'Frosted Window' Review

Opening this year’s London Korean Film Festival, Frosted Window marks another exquisitely constructed mosaic from writer-director Kim Jong-kwan.

The Korean filmmaker shapes his new work through three separate stories set across different seasons (Autumn, Summer, and Winter) in the Seoul neighbourhood of Seochon, intertwining them into a meditative portrait of love, desire, and disillusionment. By arranging the stories in a seasonal progression, Kim creates not just a thematic frame but an emotional logic: each chapter refracts the last, tightening the film’s focus from outward desire to inward reckoning.

Marking its 20th anniversary, LKFF stands as one of the world’s longest-running festivals dedicated to South Korean cinema, serving as a vibrant bridge between UK audiences and the emotional depth of Korean filmmaking. It is fitting, then, that Kim opened the festival with sanguinity. With a body of work including Come, Closer (2010) and Shades of the Heart (2021), and now Frosted Window, he has refined the modern Korean anthology film into something intimate, philosophical, and increasingly self-interrogative.

The first chapter, “Out Walking”, introduces Han-kyung (Chang Ryul), an artist and hopeless romantic whose life unfolds against Seoul’s crisp, fading autumn light. He drifts from one encounter to another, charming nearly every woman he meets. He isn’t forceful or sleazy; his old-fashioned gentleness disarms rather than alarms. Yet beneath the surface hums a kind of weary longing that is more habitual than heartfelt. His tentative connection with an aspiring young artist seems promising, but a message from a former lover, a florist with whom he shares a tender, complicated past, pulls him backwards into memory. Their reunion glows with unresolved feeling, though it’s unclear whether it’s love rediscovered or just another reflection of his own yearning.

Kim resists judging Han-kyung, observing him instead with a quiet, almost autumnal empathy. He’s not cruel, merely emotionally mercurial. His inner weather shifts as readily as the seasons that frame the anthology. He moves through relationships like dwindling light skimming a literal frosted window: warm one moment, chilled the next. The film renders him as a study in transient affection, a man who mistakes inspiration for intimacy, living perpetually in the shimmer of first contact.

At times he’s likeable, at others frustrating, but always recognisably human: a mirror for our own desires as they ripen, fade, and flare again in cyclical, seasonal patterns. What at first feels like narrative looseness in Han-kyung’s drifting and contradictions quietly foreshadows the emotional evolution of the film as a whole.

The second story, “Breather”, extends this maturation. Here we meet Bo-ra (Jeon So-young), a nail salon worker who recruits a stranger at her favourite bar to make another man jealous. It begins as a light rom-com that is awkward, funny, and full of small human hesitations. But as the evening stretches on, their banter thins into melancholy, and the playful façade tears enough to reveal deeper reservoirs of loneliness and regret.

Kim’s camera lingers on glances and pauses, letting humour and heartbreak coexist in the same breath. What first appears as a throwaway setup becomes a quietly profound moment, revealing how quickly attraction turns into alienation and how even the most performative encounters can expose truths we didn’t intend to share. The story deepens what seemed like loose emotional threads from “Out Walking”: the abrupt shifts, the unspoken motives, the unfinished longings.

The final story, “MARI”, is the anthology’s most enigmatic and self-reflexive, set appropriately in the emotional winter. Ma-ri, an actor suffering from memory loss, enters a collaboration with a film director on a project where the boundaries between reality and fiction begin to blur. The film-within-the-film fractures the anthology’s earlier innocence, replacing the gentle romanticism of Autumn and Summer with a cold awareness of artifice, performance, and loss. Winter becomes the most revealing season: a stripping away of illusion in which Kim exposes not just the characters’ vulnerabilities, but the scaffolding of narrative itself.

Where the first two stories are infused with warmer tones, breezy sketches of desire’s possibilities, this closing chapter arrives with a wintry hush. Frost settles in; clarity sharpens; light hardens. Through Ma-ri’s fragmented recollections, Kim turns inward, questioning not only love but storytelling itself: how memory and art continually reshape emotion, and how the retelling of a feeling can pacify as easily as it can wound. What once seemed like narrative gaps or unresolved emotional beats in the earlier stories crystallise here. Their discontinuities become part of Kim’s inquiry into perception and the stories we invent to live.

Across its three segments, Frosted Window moves with the quiet inevitability of changing seasons. Its tone shifts gently, echoing the cycles of romance itself. Kim’s direction remains understated, guided by natural light, unforced performances, and the soft rhythm of everyday speech. As in his earlier work, he gathers small, self-contained encounters and arranges them like dream fragments; each short stands alone, yet together they form a larger emotional pattern, with brief moments drifting into one another like seasonal weather fronts.

In a post-screening Q&A, Kim explained that the film continues the intimate structure he developed in The Table (2016) and Shades of the Heart (2019): “I have always been drawn to making a film with two people’s conversation that unfolds in a temporary, limited space, and in trying out different approaches that are in line with that composition, I have come to make the films I’ve made.” If his earlier works observed human connection from a diaristic distance, Frosted Window pushes further inward. It’s winter chapter folding the act of filmmaking into the drama itself, signalling a new boldness within his anthology form.

Kim’s cinema often evokes Eric Rohmer through its conversational clarity and emotional restraint, a lineage he openly embraces: “I like [Rohmer’s] individualistic approach and presentness and that is the direction I want to take as a creator too.” Yet the film also shares the improvisational ease of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, finding meaning in the spontaneous drift of talk, gesture, and silence. Within contemporary Korean cinema, anthologies often rely on genre shifts or explicit narrative links, such as Kim Jee-woon & Yim Pil-sung’s Doomsday Book (2012). Kim’s seasonal triptych feels unusually organic: quiet, accumulative, and ultimately self-questioning.

He also acknowledges a deep literary influence: “Whilst I was making this film, I attempted to embody the characteristics of a short novel. Through the portrayal of fleeting moments, I attempted to create a film that prompts the audience to ask different questions and, in turn, understand the incompleteness of humanity.” He adds, almost wistfully, “If possible, I’d like to keep creating a collection of novels like this once every year.”With Frosted Window, Kim Jong-kwan continues his masterful exploration of human connection in miniature. More than a love story, it is a meditation on time and tenderness; a reminder that every romance, like every season, carries within it both its beginning and its end.