Call it a Day
2022 · 2m
Directed by Jiwoo Lee
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
An office worker on his way home becomes 'immersed' in a particular event in ordinary daily life.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of a guy going home shouldn't feel this slippery—but Lee keeps undercutting the mundane with these small tonal jolts that make you question what 'immersion' even means. It's the kind of deliberately opaque premise that usually annoys me, except here the weirdness actually *earns* itself.
Lee's command of pacing and formal restraint places this squarely in the lineage of contemporary experimental cinema that trusts negative space—the film knows exactly when to withhold explanation, positioning itself alongside work that privileges ambiguity as a compositional choice rather than a flaw.
The real move is in the sound design and how it separates from the image at a crucial moment—suddenly the world becomes tactile in a way it wasn't before, and that single decision transforms what could've been a conceptual exercise into something genuinely felt.