his death is near; meanwhile, he encounters two women staying at the hotel.

Forty-year-old Andreas arrives in a strange city with no memory of how he got there. He is presented with a job, an apartment - even a wife. But before long, Andreas notices that something is wrong. Andreas makes an attempt to escape the city, but he discovers there's no way out. Andreas meets Hugo, who has found a crack in a wall in his cellar. Beautiful music streams out from the crack. Maybe it leads to "the other side"? A new plan for escape is hatched.

A disillusioned filmmaker has an encounter with a young woman who has a ritual of repeating "Tomorrow is my birthday" everyday. He tries to communicate with her through his video camera.

In 1987 Korea under an oppressive military regime, the unlawful interrogation and death of a college student ignite ordinary citizens to fight for the truth and bring about justice.

From a mountain peak in South Korea, a man plummets to his death. Did he jump, or was he pushed? When detective Hae-joon arrives on the scene, he begins to suspect the dead man’s wife Seo-rae. But as he digs deeper into the investigation, he finds himself trapped in a web of deception and desire.

Days after her friends disappear during a trip to a mysterious cave, a girl is approached by a grown man claiming to be one of her missing pals.

Security commander Chun Doo-gwang and the officers following him organize a coup. Lee Tae-shin, a stubborn Capital Garrison Command commander who believes soldiers should not take political action, fights against Chun Doo-gwang.

Mizuki's husband Yusuke has been missing for three years. He suddenly comes back home as a ghost and asks Mizuki to go on a trip with him. Their trip consists of visiting the people that helped Yusuke on his previous travel.

A young woman and her mother run away to the seaside town of Mohang to escape their mounting debt. The young woman begins writing a script for a short film in order to calm her nerves: There are three women named Anne, and each woman consecutively visits the seaside town of Mohang. A young woman tends to the small hotel by the Mohang foreshore owned by her parents. A certain lifeguard can be seen restlessly wandering up and down the beach that lies nearby. Each Anne stays at this small hotel, receives some assistance from the owner’s daughter, and ventures onto the beach where they meet the lifeguard.

Oki, a film student, gets involved in two relationships as she navigates the advances of a fellow student and grapples with her feelings for her much older professor.

A drifter lives in people's houses while they are away and repays them by doing chores for them. His life changes when he meets a beautiful woman who wants to escape her unhappy marriage.

Along with his young son, Ji-ho, Woo-jin misses his wife Soo-a, who died after promising to return a year later with the rainy season. Miraculously, they reunite with Soo-a when the rainy season comes around, but she has no memory of her husband and son whom she dearly loved.

Deliveryman Jong-su is out on a job when he runs into Hae-mi, a girl who once lived in his neighborhood. She asks if he'd mind looking after her cat while she's away on a trip to Africa. On her return, she introduces to Jong-su an enigmatic young man named Ben, who she met during her trip. One day Ben tells Jong-su about his most unusual hobby.

A South Korean woman in her sixties enrolls in a poetry class as she grapples with her faltering memory and her grandson's appalling wrongdoing.

In the year 1999, a young woman leaves her quaint seaside house and returns to the city, leaving in the mailbox a card for the next owner, with instructions to forward any mail of hers to the new address. In the year 1997, a jaded young architect moves into the same house and finds the letter. His reply, which he slips into the mailbox, finds its way to her, beginning a parallel-time love story separated by a span of two years.

Young-hee, an actress reeling in the aftermath of an affair with a married film director, escapes to Hamburg. But when she returns to Korea and meets with friends for drinks, startling confessions emerge.

In the aftermath of a car crash, a man discovers his dreams are tied to a stranger's sleepwalking.

A man finds himself stuck in a mysterious time loop, reliving the same day again and again. As the cycle repeats, he is forced to confront his daily routines, question his relationships, and search for meaning in a world that refuses to change.

While her husband is on a business trip, Gam-hee meets three of her friends on the outskirts of Seoul.

