Sarah Knows Nothing About Movies - 5 Films to Get You Into K-Cinema

I live in South Korea now, you may have heard. One of the most common questions I get from people I meet here, and got from people at home before I came, was ‘why South Korea?’ Honestly, I don’t fully know the answer to this myself, though it’s definitely a combination of crushing on Korean guys IRL (ha that was fun- please sense the sarcasm there) and slowly discovering the many elements of Korean culture that interested me. And no, by ‘Korean Culture’ I do not entirely mean ‘I’m in love with BTS’ (that’s only like, 75% of it), thank you very much. Before I really started to enjoy a wide range of K-Pop, I actually became more interested in Korean cinema and the range of wildly different stories it seemed to offer. I don’t think I’d seen anything Korean on screen before my interest grew, aside from that boy Lucille adopts in Arrested Development. I’d never watched a K-drama (and still haven’t really, they don’t appeal in the same way), but I’d vaguely heard of a movie called Old Boy (올드보이) that was supposed to be quite intense. For reference, if you haven’t seen Old Boy, ‘intense’ is not so much the right word choice as much as ‘holy fucking shit what the fuck Korea are you OK?!’ is. Seriously, there’s a scene where the main character really eats a live octopus and that’s not one of the most troubling scenes. And it has an ending that makes the ‘what’s in the box’ scene in Se7en seem tame in terms of emotional trauma. But I digress. As I started to explore what Korea had to offer, I watched this movie along with many others that I could find, including about 20 that I enjoyed at the London Korean Film Festival in 2018. I’m absolutely not an expert, but you can’t say I haven’t tried.

So as I started to watch more Korean cinema, I started to really enjoy how different these movies were from Western films. It’s impossible to properly summarise all Korean movies because of course they aren’t all the same, but as much as French movies often seem very left-field artsy, or British films all seem to be about gangsters or aristocrats, there are traits you can pick out about Korea’s cinematic output. Their films, from my experience, seem a lot more willing to play with expectations, in terms of both narrative and tone, which makes for a much more unpredictable viewing experience. Korea is also quite known for crime/serial killer movies, and Jesus from the little I’ve seen of these they are definitely more brutal than what Hollywood attempts.

That’s why I’ve decided to write this little listicle: to give anyone who wants to try Korean cinema a flavour of the good stuff I’ve seen. Now obviously, as with everything I write, this is very much from the perspective of a curious idiot: if you are a hardened cinephile I’m sure I will say many dumb things and miss out some magnum opus that you’re deathly offended I haven’t seen. I’m just choosing the films that really left an impact on me, and that I think could encourage others to try out a little more Korean cinema once in a while. There’s no order to this either, else it would take me even longer to make. Deal with it.

(Also, the original inspiration for this article came from my frustration at not having seen Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite/기생충, which I still haven’t seen yet because I’m lame. Apparently it’s mind-blowing, so if you have caught it, maybe try these 5 movies as your next step outside the boring Hollywood fare?)

1. Train to Busan/부산행

Some movies are deep, complex, powerful meditations on aspects of the human condition. They utilise complex metaphors and subtle scene-building to open up philosophical debates, or comment on political movements. And some movies are about when zombies get on a train.

No prizes for guessing which category Train to Busan falls into. I’m sure film academics could make something out of the symbolism of a violent zombie outbreak occurring across South Korea, including on a high-speed train zooming towards the country’s second city. Are the zombies South Korea’s political elite? Is the outbreak symbolic of the potential threat from the North? I genuinely have no idea and I honestly don’t care, because this movie is so objectively entertaining without needing any of that. The main character is a divorced businessman (played by Korean superstar and professional Incredibly-Handsome-Man Gong Yoo) taking his daughter down to Busan to go back to her Mum. And, whaddya know, just as the train they travel on leaves, a very sick-looking young lady runs on. And blimey is she not well. The zombie virus spreads through the train pretty darn quickly, and a motley crew of passengers (including two ‘ajumas’ or old ladies, an objectively nasty businessman and a very convenient baseball team) is left to fight them off.

As I said, this movie is just so fun to watch. The train setting makes the action as streamlined as possible, and the Korean penchant for brutality comes out nicely in how savagely the human characters get picked off. This, above all Korean movies, is the one I would recommend to start with to anyone who’s never tried this country’s cinema before. It has enough Hollywood-esque similarities in the action/apocalypse narrative to not seem strange, and, I cannot state this enough, the zombies are bloody fun. Also, as a friend pointed out to me last week, this is a rare example of a non-American zombie movie, meaning the characters don’t have a handy supply of guns to rely on. As one of South Korea’s most successful films at the domestic and international box office in recent years, it’s a great jumping off point.

2. Burning/버닝

I actually stumbled on this film completely by chance when it came out in 2018. I was at a loose end on a Saturday in London after getting a haircut, and my parents had given me a cinema gift card that still had money on it. I went to Picturehouse Central and scanned the schedules, and saw that there was one seat left for a new Korean movie. Hell, I had a gift card, if it was crap I wouldn’t technically have lost anything over it. I went into the screen and watched Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning. And holy fuck I’m glad I did.

