But at least if you didn't know, now you do.

And now here’s the outline of this unique little South Korean film.

Starting off in Spring, a floating temple is home to a Buddhist monk (played by Young-soo Oh) and a young boy.  Being the master of the boy, the monk tries to guide him towards a spiritually enlightened life.  But as you would expect, the impetuousness of youth leads to a number of questionable decisions.

As you can guess by the title, this film is split into five distinct sections, or seasons.  In the first spring we see the young boy learning about the world around him and dealing with the consequences of his actions.  As we progress to summer we see that the boy has become a teenager and the sexual awakening that brings.  In Autumn, we fast forward a number of years.  The boy is now a 30 year old man that has made a decision that leaves his life in total turmoil.  In Winter, we again fast forward a number of years, and a mature man returns to his temple home seemingly at peace with himself.  And in the final Spring, things go full circle.

I’m going to just skip the characters and plot and go right to where this film shines.  From the opening frames you can tell you’re in for something very special visually, and it just gets more beautiful as the film progresses.  Seeing the floating temple, the rolling hills, and the serene lake over the course of all the seasons is simply remarkable, and worth the price of rental on its own.

Aside from the stunning location and cinematography, the thing that you notice most about this film is the lack of dialogue.  There must be only 50 or so lines spoken in the entire 99 minutes of this film, which is perfect because the remarkable images provide more than words ever could.

For those offended by animal cruelty in film (like myself), there are a couple of small scenes where a fish, a frog and a snake are forced to endure a couple of rather distressing moments.  That being said, these aren’t the sort of scenes that should dissuade you from seeing the film, just something you should be aware of if you are sensitive to such things.

Overall, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring is a simple, engrossing little film.  For those after a break from the mainstream Hollywood monotony, this is well worth a look.

On the whole this is an excellent looking transfer.

Colour is quite realistic although just a tad dull for my tastes.  With some of the almost jaw dropping shots on offer, a little more vibrancy in the colours would have been (in my opinion anyway) icing on the cake.

Film artefacts are surprisingly rare, while aliasing is just as infrequent.  Blacks are nice and solid.  A couple of the darker scenes seemed to suffer a little from grain, but nothing to get carried away over.

This is a single layer disc, so no change.

The English subtitles are permanent and not selectable.  They are very easy to read and seem quite accurate with very few grammatical errors.

Not too often you get a high bitrate 2.0 track like this, and aside from one MAJOR flaw, it sounds very good.

Whatever the opposite of a dialogue driven film is, this is it.   On the rare occasion of speech, it is quite clean and clear although raised tones do tend to distort just a little and sound a bit harsh.

With so little dialogue, the music is left to do a lot of the talking and it does so quite beautifully.  With an obvious Asian slant, it is quite impressive with some wonderful use of acoustic guitar.

There is no surround or subwoofer activity.

Unfortunately there is one major problem with this audio presentation and that’s audio sync.  Things start off pretty well, but things gradually get worse.  As the film reaches its halfway point, it gets real ugly with an obvious ½ a second discrepancy between video and audio. 

The good news is, its effect is minimised by the large amount of music and the lack of dialogue in the film.  Still, I can safely say this is one of the worst cases of out of sync audio I have seen in some time, becoming quite distracting.

It really is a pity.  If it wasn’t for the sync problem, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring would have received a very impressive audio presentation.

THEATRICAL TRAILER

Featuring no dialogue whatsoever, this 2 minute trailer gives you a perfect idea what to expect from the film.  Unfortunately, it is just a little spoiler-y.  It is presented 1.85:1 with 16:9 enhancement and Dolby Digital 2.0 audio

IMAGE GALLERY

Five images, all from the film, all presented in a 4:3 frame.

The video presentation is very good while the audio is a little disappointing, mainly because of the audio sync problems.

If you’re after a fast paced, action filled gab-fest then run screaming right now, this film is the polar opposite.  Serene, tranquil, yet still thoroughly intriguing, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring is definitely worth taking a look at.