Young Jin-hee is taken by her father to an orphanage near Seoul. He leaves her there never to return, and she struggles to come to grips with her fate. Jin-hee desperately believes her father will come back for her and take her on a trip.

Lacking inspiration, a composer isolates himself at a desolate house, on a small island, in Brittany. There he finds an old piano and receives visits from people who won't let him rest.

Mr. Kim is jobless, lost in debt and has been dumped by his girlfriend. He decides to end it all by jumping into the Han River - only to find himself washed up on a small, mid-river island. He soon abandons thoughts of suicide or rescue and begins a new life as a castaway. His antics catch the attention of a young woman whose apartment overlooks the river. Her discovery changes both their lives.

A street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.

Seoul, South Korea, 1997. When the young but extremely anxious student Jin-seok, his parents and his successful older brother Yoo-seok move to a new home, mysterious and frightening events begin to happen around them, unexplained events that threaten to ruin their seemingly happy lives. Unable to understand what is happening, Jin-seok wonders if he is losing his mind.

A man wakes up one morning with an annoying ringing sound in his ears. A note on the fridge says: "Your friend Luigi has died. P.S. I took the car". The problem is that he does not even remember who this guy Luigi is. This is just the beginning of a tragicomic day during which he will be plunged into the folly of the world. One of those days that changes your life forever.

Famous writer Alexander contracts a terminal illness. He receives a letter from his wife describing a summer day 30 years ago, and leaves his seaside home to remember his past. This journey will allow him to wander between the past and the present, and encounter unexpected people, allowing him to collect unforgettable memories in the final moments of his life.

An exiled filmmaker finally returns to his home country where former mysteries and afflictions of his early life come back to haunt him once more.

After decades apart, childhood friends Nora and Hae Sung are reunited in New York for one fateful weekend as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life.

Dae-ho, an investigative journalist, seeks to track down the whereabouts of his son who was abducted three years ago. With the help of a detective and a psychiatrist friend, he will retrace his memory of the incident through the use of lucid dreaming techniques.

Woo-jin, a furniture designer who wakes up in a different body every day, falls for Yi-soo, a woman he meets through his work.

When filmmaker Young-soo introduces writer Soo-jung to his friend Jae-hoon, he unintentionally creates a love triangle. While Jae-hoon pursues Soo-jung, Young-soo clashes with his crew. Yet, just as the story appears to end, it starts all over again, this time with plenty of variations.

After the wild lifestyle of a famous young German photographer almost gets him killed, he goes to Palermo, Sicily to take a break. Can the beautiful city and a beautiful local woman calm him down?

Soo-hyun comes across magical pills that allow him to go back and forth in time. 30 years to the past, young Soo-hyun meets future Soo-hyun and learns that his girlfriend will soon die because of him. In order to save her, the two Soo-hyuns try to change the past together, but a completely new and unexpected past is formed that leads to a new future.

Chen Sheng goes off in search of his nephew who has been abandoned by his father. Along the way, he encounters numerous people from his past and also those from his future.

As the deceased soul Ja-hong and his three afterlife guardians prepare for their remaining trials for reincarnation, the guardians soon come face to face with the truth of their tragic time on Earth 1,000 years earlier.

As an unpredictable, sweeping pandemic causes people to develop sudden amnesia, a man finds himself enrolled in a recovery program designed to help him build a new life. His treatment: performing daily tasks prescribed by his doctors on cassette tape, and capturing those with a Polaroid camera.

Filippo is a star on the Italian TV. He works for a documentary series about wild animals and nature. He is sent to Tenerife (Spain) to shot an issue about the local stork. It is the 13th of August. After he did his job is time to leave, but the ferry couldn't operate. He has to spend the night in the island. The day after is again the 13th of August, and Filippo live again the same day for different times. Something has to change to exit the paranoid and unrealistic situation.

