Focus is an area that narrative feature films almost never mess with. As an aesthetic issue in non-avant-garde cinema, it’s really a last frontier. In movies, things are either in focus or in the background. For directors who have been adherents of the split diopter, like Brian De Palma and Raúl Ruiz, things in the background can be in focus, too (with that barely there, very thin, soft area between them). 

Today, the deep focus that André Bazin valued so much in certain black-and-white Hollywood films of the 1940s can be created in the computer by putting together planes of action filmed at different times, in different places, at different focal lengths. It’s a digital version of how plywood is made, a series of veneers in which the challenge is to make them fit, then to deploy them in a structure that becomes the shot. That’s how David Fincher works, and he’s nothing if not a master of sharp focus.

If you notice someone out of focus in a feature film, someone a little soft, it’s usually because an actor missed their mark; it’s not the fault of the focus puller, the camera assistant whose job it is to maintain lens focus while actors move through a scene, or as the camera moves through it. Or it’s soft because it’s the point of view of a character just coming out of unconsciousness looking at another character who is waking them up. The fuzziness of the world is only a temporary perspective. Not in in water, where missing the mark and not coming to consciousness is the whole point.

Before Hong Sangsoo’s in water, the last film I can remember that made an issue of focus was Jean-Luc Godard’s Hélas pour moi (1993), which deals in an Olympian view of human relationships sur la terre, a phrase I associate with Godard’s late period and its wounded detachment from life on earth, the dwelling place of mortal man. There are people like Robin Williams in Deconstructing Harry (1997), whose loss of focus in his own life is literalized when he appears out of focus to himself and everybody he’s with in his scenes, while the rest of the world—the background—remains sharp. 

Godard abandons his characters and his stories when they get “beyond images,” which is something it is becoming clear (so to speak) that Hong, after all his films, is unwilling to do. Here, he is “in water,” not “on the earth.” His films have always moved toward a zero point. He has to tell the same story over and over, reinventing it each time for the same kinds of characters—directors, actors, wannabe filmmakers—without diminishing them and while still answering the question “What is cinema?” 

The watercolor beauty of a series of multicolor traffic barriers seen out of focus, for instance, should help the fledgling director of in water “snap out of it”—the ghostly command the actress hears in the night and tells him about. Instead he drifts (without aggro) through a series of scenes Hong shoots soft on purpose, in which the fledgling director himself, along with everything he sees, is blurry and indistinct. One can get used to anything (watching a film shot out of focus), suffer any humiliation (trying to make a film at all), and if it’s beautiful or crazy enough it works, not in spite of being pathetic but because of it.

Writer and film critic A. S. Hamrah is the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018 (n+1 Books).