An actor who has given up his career tries to find his creative side again, but also lets his romantic side blossom again. This is what the South Korean stalwart does in his entry for the Locarno competition.

“By the Stream,” Hong Sangsoo’s 32nd feature, begins like many of the previous 31, with a polite encounter between two people who barely know each other — not strangers, but not as familiar as they once were. Cautious pleasantries are exchanged, before one tells the other, “You haven’t changed at all.” It’s a premature statement, of course: The ensuing action, such as it is, reveals how much has changed between the two, or how much they’ve forgotten along the way. This subtle comedy of actors, academics, and dreams, distinguished from other Hongs like it by its slight autumn chill and accompanying rust-colored palette, welcomes the director’s loyal fans like a gentle but tentative embrace.

South Korea’s prolific second feature of 2024, which premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival — following the Isabelle Huppert-starring Berlinale Prize winner “A Traveler’s Needs” — will likely be the least-watched of the two. Both are narratively muted and indirect, even by the standards of a director for whom “muted and indirect” is a default setting, but “By the Stream” is more diffuse and elusive as a character study — probably too much so to win many arthouse converts. The director’s loyalists, however, will delight in the film’s breezy romantic bent and some breezy, lithe performances from Hong regulars Kwon Haehyo and Kim Minhee, both of whom play characters curiously searching for themselves.

It’s Sieon (Kwon), a formerly respected actor who now owns a bookstore, who remarks to his niece Jeonim (Kim) that she hasn’t changed in that introductory scene. She can’t agree, claiming instead that her life has taken “a sudden turn.” She can’t even attempt to answer the cliché. No clear explanation is given for Sieon’s career decline—there are vague mentions of him criticizing others and being “attacked” in return—but he carries himself with the shuffling demeanor of someone who’s grown accustomed to keeping his head down. Jeonim, a lonely, shy art professor at a women’s university in Seoul, has asked him for a favor that’s more fitting: the university is holding its annual sketch-play festival, and she wants him to write and direct her department’s entry.