Sung-soo has everything a man could want: a beautiful wife and children, a comfortable home and luxury car, and plenty of money in the bank. When he learns that his estranged brother, Sung-chul, has gone missing, haunting memories of their troubled past urge him to visit his brother’s apartment in search of answers.

A man is on his way home when the poorly constructed tunnel he is driving through collapses, leaving him trapped leaving himself for the unexpected whilst emergency services struggle to help.

A reclusive elderly poet feels the fire of his youth when gamine schoolgirl Eun-gyo enters his life, to the chagrin of the old man's assistant.

When Seung-min was on his first year at the Academy of Architecture, he met Seo-yeon. She was a musician student, and Seung-min totally fell in love with her. Years have passed, and now he meets Seo-yeon again - she asks him to rebuild her father's old house.

Cécile is about to open her own gourmet restaurant, finally making her dream come true, when suddenly her father has a heart attack and she is called back to the village where she was born. Far from the hubbub of Paris life, she runs into her teenage crush. The memories come flooding back, destabilizing her certainties.

Ji-hae's friend is having problems expressing her feelings to the boy she loves, so she asks Ji-hae to write e-mails to him in her name. As the boy falls in love with her letters, Ji-hae discovers the story of her mother's romance which is remarkably similar to her own circumstances.

After losing both her parents, Failan emmigrates to Korea to seek her only remaining relatives. Once she reaches Korea, she finds out that her relatives have moved to Canada well over a year ago. Desperate to stay and make a living in Korea, Failan is forced to have an arranged marriage through a match-making agency.

Young-seok, who feels overwhelmed and lonely in what should be his glorious youth, meets a woman who introduces herself as Josée, and they share a once-in-a-lifetime romance.

An isolated lake, where an old monk lives in a small floating temple. The monk has a young boy living with him, learning to become a monk. We watch as seasons and years pass by.

These intertwining stories about romance and separation follow a firefighter who can't find the right time to propose, a shy theme park worker who falls for an artist, an estranged mother and son, and a man seeking to regain his lost love.

Over three episodes, three respectable middle-aged men find themselves behaving badly. A teacher hides his pornographic magazine from a female student. A jogger steals milk and blames it on a newspaper delivery boy. A drunk man desperately searches for a public toilet late at night.

Late one evening Alex suddenly abandons his girlfriend, Simone, to pursue the beautiful Aimee. In his encounter with Aimee time and place dissolve for him and he becomes a stranger to Simone, to whom he cannot return.

All unemployed, Ki-taek's family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks for their livelihood until they get entangled in an unexpected incident.

In the vast rooms of a beautiful Sicilian villa, Anna receives an unexpected guest. Twenty-something Jeanne has arrived from France, declaring herself to be the girlfriend of Anna’s son, Giuseppe, who has invited her to the house to spend Easter together. But this is news to Anna, and Guiseppe is not yet there...

After being dumped by her boyfriend just before their 100-day anniversary, Ha-young meets a college guy named Hyung-joon when she kicks a can that accidentally hits him in the face and causes him to scratch his Lexus. He demands she pay him $3000 on the spot.

A visa problem forces Adrien back to Paris after 15 years in Senegal with his wife Aminata. Her cousin Sékou, now distanced from his Senegalese origins, takes in Adrien. As Adrien awaits his return, Sékou shows him France, sparking surprises.

Dumped by his girlfriend and finding himself stranded on different couches at friends’ places, Guido tries to transform his drift into an opportunity for a new beginning.

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

Unable to remember anything about his life, a man begins regaining consciousness in a new body every 12 hours. Now, he must piece together his identity, all while evading attacks from pursuing agents and dangerous criminals alike.

A simple funeral turns a man's world Topsy turvy. He wakes up in a posh hotel room, totally clueless about how he got there. Slowly, he recalls what happened a day before.

In the 1970s, Director Kim is obsessed by the desire to re-shoot the ending of his completed film Cobweb, but chaos and turmoil grip the set with interference from the censorship authorities, and the complaints of actors and producers who can't understand the re-written ending. Will Kim be able to find a way through this chaos to fulfill his artistic ambitions and complete his masterpiece?