As I mentioned earlier, Korean movies play with tone in a way I don’t think Hollywood attempts often enough. And the shift in tone in this movie is just so amazingly subtle that it moves from an almost mundane story of boy meets girl to one of the most tense cinema experiences I’ve ever had. Watching this movie, I realised about two thirds of the way through that I was actually on the edge of my seat, in a way that I don’t think really happens that often. The only other non-horror movie I can think of that’s induced the same reaction in me is The Godfather, which is high praise indeed. This movie creeps up so slowly on you, without ever revealing anything concrete, that it isn’t until the last 30-40 minutes of the film that anything definitively weird even happens. The story is nominally this: a guy runs into a free-spirited girl who apparently went to school with him, though he doesn’t recognise her as she’s had a lot of work done. He falls for her, she goes travelling, and comes back with the super-smooth, wealthy and not-quite-right Ben. Our main character is jealous of Ben and his relationship with the girl, who then goes missing. This might not sound like a ground-breakingly new story, and it isn’t, but the genius of this film is in how absolutely nothing is certain. Who is Ben? Where did the girl go? What did Ben have to do with it? Was the girl all she said she was? The film so delicately builds this story to its climax that it never becomes either boring or annoying, and at the end you’ll definitely want to talk to someone else who’s seen it about how they interpreted it. I mean, one of the most tense scenes in this film involves a man calling out a cat’s name, and honestly it’s nerve wracking. That’s how good this film is. Come and debate with me when you’ve seen it.

3. The Handmaiden/아가씨

This movie falls into the same niche category as Black Swan of ‘movies that are really great but maybe awkward to watch with family due to the slightly surprising amount of lesbian sex.’ You have been warned, though if you are aware of the source material Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, you may be less surprised by this. The movie relocates the book's Victorian England setting to Japan-occupied Korea in the early 20thcentury, and is directed by Korean cinema legend Park Chan-Wook, the man behind the aforementioned Old Boy. If you’re wondering why I’ve chosen The Handmaiden over Old Boy, I would say that a) the latter is pretty damn famous already so the former needs more shouting about and b) honestly I found the former to be a more complex, subtle and enjoyable experience. Fight me.

This movie’s story is such an intricate little thing that I don’t really want to attempt to explain it, but in the beginning a con man convinces a young girl to become the maid for a wealthy Japanese heiress, so that she can convince her to marry said con man. The twists and turns from this point on are truly thrilling, and as much as I feel it always slightly ruins a film to even say that there is a twist, I don’t think anyone who hasn’t read the source material could see everything in this story coming. It’s an intriguing film as well as a beautiful one to look at, and paints a really interesting portrait of two complex women and the various roles that they have to perform. And it’s pretty sexy as well, if that’s all you’re looking for.

4. The Wailing/곡성

Oh, The Wailing. I don’t normally finish a film by immediately googling discussion forums about their endings, but it’s impossible not to with this one. It is effectively a horror film about an epidemic of violent outbursts in a small Korean village, but exactly what is going on is wildly open to interpretation. There are rumours of a Japanese man in the woods, and hey, maybe he’s the Devil. There are questionable shamans (ah, for more films with questionable shamans), and there are grisly murders at the hands of seemingly possessed people. This movie has a huge amount of symbolism that I believe takes from Korean traditions and customs, and some truly scary imagery to boot. The tone, however, isn’t simply horrific for the entirety of the film, and is almost comical at the beginning. But by the end you’ll be wanting to enrol on a course in ancient East Asian folklore so you can understand exactly why the flowers withered, who the woman in white might be, and why that guy vomited so much blood (trust me it makes sense when you see it). Just like the eerie sound that gives the film its name, this story is weird, unsettling, and will probably be echoing in your head for a while after the credits roll.

5. Joint Security Area (공동경비구역 JSA)

I wondered for a while about which film to include as number 5 on this list. I eventually went for Joint Security Area for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the list thus far is pretty heavy on intensity, with two full-on horrors in there, so I thought I’d throw in one of the lighter offerings I’ve seen. As well as this, the film, as you may be able to guess, is set at the border between North and South Korea, which is by far and away the most famous thing about this peninsula in most people’s eyes. Hang on, you might think, you’re saying a film about one of the most contentious political divides in the world is light? And in fairness, you’re right, it’s not exactly Dumb and Dumber. At times it’s incredibly tense, and ultimately it will break your heart, but at least there’s no Japanese Satan in the woods.

The plot centres around an investigation into a diplomatic incident in which 2 North Korean soldiers are killed (and another injured) at the DMZ, and the surrounding story of their relationship to a South Korean soldier who escaped the scene. The ways in which the soldiers from the North and South connect to each other turn out to be very different to what you expect in the most heart-warming way, leading the end point, that we know from the movie’s opening, to ultimately have an incredibly poignant punch. This film is about the political tension between two countries, and how personal relationships can evolve within that framework. Interestingly this is another, earlier, Park Chan-Wook film, without the violence and vengeance he’s most known for. It also stars Song Kang-Ho, who remarkably only features at this point in the list, given that he is probably the most recognisable face in all of Korean cinema. He’s collaborated with Park several times, as well as with Bong Joon-Ho, most recently in Parasite, where he plays the father of the poor Kim family. He’s great in this movie too, along with the rest of the cast. The final shot of this film is emotional and brilliant, and as the film is (I believe) on Netflix, you really have no excuse.

There you are, 5 Korean movies to try. There are so many others worth a mention that could work equally well to begin with: for example, Bong Joon-Ho’s 2 American co-productions Okja and Snowpiercer are both genuinely great stories that mix Korean and Western characters, which might help you if you find subtitles a bit daunting. As I mentioned, my list is definitely not a mood-lifter, but films like Little Forest (basically a young girl cooking a lot in her village home but also so much more) and Christmas in August (a simple, sweet, sad romance) are both slices of sunshine and lightness that I really enjoyed. The Villainess is a revenge movie with- shockingly given the title-a female lead, and an opening scene that could be used as the definition of the term ‘kick ass action sequence’. And these are just the films I’ve seen. There are so many more, and I hope this list gives you the chance to try some of them, and maybe fall a little bit in love, like I have.

EDIT: Since finishing this list, I have now seen Parasite. All I will say for now is that it’s completely and utterly amazing, and if you haven’t seen it literally go and do it now, it’s definitely more important than sleeping or working. More on that one another time I think.