After being involved in a traumatic incident, 17-year-old Gong-ju is forced to change schools. Uncared for by her parents, her previous teacher arranges for her to hide away at his mother's place. It takes time for her past to catch up with her, but when it does the revelation is devastating.

A disillusioned Seoul woman visits a remote island to reconnect with a childhood friend, only to find her trapped in an oppressive cycle of physical, mental, and sexual abuse. As tensions escalate, the situation spirals into a harrowing tale of survival and retribution.

Pil-ju, an Alzheimer's patient in his 80s, who lost all his family during the Japanese colonial era, and devotes his lifelong revenge before his memories disappear, and a young man in his 20s who helps him.

Eun-yi is hired as a maid in a mansion owned by a wealthy businessman. He quickly starts seducing his employee who seemingly has little choice but to comply with his sexual advances. Soon the women of the family plot against Eun-yi who must fight an equally devious battle to protect herself.

A thug offers to pay a law student's gambling debt if the student will accompany him on a trip across Tokyo.

A filmmaker talks about his work and love life with an unseen friend behind the camera. We also watch four of his short films.

A man's failed suicide attempt enables him to see ghosts, who later keep following him everywhere. It is now up to him to fulfill their wishes to make them go away.

Sugihara, a Japanese-born, third-generation Korean teenager struggles to find a place in a society that will not accept him.

Kyung-jin, a police officer who finds herself chasing down a suspected bag-snatcher on her day off. However, the man she catches turns out to be Myungwoo, a passer-by who was himself trying to apprehend the real criminal.

Soo-jin, who lost her memories due to a horrible incident, starts suspecting her husband. She is confused between reality and illusion, truth and lies.

After moving to Bogotá for a chance at a better life, a young Korean man rises through the Colombian black market — risking peril for a shot at success.

Kim Ji-young, an ordinary woman in her 30s, suddenly shows signs of being inhabited by other women from her life, past and present.

An idle part-time college lecturer is annoyed by the yapping sound of a nearby dog. He decides to take drastic action.

A man steps out of a park fountain in Ho Chi Minh City with no recollection of who he is or where he came from. As he wanders through the city, piecing together clues to his past, he is relentlessly pursued by mysterious figures.

19-year-old Argentine Martin has a nearly fatal drug overdose. After that, his mother sends him to Madrid, where his film director father (also Martin) lives with his new, much younger lover, Alicia, and bisexual actor friend, Dante.

Anna learns in prison that her mother has passed away in Seattle. Prison officials grants Anna a three day furlough to attend her mother's funeral. Anna embarks on a long trip to Seattle. Hoon is a Korean immigrant who works as a gigolo. Hoon is now on the run from a wealthy client's furious husband. These two seemingly lost souls are about to share three memorable days together.

A young Korean man surpasses his difficult childhood by becoming a powerful prosecutor, but soon learns that real power comes at a price.

Meursault is a man who feels utterly isolated from everyone and everything around him. This alienation results in sudden, inexplicable bursts of violence, culminating in murder.

The mother of a missing child takes in a lost girl she finds in the woods, but soon begins to wonder if she is even human.

After his wife leaves him, a disillusioned director dives into the drug scene, trying anything his friend suggests.

In a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city’s disappearing past, Yoko is a writer investigating the life of a modernist composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry and has found a kindred spirit in a used bookstore owner who aids her research.

An Eastern European tourist unexpectedly finds himself stranded in JFK airport, and must take up temporary residence there.

Two friends who haven't seen each other for thirteen years reunite. One is a successful concert pianist just back from a European tour and the other has just started a new business.

A married couple who received a divorce settlement lose their memories in an accident. With amnesia, they fall in love again, so their families try to restore their memories to finalize the divorce.

A man sets up the First Love Agency to help people locate their long-lost first love. But then he ends up falling in love with his first client.
